3. Is it
Allowed?
From What Happened to Sin?, by Seán Fagan. S.M.
The Columba Press, 2008.
For centuries the catechism definition of sin was: any thought, word or deed contrary to the law of God. One of the most widely used summaries of moral theology introduced the chapter on sin with the statement: ‘Sin is the free transgression of a divine law. Every law is, in a sense, a derivation from the divine law; therefore, the transgression of any law is sinful.’ It is no wonder that for many people morality is often restricted to legality, and that right and wrong are understood in terms of what is allowed and what is forbidden. This infantile attitude was, if not created, at least encouraged, by much of the Church’s moralistic preaching. Textbooks of moral theology used precisely the kind of language that emphasised law as the primary criterion of morality, the measure of right and wrong. The following quotations are just a few examples: ‘the direct taking of one’s own life is a mortal sin if done on one’s own authority. It is also forbidden to do something from which death will accidentally follow, if one has suicidal intentions in doing it, e.g. to smoke or drink immoderately in order to shorten one’s life. Indirect suicide is in itself forbidden, but may be permitted for a proportionately grave reason.’ ‘Self-mutilation is allowed only to save one’s life.’ ‘Dangerous tight-rope walking, etc. merely for motives of gain or vanity is forbidden, though if practice or skill make the danger remote there would be no mortal sin in such action.’ With regard to the obligation of Sunday rest, the same text lists the forbidden servile works, and then goes on to say that ‘custom justifies shaving, haircutting, knitting, etc., and it is also permitted to go walking, riding, driving, rowing, journeying, even though these be very fatiguing.’ Another textbook uses the same language when speaking of the sixth commandment: ‘It is permitted to take baths, to wash oneself, to mount a horse, etc., even if one foresees a possible pollution. In the same manner it is permitted to scratch an irritation of the genital region provided that the itching does not proceed from an excess of semen or the heat of passion. When the cause of the irritation is in doubt, scratching is permitted. If the irritation is slight, it is permitted to scratch even when the scratching may provoke slight sexual stirrings.’
Danger of law
With such an emphasis not only on law as such, but on the multiplicity of laws attempting to cover every conceivable situation, it is no wonder that so many Catholics were confused about the notion of sin. There have been so many changes in the Church in recent years that people are no longer sure what is allowed and what is forbidden. Concerned parents complain that their children are no longer taught what is sinful and what is not, and that the Commandments are seldom mentioned in religion classes. Some preachers are at a loss to explain the Church’s laws in today’s world, and may even long for the black-and-white precision of the older approach. But this attitude to law is no longer sufficient for an understanding of morality and sin.
Certainly, law is an essential element in Christian morality, and sin is a breaking of God’s law. ‘Keep the law, and the law will keep you’ has a certain attractiveness, and generations of good people have led holy lives with this simple attitude. It makes life easy and straightforward. You know where you stand. All-important decisions are made for you in advance; there is no doubt, indecision or agony of conscience. It also makes for uniformity; everybody is bound by the same law, with no messy exceptions. The good Catholic is easily recognised as the one who keeps the laws of the Church. The Church itself is clearly marked off from other Christian groups by its distinctive rules and regulations. A good system of laws can make for order, stability and efficiency in society, and the morally good person is normally a law-abiding citizen.
Sin and law
But an exaggerated emphasis on law gave rise to serious inadequacies in people’s understanding of morality and Christian living. When sin is primarily seen as the transgression of a law, it is easy to feel that where there is no clear-cut law there can be no question of sin, indeed no moral obligation at all. For example, people often confessed to having missed Sunday Mass, even though they were sick and unable to attend. Although their illness excused them, they still felt obligation and a certain amount of guilt because of the specific law. On the other hand, their marriage could be falling apart because of some personality disorder recognised as the cause of their trouble, but they would not see any sin in their failing to get professional help, because there is no law to the effect that they should see a marriage counsellor on the first Monday after discovering their problem. Again, people might confess to using contraceptives, but fail to realise that sin, and indeed serious sin, may be involved in their savage driving habits, dangerous parking on a corner, their flirting with people at work, their lack of sensitivity towards their marriage partner, their failure to give time to their children, their obsession with their job or hobby. A priest might accuse himself of not praying his breviary, but see no sin in his authoritarian attitude to parishioners, his frequent failure to respect their intelligence or experience as he talks down to them from the pulpit, never listens to them, and generally behaves as though he owned the parish. All sin is idolatry, setting oneself up as the centre of one’s world, suiting self without regard for God, for neighbours, for consequences. But in practice most sin consists in simply not bothering about patience, kindness, humility, temperance, and discretion. There is no precise law about these things, so people are inclined to regard them as optional extras reserved for those striving for perfection.
Over-emphasis on law also tended to reduce morality to mere obedience, so that little room was left for conscience and personal responsibility. All one needed was to discover the appropriate law for each situation and assess how far it was binding in the circumstances. Since this was the only exercise of conscience that many people were familiar with, it is hardly surprising that they were confused, and felt let down when confessors told them that they must ‘follow their conscience’ on a question where the law is a matter of controversy, as in the birth control issue.
When law becomes paramount in morality, the Church as a whole suffers. The Church is a very large institution, and like every institution it cannot survive without law. But when law takes pride of place, the Church tends to be identified with the institution, and people lose sight of the fact that the Church is also a fraternity of brothers and sisters in the Lord, a sacrament of Christ, a herald of the kingdom of God, and a servant of the world that Jesus came to save. These are more than just titles. They are the reality of the Church, and the Church needs to be experienced in these ways by its members. But pre-occupation with law can block that experience. Over-concern with law is most damaging to pastors and bishops, who can become simply administrators hiding behind the law whenever a difficulty arises and refusing to dialogue with a brother or sister in distress.
