The Many Meanings of Freedom and Liberty

Will Americans ever be on the same page about the meaning of liberal democracy?


I could not imagine that, in his final State of the Union address, President Bush would pass up the opportunity to once again contrast believers in democracy and believers in terror, the adherents of “freedom” vs. the adherents of “tyranny.” He did not disappoint. And this final time around, he phrased it like this:

The advance of liberty is opposed by terrorists and extremists -- evil men who despise freedom, despise America, and aim to subject millions to their violent rule.

This echoed the essentially same thought he expressed in his 2002 address:

They [the terrorists] embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice, made long ago, on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom…

Now, I am hardly faulting the President for casting the idea in these terms.
Along with millions of Americans, I think I know what he means.

But if truth be told, with each passing year, I have found these appeals to ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ to ring hollow—notwithstanding their well-intentioned air of eloquence in the context of our global conflict with Jihad-driven terrorism.

They ring hollow because, while millions of Americans are able to understand appeals to ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ within a philosophical context shared by President Bush—and arguably by the founders of our great nation—it is also apparent that millions of Americans do not partake of that context, are oblivious to it, or in many cases ideologically and existentially at extreme odds with it. It goes without saying, of course, that lacking well defined and well reasoned accounts of what ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ are—and how they were understood at America’s founding—such appeals will falter as mere platitudes.

In many contexts, the concepts of freedom and liberty are used interchangeably. But there are also meaningful distinctions. Freedom is perhaps best understood from within the context of philosophical anthropology, as a basic assessment, that is, of our human condition: we are able to act as self-determining agents, to be the “fathers of our own actions” as Aristotle would put it.

While it has been philosophically trendy of late to espouse some form of determinism and challenge the validity of traditional claims to such freedom, determinism doesn’t play out well in our shared human experience. Determinists have a particularly difficult time trying to explain how our DNA might have hard-wired us to make choices often against the deepest clamorings of our basic tendencies and preferences: why a Thomas More would face beheading rather than betray his conscience, or why a Marine might smother a live grenade with his own body rather than jump for cover.

Liberty could be understood as the public exercise of freedom within the life of a polity in which we have membership. Freedom, in this sense is the foundation and raison d’etre of liberty.

It is no secret of course that common understandings of freedom and liberty in American culture are not only conflicting but often work at cross purposes. And that is surely not lost on the President.[1] I was reminded earlier today of a fine synthesis of what I believe the founders understood about such concepts. It was an address by Pope John Paul II in 1998 to newly confirmed ambassador to the Holy See, Lindy Boggs:

The Founding Fathers of the United States asserted their claim to freedom and independence on the basis of certain "self-evident" truths about the human person: truths which could be discerned in human nature, built into it by "nature's God". Thus they meant to bring into being, not just an independent territory, but a great experiment in what George Washington called "ordered liberty:" an experiment in which men and women would enjoy equality of rights and opportunities in the pursuit of happiness and in service to the common good. Reading the founding documents of the United States, one has to be impressed by the concept of freedom they enshrine: a freedom designed to enable people to fulfill their duties and responsibilities towards the family and towards the common good of the community. Their authors clearly understood that there could be no true freedom without moral responsibility and accountability, and no happiness without respect and support for the natural units or groupings through which people exist, develop and seek the higher purposes of life in concert with others.

The current state of our union, if anything, is one of sheer confusion as competing accounts of liberty and freedom collide with each other in the public square, and the denizens of public culture are either oblivious to these semantic conflicts or resigned to their own helplessness in trying to make sense out of them.

Is ‘liberty’ to be understood, as Washington understood it, as being “ordered” and indeed subordinate to certain self-evident truths about human nature and our situation in the cosmos, or rather is it the case, as Justice Anthony Kennedy speculated in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood (1992) that “liberty is defined as the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of being, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”?