Appreciation of law
Law can become impersonal, and its observance mechanical and empty. But its inadequacies and dangers should not lead us to a total rejection of it. For true religion and service to God, we need a real appreciation of it, combined with a critical awareness of its limitations and pitfalls. To savour it in its proper religious context, one should read psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Bible. Almost every one of its hundred and seventy six verses is in praise of God’s law, of its goodness and power, and of the protection it affords:
Happy are those who live according to the law of the Lord .... I will obey your laws .... I take pleasure in your laws; your commands I will not forget .... Open my eyes that I may see the wonderful truths in your law .... Explain your law to me and I will obey it; I will keep it with all my heart …. Your word, O Lord, will last forever; it is eternal in heaven …. The rules that you have given are completely fair and right …. I will always praise you, because you teach me your law ....
This was the attitude of the early Israelites to law. It was not seen as a burden or an arbitrary imposition by a remote and angry God, but as a privilege and a gift revealed by the God who loved them. To obey it was to be faithful to the covenant, to prosper and be happy, to share in God’s wisdom. In the law, God was offering himself, and therefore offering wisdom and life. The law was wisdom, the knowledge of how true life was to be lived. The response was not so much to learn the law in all its details, as to accept God, to love and serve him with one’s whole heart and mind in the concrete circumstances of daily life. As these circumstances varied through the centuries, the law changed and developed. It became a living tradition guiding and directing the people’s response to God. The details were gleaned from experience and many of the formulations were copied from the surrounding peoples, but these were always incorporated into a context that lifted them onto a new level, the religious level of the people of God.
Legalism
With such high regard for the law, however, it was not easy to avoid the temptation to legalism and formalism. The law which was meant to be a free response to God, a share in his wisdom, often became an end in itself. It was looked on as God’s word, revealing God’s mind. But in the attitude of some, it actually became God’s mind itself, then took on an objective life of its own within God’s mind, and finally outside and even above God’s mind. A Jewish rabbinical tradition at the time of Jesus maintained that the law was so sacred that even God himself studied it for a certain length of time each day. When the law became fixed in a canonical legal text, the temptation to absolutise and make it an end in itself became all the greater. The law was so sacred that no prophet, no new Moses could change or replace it. In practice, the law was God, more immediate and more concrete than the real God. The Lawgiver became bound, circumscribed by his own law. All of God was expressed in the law; he became reduced to the law. For the Jewish people, this was the letter at the expense of the spirit. The law had been given to make them free, with the freedom of the children of God. But they used it to avoid the complexity of life and the pain of decision. They abdicated their power to make personal moral decisions. The law decided all questions in advance; they had only to obey. The law was no longer valued because of its relation to God and the covenant, but because the people could rely on it, measure it, obey it and be in the clear before God. This was boasting and complacency. This was the attitude for which Jesus castigated the Pharisees. Likewise, when Paul inveighed against the law, it was not so much against the specific details of its content as against the place accorded it by the Jews, as though the law itself could justify them.
This was a constant danger throughout the whole of the Old Testament. The prophets continually warned against it, and in the liturgical ceremonies for the renewal of the covenant the people were reminded of the kind of God who had chosen them, and the kind of service he required. They were told that true religion was a matter of the heart, and that the Lord wanted worshippers in spirit and in truth. But the very multiplicity of laws tended to exaggerate their importance. It is easy to criticise the scribes and Pharisees for their six hundred and thirteen precepts, and forget that the Christian Church has continued the tradition, and in some ways outstripped the Pharisees, both in the multiplication of its laws and in the intricacies of its casuistry. No society can survive without some organisation, and the larger the society the more complex its body of law. The simple structures that kept the first Christian communities together would not suffice for today’s Catholics, who number over a billion in our international Church. But somewhere along the line a serious shift of emphasis took place as law developed. Laws which were formulated to guide people in their response to God often reached a stage where they defeated their purpose and became an obstacle.
Defeating its purpose
There are hundreds of examples, but a few will suffice. There is a Christian obligation to pray, and over the centuries the Church developed the Divine Office in Latin, originally for choral recitation in the monasteries, but eventually imposed on all in sacred orders. The seriousness of the obligation was such that it was considered a mortal sin, punishable by an eternity in hell, to omit even three short psalms from it. Until the 1960s one could not fulfil the obligation by praying the office in English; it had to be in Latin to avoid mortal sin. This applied even to nuns who did not understand a word they were saying. One wonders how many of these good sisters and priests ever suspected that Jesus was trying to tell us something when he commanded: ’When you pray, do not use a lot of meaningless words, as the pagans do, who think that God will hear them because their prayers are long’ (Mt 6:7). Since the obligation was to ‘say’ the office, it could not be fulfilled unless the vocal chords actually vibrated, even though no sound was heard. It was further explained that internal attention was not necessary for the essence of the prayer, and that the obligation could be fulfilled even though the prayer was said with freely willed distractions. What a far cry from the teaching of Jesus (Mt 6:5‑13).
Similarly, to promote reverence for the blessed Eucharist and dispose people to receive it with due reverence, the Church imposed the law of total fast from midnight before Holy Communion, again, under pain of mortal sin. As social conditions changed, people found this more and more difficult, until a stage was reached where the vast majority of Mass-going Catholics abstained from Communion, except on rare occasions. The law was so absolute that even the accidental swallowing of a drop of water while brushing one’s teeth was enough to bar one from Communion. In explaining the law, it was pointed out that the Eucharistic fast could be broken by sucking a drop of blood from a pin-prick or a bleeding gum, but not by biting one’s nails, because the latter were not edible, and could not be counted as food.