Is ‘freedom’ a fundamental disposition that enables us “to fulfill our duties and responsibilities towards the family and towards the common good of the community” or is it the maximum possible existential space in which to pursue my own personal preferences, unencumbered by any demands of others except those I would reasonably expect them to respect in my own regard?[2]

The late John Rawls is the father of the most broadly accepted possible solution to this cultural predicament. His answer, in part, hinges on the notion of “public reason”, that is, the supposed collection of assertions about persons, societies, rights, and duties generally agreed upon and accepted as an area of "overlapping consensus" by "reasonable" people who happen to hold contradictory opinions on those same matters.

While we might take some consolation in the fact that Rawls at least appeals to some notion of objective and reasonable belief,[3] his notion wears rapidly thin under philosophical scrutiny. It is a notion, to be sure, which deliberately rejects any kind of tenet whose origin is to be found, for example, within a tradition of religious belief. And confusion today over what is “reasonable” and what should be admitted into “public reason” is at the very heart of our confusion about liberty and liberal democracy.[4]

This is why I look forward to the day when an American president will take advantage of the state of the union address to disabuse us of the impression that we share an allegiance to a unified understanding of what “advancing liberty” or “choosing freedom” means. That might be a good catalyst toward really getting us onto—or back onto—the same page. If we don’t eventually get ourselves on the same page here—preferably the same page the founders were on—we have reason to fear for the endurance and survival of our great experiment in ordered liberty.

So let’s keep discussing what should and should not be considered “reasonable”; let’s keep alive a thriving public discourse about the nature of morality, about the common good, about the nature of rights claims, and the relationship of moral judgments to law and public policy. Such on-going debate, discussion and reasoned discourse are our only way forward.


Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

Copyright © 2008 The Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person

[1] On another note, I would be amiss if I did not credit the President for acknowledging the scientific breakthrough in somatic cell reprogramming, and for calling on Congress to ban the cloning of human organisms:

In November, we witnessed a landmark achievement when scientists discovered a way to reprogram adult skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells. This breakthrough has the potential to move us beyond the divisive debates of the past by extending the frontiers of medicine without the destruction of human life. (Applause.) So we're expanding funding for this type of ethical medical research. And as we explore promising avenues of research, we must also ensure that all life is treated with the dignity it deserves. And so I call on Congress to pass legislation that bans unethical practices such as the buying, selling, patenting, or cloning of human life.

[2] For a wonderful exploration of our competing notions of freedom, see George Weigel, “A Better Concept of Freedom,” First Things (March 2002).

[3] It would seem Pope Benedict is at least intrigued by such claims to “public reason.” His recent (planned but undelivered) discourse to students and faculty of La Sapienza University is well worth a read.

[4] For more on Rawls’ theory and how the natural law tradition poses a considerable problem to that theory, see Robert P. George, “Public Morality, Public Reason,” First Things (November 2006).

Reflections on Roe at 35

I am on the road this week guest-lecturing at the Notre Dame School of Law and the Ave Maria School of Law. In place of my regular column, I am sending a few articles that touch on abortion in America in light of today’s 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that mandated legal abortion in all fifty states. I hope you enjoy reading some of these compelling items.

*An inspiring news article in today’s LA Times about how the pro-life cause stirs the younger generation, motivated by “a sense that millions of their peers are missing.”

*Dorinda Bordlee and Nik Nikas, attorneys and co-founders of the Bioethics Defense Fund, on the powerful witness of a peaceful prolife movement; also, Nikas counsels that we should be persistent in the struggle to end abortion, noting that the movement is relatively young and that true social change occurs over extended periods of time. See BDF’s list of the The Top Seven Pro-Life Victories here.

*Robert George, whose essays never disappoint, provides a superlative example of respectful logic delivered with kindness in his open letter to Anne Rice, addressing Anne Rice’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton, despite Rice’s pro-life convictions.

*George Weigel offers a worthwhile tribute to “the most consequential Catholic legislator of his time”, the Honorable Congressman from Illinois, Henry Hyde. Congressman Hyde fought tirelessly in defense of those who have no voice. As Weigel notes, “If the pro-life movement is the great civil rights movement of our time, then Henry J. Hyde was one of America’s greatest civil rights leaders. Today’s holy innocents, who welcomed him at his final homecoming on November 29, had no doubt about that.”

*In an April, 2007 In Focus Essay, Westchester Institute Fellow and attorney Michelle Gress analyzes Gonzales v. Carhart, the first Supreme Court decision to uphold legislative limits on the grisly partial birth abortion procedure.

*Michael J. New, of the University of Alabama, discusses the positive news about abortion trends that has been ignored by the mainstream press.


My regular column, With Good Reason, will resume next week.

Faith, Reason and the War on Jihad - George Weigel' Call to Action

Clear thinking on complex moral and cultural issues is a scarce commodity these days. George Weigel, Catholic theologian and one of America's foremost commentators on issues of religion and public life, has for years been responding to that paucity with a consistent output of robust, penetrating and cogent thought. Last September 11th, I dedicated this column (9/11, Jihadism and Reason) to highlighting some of Weigel's reflections on the occasion of the 6th anniversary of the attacks. Those thoughts were an excerpt from the sixth William E. Simon lecture which Weigel had delivered for the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington in January 2007. Happily, the elements of that lecture have now taken the form of a new book entitled Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism. The book is, quite simply, a must-read for persons who are trying to be thoughtful, realistic and objective about the complex issues posed by Muslim jihadists to western civilization as we know it. If you think my posing the situation in such stark terms is hyperbole, then you will likely find Weigel's blunt assessment of things hyperbolic as well. "The challenge of global jihadism cannot be avoided," writes Weigel. "The war that has been declared against us-and by "us" I mean the West, not simply the Unites States-must be engaged, and through a variety of instruments, many of them not military." The fact that many might discover hyperbole in such declarations takes us to the very heart of Weigel's message: it has taken far too long for the U.S. and other western democracies to understand the situation we are in. Over the weekend, I interviewed George on a number of issues the book raises, and probed him for his take on the future of the conflict between Jihadism and the West. FTB: You note that "Christians have taken an aggressive and bloody-minded posture toward Islam on many occasions over the past fourteen hundred years, an aggressiveness that has left deep resentments in the Islamic world..." (p. 21). Is this one of the root causes of Jihad? Weigel: Resentment of Western success ("the Great Satan" and all that) is certainly part of the motivational mix among jihadists today, although the endless references to "Zionist Crusaders" nicely mix 20th century hatreds with 12th century hatreds. But the basic point to be stressed is that jihadists have their own motivations: i.e., if "jihadism" is the religiously inspired ideology that teaches that it is the moral duty of all Muslims to employ all means necessary to compel the world's submission to Islam, that in itself is motivation enough. FTB: We grew accustomed to Pope John Paul II reiterating the need to get at the "roots" of terrorism, which he identified as various forms of injustice. For instance: History, in fact, shows that the recruitment of terrorists is more easily achieved in areas where human rights are trampled upon and where injustice is a part of daily life. This is not to say that the inequalities and abuses existing in the world excuse acts of terrorism: there can never, of course, be any justification for violence and disregard for human life. However, the international community can no longer overlook the underlying causes that lead young people especially to despair of humanity, of life itself and of the future, and to fall prey to the temptations of violence, hatred, and a desire for revenge at any cost (Address to new British ambassador, Sept. 2002). Do you find in this notion-particularly as it is insisted on today-at all naïve or misguided? Weigel: The jihadists of 9/11 were not the wretched of the earth; they were college-educated, middle-class people. The command structure of al-Qaeda is not composed of peasants or the Arab lumpenproletariat, but of rich men and professional men. This follows the established pattern of modern terrorism (which began in 19th century Europe with