Pharisees not dead
Younger Catholics will not remember those days and may well be puzzled by it all, but the older generation can recall how scrupulously such laws were observed. They were intended to be helpful, but were enforced far beyond the point where help becomes a hindrance. Loyalty to the Church may prompt one to point out the good intention of the legislators and the efforts of commentators to be helpful to people, but one can be forgiven for wondering if this is what religion is all about. The above examples are only a small sample of what was taken for granted as normal; one could easily quote a large number of others that are far more incredible. Law had become such an absolute in the Church that the vast majority of the faithful, beginning with bishops and priests, were simply not aware of how faithfully we were following in the footsteps of the Pharisees excoriated by Jesus. Internationally renowned Scripture scholar Wilfrid Harrington OP claims that the clearer the words of Jesus in regard to Christian conduct, the more certainly have Christians done exactly the opposite. The absolutising of law led to excessive casuistry, misplaced priorities, over-emphasis on externals and increasing distance from the gospel message.
We are so accustomed to the bad press the Pharisees are given in the gospels that we forget that they were the religious establishment of the time. The scribes were the lawyers, moralists and theologians of the Jewish community to which Jesus belonged. They were the guides and teachers who spent their lives ‘searching the Scriptures’. The Pharisees were a middle-class religious party noted for their exact observance of the Mosaic law and of the ‘traditions of the elders’. When the law of Moses forbade work on the Sabbath, ‘work’ had to be defined, so there were thirty-nine basic actions listed as forbidden, including carrying a burden, reaping, winnowing, threshing and preparing a meal. People wanted to know what constituted a ‘burden’, so it was decided that anything weighing the equivalent of two dried figs came under the ban. When the disciples of Jesus plucked the ears of corn on the Sabbath, they were guilty of several infringements of the Sabbath law (Mt 12). By plucking the corn they were guilty of reaping; rubbing it in their hands was threshing, separating grain and chaff was winnowing, and the whole process was preparing a meal. No wonder the Pharisees condemned them.
But why should we self-righteously applaud when we read of Jesus castigating the Pharisees, and fail to see that in many ways we are no different? The Church loses credibility when we insist that of course there is a difference, even if it cannot be seen. A little humility and realism would be much more becoming to the Christian community. The command of Moses against setting up idols, and the words of Jesus about law being for people and not vice versa, are not simply for the Jews of the exodus or of first-century Palestine. They are for all God’s people in every age, including our own. It would be unchristian arrogance to claim that we have no need of such warnings, that we are above temptation.
Confusion about law
Our reaction to the exaggerations of the past, however, should not be a rejection of law, but a better understanding of its true meaning and the purpose it serves in human living. But this is where the confusion starts, because we hear of God’s law and human law, natural law and positive law, Church law and civil law, and few of the faithful ever have an opportunity of getting clear answers to their questions: What is law all about? In what sense is it God’s law? Is it really a sin to break a law?
First of all, we need to see the context from which law gets its meaning. We are social beings. We not only have a capacity for relating to other people, but we need them. People need people, nobody grows alone. We are what our relationships enable us to be. But if people are allowed to simply bump against each other in a group, pandemonium will follow and nobody will grow. If the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs of individuals are to be met even on a minimal level, there is need for community, for stability and predictability in the community, for role-definition, and for the recognition of certain rights and obligations. This is what laws are for. Any group of people, if they are to live and work together, soon discover the need for laws to regulate their relationships, so each community formulates the rules it needs.
Positive law
Individuals born in the community, and outsiders coming in, find an already established pattern of behaviour in the community, regulated by traditions and customs, and in modern society by written constitutions and laws. Thus, most people experience law as an imposition from without, something decided and established by an authority external to themselves, demanding obedience. This is commonly called ‘positive law’, a regulation of human behaviour positively formulated and enacted by the lawful authority for a particular community. Its purpose is to protect basic human rights and freedoms: the right to life, to bodily integrity, to property, freedom of movement, expression and association. It regulates conflicting interests, so that the common good of all will be served. It seems to limit freedom insofar, for example, as it imposes traffic regulations involving red lights and speed limits. But such limitation of freedom provides safety, which in the long run makes for greater freedom for all concerned. This element of limitation may reinforce people’s feeling that law is imposed from without. But reflection will show that positive laws are not arbitrary, that most members of the community, if they had to reflect on the needs of the situation, would agree, not only to law as such, but also to the limitations on their freedom, in their own interest and in the interest of all. There is an element of arbitrariness insofar as it makes little difference to the smooth running of traffic whether people drive on the left or the right, but it is recognised that a decision must be made in favour of one or the other to avoid chaos. By having specific laws, carefully formulated and systematically enforced, people are freed from the necessity of deciding at every step what is the best thing to do. Without such laws, each individual would have to discover individually the best course of action on every occasion, which would involve considerable time spent in collecting and assessing all the facts of the situation, calculating the short-term and long-term results on the individual and on the group of each possible decision. Not everybody would be in a position to know all the facts, or have the experience to evaluate them correctly, or foresee the possible consequences. Nor can we be sure that each one would be sufficiently free of selfishness to think of others and the common good. By formulating a law to be obeyed by all, the community frees the individual members from the burden of such decision-making in a variety of matters, thus freeing them for the ordinary business of living. To live in a law-abiding society where the laws are just, is to experience a high degree of freedom: freedom from the fear of bodily assault and the various forms of exploitation, freedom to travel safely, to possess property and provide for one’s future and one’s children, freedom to develop one’s potential and to grow as a person.