well-to-do anarchists). That authoritarian politics plus corruption, and a lack of economic opportunity creates a fertile field for jihadist recruitment in populations with a large "surplus" of unemployed young men, I don't doubt; the young men heading for terrorist training camps in Waziristan probably fit this profile. So yes, changed political and economic conditions in the Arab Islamic world are going to be a necessary part of winning the war against jihadism. But to repeat it again: the jihadists have their own motivations, and if we don't understand that, we won't understand the depth and breadth of the problem. FTB: Is the problem Islam itself-the religion (understanding that "Islam" contains "many worlds" as you put it)? Weigel: That the great majority of the world's Muslims do not accept the jihadists' definition of a faithful Muslim's responsibilities suggests that the jihadist "answer" to the problem of Islam-confronts-modernity is not inevitable. Still, a frank inter-religious dialogue would recognize that certain core themes in Islamic self-understanding - its supersessionism (i.e., its claim that the revelation to Muhammad effectively cancels the revelatory "value" of the revelations of the God of Abraham to the people of Israel and in Jesus Christ), its concept of a dictated sacred text, its tendency to detach faith and reason (due in part to its lack of a notion of God as "Logos") do, under certain historical, cultural, social, and economic conditions, tend to produce a very aggressive notion of Islam's relationship to "the rest." FTB: Has Benedict taken a "hard line" with Muslims? How would you describe his approach to the problem of jihadism? Weigel: The immediate problem, as Pope Benedict XVI has suggested on numerous occasions, lies in Islam's difficult encounter with the Enlightenment political heritage, especially with the idea of religious freedom as a human right than can be known by reason and with the idea of the separation of religious and political authority in a just state. Those are the areas where the dialogue should focus today, for those are the issues that tend to create what Samuel Huntington called "Islam's bloody borders." FTB: Do you envision a future in which some modernized form of Islam-liberated from the jihadist element-will have accomplished a fruitful "encounter with modernity" (p. 33) and will be able to subsist at peace with the 'rest'? Weigel: I think you can find places where the effort to broker a more fruitful engagement between Islam and modernity is underway: Indonesia, for example, or Bosnia. One of the great difficulties in all this is the inordinate influence of Wahhabism, the radical Islamist ideology that has been exported from Saudi Arabia throughout the Islamic world. Add the passions of Middle Eastern politics to the effects of Wahhabist radicalism, and you get the kind of problems that we've seen, not only throughout the Levant, central Asia, and southwest Asia; you get the kind of problems we see in France, Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and elsewhere - like in American prisons. FTB: Will it take another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil to provoke a broader understanding of "who the enemy is" and acceptance of the fact that we are at war? Weigel: I hope not. That's one reason I wrote the book. But there does seem to be an odd, almost Victorian, reticence to name the unpleasant thing that's staring us in the face. If we don't learn to name it - and if we don't understand that this is fundamentally a war of ideas, ideas about human goods and the human future - we 're going to be surprised again and again. As for immediate dangers, anyone who doesn't think that al-Qaeda is working 24/7 to pull off, during our current election cycle, something similar to the attack on Madrid prior to the Spanish elections a few years ago simply isn't paying attention. FTB: What would you respond to critics who would call your book "myopic," an "exaggeration," "neo-con war-mongering hype", and so on? Weigel: I would invite anyone inclined to think I am exaggerating to read the book. The case is made there with evidence, calmly, and in a spirit that looks toward both a revitalized inter-religious dialogue and a renewal of American culture. Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C., Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

Copyright 2008 The Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person

A Papal Appeal to Natural Law

Why Benedict’s Peace Day Message didn’t get a Fair Hearing in Many Quarters

Last week (1/1/08 Speaking Softly and Rationally), I highlighted Pope Benedict’s past three messages for the World Day of Peace, January 1st. I noted that each of these messages—employing the figure of a human “moral grammar”—constituted a contemporary apologia for human reason, and specifically for belief in a universal natural moral law.

This week I want to explore some of the many reasons why such appeals—Benedict’s not least among them—have long fallen on deaf ears in the world of policymaking, jurisprudence and academia.

Our contemporary era is characterized by a generalized skepticism or perhaps more precisely—as Pope Benedict has cogently pointed out—agnosticism with regard to the determination of what constitutes the ‘genuine human good’. Theories of natural law, of course, hinge on precisely our shared ability to recognize such a good as universally intelligible and, indeed, reasonable. From a practical understanding of the goods that are perfective of our nature and constitutive of our ultimate human good, natural law theory is then able to make sense out of the moral norms that ought to guide and direct our chosen behaviors.

Consequently, contemporary philosophical ethics by and large denies our ability to grasp, much less make any rational sense out of moral principles, axioms, and evaluative judgments on human behavior. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has conclusively demonstrated that the roots of this crisis reach back to the Enlightenment.[1] Enlightenment thinkers failed to offer any such rational explanation for the genesis of moral norms in our moral experience.

Natural law theory, on the other hand, can explain such norms as the fruit of reasoned reflection on the goods that fulfill human beings as persons and the demands placed on us by reason itself as we pursue those goods—demands which, in their integral influence, direct us to pursue those goods in a manner harmonious with an objective and universal conception of the genuine good of the human person, or, “the genuine good of the human race, [allowing] men as individuals and as members of society to pursue their total vocation and fulfill it.”[2]

Enlightenment thinkers failed to offer such a meaningful account of the genesis and existence of moral precepts precisely because the overarching project during the Enlightenment—though certainly an ‘age of reason’—was paradoxically to narrow and curtail what had been the classical understanding of the proper domain of reason. In broad brushstrokes, according to these thinkers, reason’s proper scope was that of utility, instrumentality, empirical scrutiny—and the execution of personal preferences as dictated by the passions. Hence, ‘the nature of God’, ‘the essences of things', ‘human nature', ‘genuine human good’ and other such notions were understood to lie beyond the boundaries of the proper purview of human reason. [3]

The convictions of contemporary mainstream and secular moral philosophy are today, by and large, a follow-through from Enlightenment thought. In the early 20th century, the eventual result was Emotivism which argues that there really is no rational basis for moral normativity. It equates moral judgments with the expression of one’s inner feelings.

The next time you are asked how you “feel” about a particular moral issue, you will know where the question is coming from.
The Emotivist insistence on intuition or “moral sense” as the ultimate source of our value judgments and moral norms, along with the perceived helplessness to make sense out of competing moral claims and systems, has gone a long way to effectively sideline questions about ‘the good’ and ‘the right’ from the realm of reasoned discourse in the arenas of policymaking, jurisprudence and academia at large.

This intellectual caving in to moral agnosticism and skepticism has spawned sundry moral theories—particularly in the tradition of egalitarian liberalism—that attempt (and fail) to provide a putatively neutral framework within which diverse peoples might peacefully and securely pursue their varying, and often contradictory, conceptions of ‘the good’ and the ‘good life’; all of which has only deepened the quagmire of contemporary moral relativism. Such is the predominant view, the secular orthodoxy of our time, within which Benedict and the rest of us must make our case for natural law.

Add to this, of course, that it’s not only the proponents of secular orthodoxy who upbraid us on this question. Lots of people have problems with the idea of natural law. There are those fideistic critics of natural law theory, for example. Why do we need natural law, they ask, when we have divinely revealed law? Then there are what we might call the common sense critics of natural law. If the precepts of natural law are supposedly so “evident” to human reason, “written on our hearts” as even St. Paul affirms (Rm. 2: 14-15), why, they ask, do human beings so easily transgress that law? If human beings are wired for morality by some inborn rational capacity to interiorly understand right human action, why are we so adept at immorality?