Values before law
It is because people value freedom, order, stability, justice, bodily health, safety, community living, etc. that they enact and accept laws to promote, guarantee and protect these values. The laws themselves may be felt as an imposition and a burden, but the values they enshrine or protect correspond to our basic needs as human beings. We may grumble at the tax laws, but we do really want the social services of health, education, etc. provided by our tax money. It is values, therefore, which are primary. Laws are secondary or derivative. The kind of laws needed for the safeguarding and promotion of a particular value will vary according to the culture and living conditions of the community. Laws governing taxation and traffic are an obvious example. But even more basic laws can change. For example, human life has always been regarded as a value with a high priority, but respect for life can give rise to very different laws. Thus, in primitive societies subject to frequent attack from enemies, the sick and elderly were put to death by relatives and members of their own tribe. This was not disrespect for life, but to save them from a worse fate at the hands of the enemy, and to save the healthy members from being slowed down in their flight and therefore killed by having to care for the weaker ones. Likewise, in some tribes, foreigners were considered enemies, potential attackers, so it was judged lawful to kill them, a kind of self-defence in anticipation. In our more settled conditions, however, we have laws against euthanasia, foreigners are not killed as enemies, and more and more the death penalty is seen as an inadequate response by the community to lawbreakers.
Besides, not only will respect for the same basic value give rise to different laws through time, but even the values themselves change. There are no values in the abstract. Values exist only in people’s minds. They are what people consider worthwhile, what they are prepared to live for, to sacrifice their time, effort and money for and at times even to die for. Human beings have changed considerably in the course of history, so people grow in their appreciation of basic values, and discover new ones. Thus, the notion of human freedom and dignity strikes a deeper chord in modern hearts than it did in earlier centuries. Slavery could be accepted without question by St. Paul and even defended philosophically by St. Thomas Aquinas, and the popes had slaves as late as 1800, whereas the very idea of slavery is abhorrent to people today. It was only at Vatican II that the Church described the practice as odious, destructive, infamous, a scourge and a poison. It is obvious, therefore, that even values themselves have a history, that they are not static or absolute. It is only recently that people realised that respect for human dignity involves recognising sexual equality between women and men, though we still have considerable distance to go before this is reflected in all our laws.
God’s law?
At this point, one might ask: what has all this got to do with sin? The theology text-book quoted at the beginning of this chapter defined sin as the free transgression of a divine law and went on to explain that all law derives from the law of God. Popular preaching often gave the impression that over and above ‘human law’, as described above, there is a special ‘divine law’ revealed by God, and that human law is unjust, not true law, not binding in conscience if it in any way contradicts God’s law. There is indeed a sense in which this is true, as we shall see shortly. But the impression many people have is that there is a ‘law of God’ that can be consulted and read off in much the same way as one would look up a point of civil or ecclesiastical legislation. There is an idea of ‘God’s law’ in the minds of some religious people which is at the root of so much confusion in discussions of morality and sin. It is argued that since God is eternal, immutable, all-wise, his law must likewise be eternal, unchanging, and perfect. It is frequently described as ‘absolute’, therefore binding in all circumstances and admitting of no exceptions.
There are a number of difficulties about such a view. First of all, there is no ‘revealed law of God’ in the sense of a specific, formulated law communicated directly and verbally by God to any individual or group. Older theology books used to present the Ten Commandments in this way as a revelation to Moses. Theologians explained that apart from the command to keep the Sabbath holy (a positive law of God), all the others were precepts of ‘natural law’, which could be discovered by unaided human reason. But since they could be discovered only with great difficulty, and yet are so necessary for people’s moral life, it was said that God revealed them directly to the human race through Moses. This view rested on a very literal, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible that cannot be accepted today. Not only do we know that much of the content of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) in general pre-dates Moses by up to five hundred years, but we recall the many culturally conditioned, and to our modern mind rather barbaric practices, that were proclaimed in the Old Testament as the ‘law of God’. (e.g. the death penalty for a disobedient son or a wife found not to be a virgin on her wedding night). Nowhere in the Bible can we find a single specific law ‘revealed’ directly by God; much less can we look on Old or New Testaments as a handbook or code of revealed morality. Jesus gave us a ‘new law’, that we love each other as he loves us, but he left it to us to discover what true love means in different situations, and what it demands of us in practice. His law of love is a principle of action, an ideal to inspire us, but not a law as such. Neither the ‘law of Christ’, nor the example of the life of Christ, nor any of the words of Christ will tell the conscientious doctor when to cease prolonging the life of an incurably ill patient or show the scientist the precise limits to observe in his stem-cell research.
Official pronouncements of the Church on moral matters frequently invoke the ‘divine law’, and state that certain things are against the ‘law of God’. Most Catholics who got beyond the elementary stages of the catechism were told that the Commandments of the Church were ecclesiastical laws, therefore human laws. Human law was explained as an ordinance of human reason for the common good promulgated by the lawful authority: civil law for the civil society of the state, and ecclesiastical law for the religious society which is the Church. But divine law is a higher law, a more basic law, the foundation on which both civil and Church laws depend. It was recognised that ecclesiastical laws could change from time to time, that one could be given a dispensation from them, and that in certain circumstances they were not binding (e.g. the Sunday Mass obligation during illness). But the ‘divine law’ was unchangeable, absolute, allowing no exceptions, and could not be abrogated or dispensed from, even by the Vicar of Christ himself, since a vicar cannot overrule the will of his sovereign.