My immediate response is that the doctrine of original sin goes a long way in responding to such questions, but we’re not doing theology here. Suffice it for now to insist—with Benedict—that the crisis of belief in the natural law is, at root, a crisis of belief and understanding of the potentialities and possibilities of human reason, a crisis that has been dogging western thought and culture for the better part of five centuries. But that notwithstanding, I would also point out that five hundred years of horribly skewed visions of the human person and the ideologies they drive have not altogether managed to blot out a genuine understanding of human reason. That’s why we can also be confident that an authentic understanding of natural law will also stand the test of time.

Copyright © 2008 The Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person

[1] This is the central topic of his After Virtue.


[2] Vatican Council II, Apostolic Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 35.

[3] As MacIntyre explains: “...for [Kant], as much as for Hume, [reason] discerns no essential natures and no teleological features in the objective universe available for study by physics. ...[They] reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end. But to understand this is to understand why their project of finding a basis for morality had to fail (After Virtue, 54).

Speaking "Rationally and Softly"

Pope Benedict proclaims his 3rd message for the World Day of Peace

With arguably few exceptions in history,when a Pope speaks about peace, the world hardly blinks.

But for the third time in his pontificate, Pope Benedict has again formally addressed the question of world peace. Released on December 11 and entitled "The Human Family, a Community of Peace,” this was his third “message” for the traditional January 1 World Day of Peace. It was the 41st time a Roman Pontiff had published such a document, a tradition begun by Pope Paul VI on December 8, 1967.

And like so many times in the past forty-one years, this year’s message—with the exception of a few hundred Catholic websites and periodicals—was hardly picked up by the media, lost like a shout into the proverbial wind.

Careful observers of this year’s message and the two previous ones will note, however, that Benedict is not shouting. They will further note that, while all three messages point to the great threats to world peace (nuclear arms proliferation, economic inequality, civil wars in Africa, violence in the Middle East—but also abortion, birth control, same-sex marriage by the way), his message, in reality, is a thinly veiled apologia for human reason, and a call for humanity to embrace belief in a universal natural moral law.

Is this just so much pontifical naïveté? Can Benedict possibly not understand how quaint these messages sound every year? Well, if we can set our skepticism aside for just a moment, we might begin to see that there’s a method to Benedict’s madness here.

It all begins with the fact that Benedict has been talking for the past three years about “grammar.” His 2006 message led with a notion of peace derived from St. Augustine’s The City of God. In Book XIX, Augustine defines peace as the tranquility of order.[1]

“By this,” explains Benedict, “[Augustine] meant a situation which ultimately enables the truth about man to be fully respected and realized.” Peace, explains Benedict —peace of all sorts, from the harmony of one’s own feelings, judgments and actions, to harmony between persons and nations—is the result of fidelity to that transcendent order established by the Creator which constitutes a moral law which he terms a “grammar of dialogue.”

This notion of “moral grammar” is from John Paul II. In his 1995 address to the United Nations John Paul asserted:

[T]here is a moral logic which is built into human life and which makes possible dialogue between individuals and peoples. If we want a century of violent coercion to be succeeded by a century of persuasion, we must find a way to discuss the human future intelligibly. The universal moral law written on the human heart is precisely that kind of "grammar" which is needed if the world is to engage this discussion of its future (n. 3).

Benedict continued with this strand of thought in his 2007 message. There, he referred to this “grammar” as “the body of rules for individual action and the reciprocal relationships of persons in accordance with justice and solidarity”, and as “inscribed on human consciences, in which the wise plan of God is reflected.”

This grammar, this set of principles is the work ultimately of divine Reason, of the divine Logos, who—as Benedict had insisted some months earlier at the University of Regensburg—is the ground and source of the intelligibility and meaning-fullness of both the outer cosmos and the inner cosmos of our very human nature.

Through and through, from the depth of our consciences, to the depths of the universe, all of reality is “dripping with logos” as the philosopher Louis Durpré has expressed it.[2] Persons, cultures, art, technology, are all caught up within a fabric of meaning, endowed with a God-given order.