However, we have the same difficulty with the documents of the Church as with the Bible itself. They contain no evidence of a specific, formulated law revealed by God to any authority in the Church. They also have the other difficulty noticed in the biblical references to ‘God’s law’, namely that in spite of the divine law being unchanging and absolute, there are so many doctrines officially taught for centuries by the highest authority in the Church which were eventually, though quietly, given up as false. Up to the middle ages the Church taught that marital intercourse during menstruation or pregnancy was a mortal sin. Intercourse with a sterile wife or by a man in old age was condemned. Pope Leo X, against Luther, declared that the burning of heretics was perfectly in accord with the will of the Holy Spirit. Slavery and the temporal power of the popes were defended for centuries as part of Catholic teaching. Pius VI rejected the ‘abominable philosophy of human rights’, and especially freedom of religion, of conscience, of the press and the equality of all human beings. Freedom of conscience was dismissed as ‘sheer madness’ by Gregory XVI and Pius IX, but solemnly proclaimed as a basic human right by Vatican II. For three hundred years castrati sang in the Sistine Chapel, spanning the reigns of thirty-two popes, but not one of them spoke out against the practice. In his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (Feeding the Lord’s Flock, 1907) Pius X, a canonised saint, raged against ‘...that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity a factor of progress in the Church’ (n.27).
Natural law
Does it follow, therefore, that there is no such thing as a ‘law of God’? Yes, if we mean a set of specific laws already formulated, needing only to be read off as occasion requires. There are no such laws in the Bible, or in Church documents. If we claim that they exist in God’s mind, we have the problem of discovering them, because God’s mind is in no way open to our inspection. Nevertheless, throughout the ages people have always appealed to a justice higher than law and against which all human law must be judged. It is spoken of as the unwritten law, the natural moral law, the law of God. St. Paul says that the gentiles have this law written in their hearts (Rom 2:15). In a very real sense, therefore, there is a ‘law of God’. Human beings are not a law unto themselves, the sole arbiters of right and wrong, but we are dependent on God, our creator. In the physical world, we discover a whole series of laws built into the very nature of things, the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Insofar as we formulate our discoveries into laws, they are simply a description of the internal structure of the universe which we can come to know more accurately with the progress of science, but which we have no power to change. These laws (e.g. gravity, aerodynamics, the laws of plant, animal or human reproduction) simply describe the nature of things, the way things are and behave. We ourselves are part of this created world, and we are subject to the same laws insofar as we are physical and living beings. These are simply the laws of nature, not a moral law.
But humans are a special kind of living being. We are capable not only of seeing how things are, but because of our powers of conceptual thought and free choice, we also know how things might be, and in some cases how things ought to be. When it comes to painting a house, for example, we can freely choose from a variety of colours. Our final choice may be a matter of personal taste and preference. But in our dealings with our fellow human beings, our choice of action will be influenced by an awareness of the fact that we ought not to deceive, exploit or murder them. This awareness will have come to us through the laws explicitly formulated by the community (e.g. the Ten Commandments). But to the extent that we have reached some degree of moral maturity, we will be convinced that behind the particular law there is a basic human value at stake, a value we must respect if we are to be true to our nature. We will have experienced some basic need in our own nature which must be met if we are to grow as human persons. There are physiological needs (food, warmth, etc), safety needs, the need to love and be loved, to belong, to have roots in a community, to be esteemed by our fellow human beings, to be self-determining and self-actualising. The meeting of these needs brings us satisfaction and fulfilment as persons, so down through the centuries society has formulated laws to ensure that they will be met. Since these laws are determined by the basic needs of human nature itself, and not the eccentricities of isolated individuals, they are referred to as the ‘natural’ moral law, the law governing human behaviour based on our very nature as human beings. Since we do not create our own nature, but discover it already shaped by God our creator, with its in-built needs and direction, the natural moral law is often described as ‘God’s law’. Since we cannot read God’s mind directly to discover his law, we can find it reflected in his creation, in the same way that we can guess the blueprint in an inventor’s mind by studying the machine he produced.
Blueprint theory
This ‘blueprint’ or ‘maker’s instructions’ theory of natural law has given rise to misunderstanding and is responsible for much of the confusion in discussions of moral issues. Because ‘human nature’ can be studied and described in the same way as the nature of animals, plants or non-living things, the natural moral law is often compared to the laws of physics, chemistry, physiology, etc., clear, fixed, stable, needing only to be ‘discovered’ in human nature. But this is to leave out of account the most distinctive feature of human nature, namely our God-given creative human intelligence and free will. Though our basic needs remain the same, our nature is not something static and fixed for all time. The human person is a being of possibilities, and we develop and in a sense create our nature as we decide among these possibilities. Inwardly, we change each time we adopt a new image of ourselves or get a new understanding of ourselves. For example, our understanding of our body, of our sexuality, or of our relationship to the material universe is radically different from what it was in primitive times. Outwardly, we change insofar as we fashion instruments and technology that become as it were extensions of ourselves and we change the world we inhabit. Many of our inventions bring about a whole new civilisation, though it may not be realised at the time. Thus, printing was first thought to be merely a new way of reproducing books, and the motor-car just a faster means of travel, but both of these inventions transformed society, and in a sense our own human nature. Today’s computer world and information technology is an even more striking example. Thus, change is an essential part of our unchanging nature. It is a mistake to imagine that God created an original human nature at the beginning of time, to which any subsequent development must be considered an addition, something almost artificial.