This order—as understood by Augustine and Pope Benedict—can become the basis of a harmony of human persons living in a common pursuit of the genuine goods that fulfill us as human beings in the communities we form. That order becomes a reality when we live in docility to the moral norms which arise from the interior guidance of human reason, when this is allowed to have full sway over our choices and actions, unburdened by vice and passions.

These norms, grounded in human reason and consequently in our shared human nature, constitute a moral law—a “grammar”—whose ultimate ground and source is the Author of that very human nature.

It is Benedict’s contention that universal “respect” for this “grammar” can become the basis of genuine peace, both individually and within and between human communities:

From this standpoint, the norms of the natural law should not be viewed as externally imposed decrees, as restraints upon human freedom. Rather, they should be welcomed as a call to carry out faithfully the universal divine plan inscribed in the nature of human beings. Guided by these norms, all peoples —within their respective cultures—can draw near to the greatest mystery, which is the mystery of God. Today too, recognition and respect for natural law represents the foundation for a dialogue between the followers of the different religions and between believers and non-believers. As a great point of convergence, this is also a fundamental presupposition for authentic peace.

In his 2008 message, Benedict continues in the same line of reasoning. “Mankind is not lawless,” affirms the Pope:

Knowledge of the natural moral norm is not inaccessible to those who, in reflecting on themselves and their destiny, strive to understand the inner logic of the deepest inclinations present in their being. Albeit not without hesitation and doubt, they are capable of discovering, at least in its essential lines, this common moral law which, over and above cultural differences, enables human beings to come to a common understanding regarding the most important aspects of good and evil, justice and injustice.

In Benedict’s view, if there is any hope for an enduring world peace, it is to be found in a renewed respect for the natural moral law. Of course, to say that the very notion of natural law continues to be met with skepticism in contemporary academia and jurisprudence is putting it mildly.

Next week, we’ll have a look at contemporary opposition to the notion of natural law—at that storm of opposing currents of thought into which Benedict is trying to speak.

Let me conclude by noting that fifteen centuries ago, another Benedict—the saint from Nursia in Italy, and founder of western monasticism—in his book of norms for monastic life, laid down a twelve-step plan for attaining the virtue of humility. He likened each step to a rung of a ladder that connects heaven and earth (recalling the image of Jacob’s ladder in Gen. 28: 10-22). “The eleventh step is arrived at,” explains the saint, “when a monk speaks gently, without jests, simply, seriously… rationally and softly.”

We need have no doubt that our contemporary Benedict has reached this 11th step. His patient insistence—speaking softly and rationally—about reason, human nature, and the natural law, albeit against a gale of opposed ideologies, may not be the exercise in naiveté that it seems. He remembers perfectly well how His predecessor ushered in a cultural revolution of untold proportions by proclaiming the truth about the human person at the Gdansk shipyards in June of 1979. Benedict’s humble persistence may yet prove to be just the ticket we need for the kind of cultural renewal we all pray for in this New Year.

***
Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

Copyright © 2008 The Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person

[1] “The peace of the body then consists in the duly proportioned arrangement of its parts. The peace of the irrational soul is the harmonious repose of the appetites, and that of the rational soul the harmony of knowledge and action. The peace of body and soul is the well-ordered and harmonious life and health of the living creature. Peace between man and God is the well-ordered obedience of faith to eternal law. Peace between man and man is well-ordered concord. Domestic peace is the well-ordered concord between those of the family who rule and those who obey. Civil peace is a similar concord among the citizens. The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. The peace of all things is the tranquility of order” (Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XIX, 13, available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120119.htm).

[2] "If there is one belief Greek thinkers shared, it must be the conviction that both the essence of the real and our knowledge of it consists ultimately of form. Basically this means that it belongs to the essence of the real to appear, rather than to hide, and to appear in an orderly way" (Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 18).