The fundamentalist understanding of human nature tends to give an exaggerated importance to our physical and biological nature in determining moral norms. The impression is given that we can best discover God’s plan for human beings by studying our human functions in their natural state, prior to any intervention by us. Thus, speech is for communicating knowledge, eating for the conservation of health, and sex for reproduction and the continuation of the species. But this approach ignores the fact that all these activities are human, and have their full human meaning only in a human context, which includes intelligence, free will, human relationships and the whole world of culture and civilisation. The laws governing these activities insofar as they are physical are not moral laws, but merely physical or physiological laws. They tell us nothing about how these activities are to be used for responsible self-development and growth as persons, and this is what morality is all about. For most of its two thousand year history, the Church claimed that the primary purpose of human sex was procreation, while the secondary purpose was the ‘alleviation of concupiscence’. It is only since Vatican II that official teaching has rejected this subordination and recognised that the two purposes are equal since sexual intimacy and the quality of the relationship are as much at the heart of marriage as the physical production of offspring. In fact, in a very real sense the intimacy of ‘two in one flesh’ is far more important as the very essence of marriage (as taught by Genesis and Jesus) than procreation, which is only intermittent and indeed totally absent in many marriages.
What can be read directly in human physical or biological nature is nothing more than facts (like the laws of gravity, chemistry, or aerodynamics, etc.), namely how nature works spontaneously, without human interference. For example, nature, through the production of prolactin causes ovulation to be suspended during the early stages of lactation in a woman who has given birth, and the same effect is produced by taking contraceptive pills. Both of these are facts of nature. The fact that the latter involves human intelligence and skill to produce the appropriate chemicals in the laboratory does not make it less natural, since the ingredients of the pill combine in the laboratory according to the laws of chemistry and they function in the woman’s body to inhibit ovulation according to the laws of physiology, and our human creative intelligence which discovers and applies these laws is itself part of our human nature. But ‘nature’ does not tell us whether it is morally better to make use of one rather than the other of these facts of nature. That one happens to be described as ‘artificial’ is not sufficient ground for moral condemnation, otherwise tranquillisers and most of the techniques of modern medicine would be immoral, not to mention cutting nails and dyeing hair. To decide what is morally good, we need to understand the meaning and importance of the particular activity or fact of nature in the totality of the human person as such. Thus, which method of birth control is morally right for a couple in the exercise of responsible parenthood will depend on a variety of factors, and not simply on whether or not it is ‘artificial’. The encyclical Humanae vitae lamentably fails to understand this simple and basic fact.
A further indication of the weakness of this oversimplified approach to natural law can be found in the variety of practices condemned for centuries as unnatural, therefore against the natural law. Writers of the Eastern Church (Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Basil) prohibited third and fourth marriages as against natural law. Many of the earlier western writers forbade even killing in self-defence on the same grounds; it was left to Augustine to define the distinction between justifiable homicide and murder. Clement thought both ear-rings and nose-rings equally forbidden by the law of nature. Tertullian could not endure the actor’s make-up, or the garland of flowers, because they were unnatural, and, as he said, ‘our God is a God of nature’. It is easy to smile at these examples from history, but is there not a moral obligation to learn from history? Do we have to wait another century or more before asking whether many of the things condemned today as sins against the natural law are really such? At least 80% of Catholics are not convinced of the current teaching on artificial contraception and the thousands of committed married couples who were crucified in conscience by it and were refused absolution in confession are deeply angry at the injustice of their morally responsible decisions about marital intimacy being labelled as sinful where no sin can be proved.
Criticism of the ‘blueprint’ theory does not mean that there is no such thing as natural law. It is simply to warn against expecting God to communicate his will through a particular channel like the physical nature of human sexuality, expecting to be able to read off specific precepts of moral law from an examination of our biological, physiological, psychological or sexual make-up. All that can be read like this in our human nature is the capacity to ethicise, the power to make decisions about right and wrong and to feel bound by them. What those decisions will be in specific areas will depend on a variety of factors, but they are not determined in advance simply by the biological facts.
However, we can speak of a modified version of the ‘maker’s instructions’ theory insofar as we discover basic needs and potentialities in human nature that simply cannot be ignored, and these give us some general insight into values like freedom, responsibility, sociability, love, etc. In striving to promote and preserve these values, experience and reflection will enable us to formulate some general principles like: treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, some arrangements should be made for the preservation of life, for the regulation of the sex instinct, for the organisation of the family and of society. These principles may seem very vague, but they are the basis on which we work out more detailed norms for moral behaviour. But the further norms will vary according to changing historical circumstances, both because the same basic value may be served in different ways, and our understanding and appreciation of some values may change. Thus, in a given set of historical circumstances (economic, social, cultural), polygamy might be the best norm for family life, as it was for centuries in primitive societies, whereas nowadays we look on monogamy as best serving the values of human dignity and family relations.
Absolute norms?
Does this mean that there are no absolute and unchanging moral norms? In fact, it is not very helpful to speak of absolute norms. The expression is confusing insofar as many of the precepts commonly regarded as absolute actually do admit of exceptions. Thus, in spite of the precept: Thou shalt not kill, we justify killing in self-defence and we accept a theology of the just war. Artificial contraception is said to be ‘intrinsically evil’, i.e. in all circumstances and of its very nature immoral, and yet the Vatican allowed nuns threatened with rape in the Congo to take contraceptive precautions, and many hierarchies say that married couples may choose whatever method of birth control their conscience finds best, provided they avoid abortifacients and whatever would offend the human dignity of the partners. It was the constant teaching of theologians that a married couple are justified in interrupting intercourse if children come on the scene, but if all forms of contraception except abstinence during the fertile days are decreed to be ‘intrinsically evil’, then even this exception is ‘against the natural law’, and therefore forbidden by God. The very phrase ‘intrinsically evil’ attached to actions like lying and contraception is a reflection of the old blueprint theory of natural law, with its clear-cut, black-and-white, easily measured moral rules read off from the physical facts of nature. The phrase immediately conjures up the notion of an absolute norm, admitting of no exception. But it is extremely difficult to find such norms, at least understood in this sense, and this is the sense most people take to be intended.
Loyalty to the Church does not require that we continue to use a phrase from a bygone age simply because it is consecrated by long usage. Loyalty to God and to his call that we serve God’s people demands that we cease using terminology that confuses people. An action considered in total isolation from motive and circumstances is a mere abstraction, with no human meaning, and without its human meaning it can have no moral label. If phrases like ‘intrinsic evil’ need the involved reasoning of skilled theologians to explain that it does not really mean what it says, and at the same time that it nearly does, it were better dropped altogether. Perhaps it would be going too far to say that there are no absolute norms, but if there really are, they are extremely few. For example, it is impossible to envisage circumstances in which the torturing of innocent children would be justified. But is it really necessary to formulate absolute moral norms in order to bring home the absoluteness of the call to be morally good? Rather than speak of absolute moral norms and intrinsically evil actions, it is less confusing and more helpful to discover and develop the constants in human behaviour, the values which provide an overall direction and order in our human development.
Lust for certainty
The multiplication of absolute moral norms is part of the human lust for certainty. This lust for certainty is part of our human nature, but too often the tone and manner of Church teaching pandered to it and encouraged it. Psychologist Erich Fromm warned that certainty can be a dangerous and dehumanising thing, and the quest or lust for certainty can block the search for true meaning. We Catholics can be more prone to it since we belong to a Church that speaks with so much authority. We might learn a little more humility if we recall the views of saints and theologians that were taken as certain because they came from such authorities. A few examples: Clement of Alexandria: a woman should cover her head with shame at the thought that she is a woman. St. John Chrysostom (died 407): woman is a necessary evil. St. Jerome (died 420): women are the gate of hell. St. Augustine (died 430): women are not made in the image of God. Pope St. Gregory the Great (died 604): woman’s use is two-fold: animal sex and motherhood. St. John Damascene (died 750): woman is a sick she-ass… a hideous tape-worm… the advance-post of hell. It is easy to smile now at these prejudices, but the writers reallly believed these myths and proclaimed them with absolute certainty. Lest these facts be dismissed as ‘water under the bridge,’ best forgotten quietly, we should remember that Pius XI in Casti Connubii warned against trusting human reason alone to understand natural law in the area of marriage, ‘where the inordinate desire for pleasure can attack frail human nature and lead it astray.’ Pius XII in his address to Midwives (1956) explicitly denied the unitive meaning of intercourse. He said: ‘The truth is that marriage is not ordered by the will of the Creator towards the personal perfection of the husband and wife as its primary end, but to the procreation and education of new life. The other ends of marriage, although part of nature’s plan, are not of the same importance as the first, still less are they superior’ (48). The attitude of these two popes is a far cry from the solemn official teaching of the Church in the Second Vatican Council’s document on The Church in th Modern World.
This lust for certainty is understandable as part of our moral concern, but not very helpful in striving for moral maturity. The attempt to formulate a long list of them would defeat their purpose by providing a false sense of security. It is true of course that many insights with regard to human conduct have a lasting value and will be passed on from generation to generation, so that we do not have to call everything into question on each occasion. But the norms we formulate are no more than general guidelines, reminders that an important value is at stake. They are not meant to bypass conscience or save us the trouble of thinking. We cannot be satisfied with prefabricated solutions from the past, especially as answers to questions which were never asked in the past. The basic moral call is to grow, to become actually what we are potentially. Insofar as we are continually changing and are faced with new questions, we are called to find new answers. On the basis of experience, inquiry and insight, we must discover which of the various possibilities that present themselves are right, reasonable, human, which of them enable us to grow as persons. It is a flight from personal responsibility to imagine that answers can be found ready-made in Scripture, Church documents or papal statements no matter how often repeated, although we can get valuable insights from these sources. The Second Vatican Council reminds us that the pastors of the Church do not always have solutions to every problem which arises, and admits that, in the complicated and rapidly changing world of today, the Church needs special help from experts in various sciences in order to ‘listen to and distinguish the many voices of our times, and to interpret them in the light of God’s word’ (Church in the Modern World, n. 44). The weakness of Humanae vitae is that it totally ignored this sound advice. The world’s bishops gathered in council were not allowed to discuss it because a papal commission had been established to study the matter. This commission, including cardinals, bishops, lay married people and various experts voted overwhelmingly that there could be no objection to artificial contraception. Even the four clerics of the minority opinion publicly admitted that they could find no proof for their position except to warn that changing the teaching would be a disaster for the Church, implying that the Church had been seriously in error in the past, and it was this fear that drove Paul VI to compose his text.
Natural moral law, therefore, is not an external law or set of precepts to be read off from human nature and absolutely obeyed. Rather it is an internal law, functional, dynamic, flexible, not a list of regulations and commands, but a basic thrust towards self-determination and fulfilment as a person. It can be called God’s law insofar as he created our human nature with its fundamental needs, its irrepressible appetites of heart and mind: for self-preservation, for endless intellectual inquiry, for social living, for searching for God. But the best and most human ways in which these needs are to be met, and therefore the norms to guide us in meeting them, have not been spelled out directly and verbally by God in advance. They have to be discovered by our own God-given, creative intelligence, from our collective experience, inquiry, reflection and decision, and this is an ongoing process. The moral call is to be faithful to the demands of each step in this process.
Continual discovery
It is clear from all this that neither in Sacred Scripture, nor in the official pronouncements of the Church, nor in what is called natural moral law, can we point to a set of precepts and say: ‘this is God’s law’ in the sense of a directly revealed code of morality. This simple fact ought to alert us to the danger of idolising law, allowing it to take the place of God himself. Our very concern for the sanctity of God and our respect for his will could well tempt us in that direction, as it did the Pharisees. Our lust for certainty can lure us along the same path; we would like to know where we stand before God, how far we can go before getting into the area of sin, etc. But this is not moral maturity.
There is a presumption in favour of law, that it is a good law, that it serves the purpose for which it was formulated and enacted. In general, we trust the legislators in both Church and state, and we trust the wisdom and experience of previous generations, as we accept the laws handed down to us. But obedience to law can never be the whole of morality. To be morally mature is not simply to do what we are told, but to make our own the value which the particular law is intended to protect or promote, and to act from conviction. The real authority of any law, therefore, is not simply the will of the legislator, but the human value at stake (e.g. truthfulness, justice, order in the community, love for each other). Through passage of time and change of circumstances laws may cease to serve the value originally intended, in fact they may even come to defeat their purpose. This is true not only of positive civil law and ecclesiastical legislation, but even of norms claimed to be God’s law as revealed in the natural moral law or in the Bible. Such laws lose their authority. Insistence on them creates a credibility gap for leaders. Blind obedience to them stunts moral growth in the individual. Failure to see this is sinful neglect on the part of the community, a refusal to read the signs of the times as an ongoing revelation of God’s call.
Coping with change
A basic weakness in our Church teaching is that it practically never admits failure in the past, but relies on reform by amnesia when the teaching changes, quietly and conveniently forgetting the many dreadful things solemnly taught in the past. For centuries married couples were told that it was a mortal sin to have intercourse during pregnancy or menstruation because until the discovery of the ovum in 1845 sperm was thought to contain the whole embryo (homunculus, little man), so that any waste of seed outside the vagina, even in wet dreams, was thought to be a kind of homicide. Pius XII in his Address to Midwives in 1951 dismissed the idea that sex fosters mutual love in marriage and implied with St. Augustine that it came from the lust caused by original sin. These assertions were based on faulty physiology and psychology and make no sense in today’s world. More recently Paul VI’s Humanae vitae has no convincing proof that artificial contraception is immoral, but feared that admitting this would imply that the Church was seriously mistaken in the past. The Church would gain enormously in credibility if it had the humility to admit these sad but true facts of history.
It is true to say that sin is a transgression of the law of God in the sense that sin means a refusal to grow into what God wants us to be, a failure to grow into the fullness of the maturity of Christ. But it is an oversimplification to limit sin to the transgression of a law. In Paul’s words, law can convict us of sin insofar as it points out to us the areas and sometimes even the ways in which we fail to live up to the Christian ideal. It can spell out the minimum requirements of what God expects of us. But God’s call, to the individual and to the whole community, is an ongoing one that cannot be confined to a set of laws, any more than a love relationship between two people can be adequately described by a legal contract. To respond to that call is to grow, but the pattern of our response is something to be continually discovered in the changing circumstances of our lives. It is not enough to examine ourselves in the light of a set of laws and ask how we keep them. It is not enough to ask: what am I doing? We must also ask: what is the doing doing to me? What kind of person am I becoming as a result of what I am doing? Laws can help us to recognise God’s call, they can educate our conscience by the insight they give us into human values, but they can never be the full measure of our response, and much less can they ever take the place of the God to whom we respond. In the light of the Church’s long history of insistence on law and obedience, and its frequent lapses into pharisaism and scribalism, it could do with a healthy dose of relativism in order to relativise some of our false absolutes. We can still joyfully sing the praises of God’s law in psalm 119, provided we preface it and regularly intersperse within it the first of God’s Commandments: ’I am the Lord your God ... worship no god but me’ (Deut 5:6‑7).
Obedience and law
In the Genesis myth of the first humans in paradise their original sin was disobedience, their refusal to obey God’s law. Obedience to law is generally recognised as virtue, but in fact obedience as such is morally neutral, and there are situations where true virtue calls for disobedience. The recently beatified Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter is on the way to canonisation in spite of his refusal to obey his parish priest, his bishop and most of the German bishops, when he would not serve in Hitler’s army, because of his conscientious belief that a Christian should not support evil. Church representatives told him that he had a duty to defend his country, and that the government was in a better position to decide what was good or evil in this situation. Because he believed he was doing God’s will in following his conscience he was beheaded by the Nazis in 1943. His conscientious disobedience took tremendous courage because for centuries the Church insisted on uncritical obedience to all its teaching. Its failure to encourage independence of mind among its members led to massive acquiescence in evils like the Nazi atrocities and the brutal dictatorships of Latin American. Historically, in fact, the Church’s reliance on total unquestioning obedience undermined authentic moral development among Catholics. Its unchristian treatment of theologians judged insufficiently obedient to ‘Church teaching’ meant considerable loss of credibility for the Roman Church. Its insistence on absolute obedience led to a concern for power and centralisation which leaves little room for gospel humility. In spite of the wonderful vision of Vatican II, the Church is more centralised and authoritarian than ever, with no facilities or structures for input from God’s holy people who are the Church. At the end of the seventeenth century the popes appointed bishops for only 24 dioceses around the world, but the pope now personally appoints bishops for 3000 dioceses in the world, so it is difficult to see how they can be representatives of the local Churches. The exaggerated emphasis on total obedience in our Church is not conducive to the development of moral maturity
It should be obvious by now that law is not the absolute that many Christians have taken it to be, though it will always have an essential place in civil society and in the Christian community of the Church. What has been said so far should provide the beginnings of an answer to our last question: when is it a sin to break a law? A fuller answer may emerge when we discuss the question of measurement of sin and the ways in which the Church should preach morality.