Death and Resurrection of Moral Theology
Maguire, Daniel C.
When Paul wrote to the Galatians who had been enticed to listen to "another gospel" (1:6), he made it clear to them that through Christ and faith in him they had found not only justification and...
...Rather, they are salient and specific in the Catholic story...
...And yet, monosexual assumptions reign...
...Since these are essential dyadic components of humanness, and since the discernment of true humanness is the supreme task of ethics, the distortion struck at the heart of the ethical enterprise...
...in his cautiously written book Sin, Liberty and L ~ , (p...
...Principles also are not adequate to lead moral persons into the realm of the heroic, or to what has been called "ultraobligation...
...There was the bad exegesis of the Judaeo-Christian scriptures...
...By studying everything from New Testamental "early Catholicism" to medieval councils, from contemplative orders'to the Roman Curia, from fast days to rosary beads, amid debacles and glories, distinctive themes of Catholic moral and religious experience can be discerned, redeemed when need be, and always built upon...
...Our innocence is spent and confusion mounts...
...Since woman is the correlative of man, and since it is imposs~le to distort one correlative without distorting the other, we are awakening to the grim admission that we have been functioning out of false categorizations of both femaleness and maleness...
...Christ lives in the Christian (the ontological situation...
...Deep down in principles there is contact with the sanctity of life that distinguishes us from more complete barbarians...
...Such an integration is necessary in order to meet the test of credibilitym both for ourselves and for others...
...Principles, furthermore, conflict with one another...
...As language, it is a terminal case, bruised beyond utility by polemical usage...
...My thoughts on this theme grow out of my own experience of tension where there is lack of integration...
...Ethics...
...It is just another way of expressing the old distinction between the indicative and the imperative: Be what you are...
...These are not trends unique to Catholics...
...The truth, however, is that "the complete human molecule," in Teilhard de Chardin's terms, "is a duality, comprising masculine and feminine together...
...Catholicism is heavy with transcendence which is the precondition of laughter...
...Rummaging in the Catholic past is not useless...
...At least I've always found it so, Benedicamus Domino...
...For the Christian of today is like Paul: one who encounters the Risen Lord only in faith...
...Kant, of course, was so impressed with this experience that he slighted the limited applicability of practical moral principles and lapsed into pernicious absolutism...
...There's the rub...
...Some of yesterday's and today's moralists have reduced principles to statistical generalizations...
...The truly natural thing is for men and women to conspire in everything, not just in making babies...
...This leaves us with the problem that in ethics too, one man's meat may be another man's poison...
...There are bad principles, just as there are bad prophets...
...Paul, if he ever did know the historical Jesus, considered it naught in comparison with his faith experience of him: "even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view (kata sarka), we regard him thus no longer" (2 Cor 5:16...
...Philosopher John Rawls' famous example of a son's obligation to keep a promise made to his dying father after the father's death, when no one knew of the promise, goes to the heart of the matter...
...He is called a living God unlike dead idols or ideas, because he takes by surprise and reshapes the very things that idols neglect or confirm...
...In general, it could be said that, from a Catholic view, a healthy ethics could arise from the avoidance of all the above listed errors...
...There was the deeply ingrained, self-preservative reverence for fertility that developed in a species that was precariously surviving...
...And yet for many, has not commitment to action for social justice frequently appeared to con15 November 1974:146...
...There was the bad biology that thought of sperm as a collection of homunculi, little persons who needed only a womb to grow in...
...This meant that a rigorous opinion had to be held to, even when solid reasons and good moral authorities had rendered it doubtful...
...The roots of that principle are as many as they are suspect...
...Since moral meaning is found both in principles Commonweal: 143 and in the circumstances which distinguish one situation from another, ethics can be seen as a conversation between principles and context conducted by the moral agent...
...More basic than the question of why principles are not always situationally applicable, is the reason why they generally point toward humanizing value...
...His respect for life was uneven, absolutely opposed to all abortion and mercy death, too permissive in practice regarding military 15 November 1974:142 slaughter...
...Because of this he could not even consider cases where abortion, sterilization, or mercy death can be morally justified...
...Let us, however, give specific focus to three subjects: the feminization of ethics, "situation ethics," and the retrieval of the Catholic heritage...
...And, finally, there must be room, if one's perspective be Christian, for the possibility of "a vertical charismatic stroke...
...Clearly I am not just saying here that we should ask the ladies in to chat about "woman-related" issues like sex and abortion...
...You may have to tell an untruth to someone who intends murder in order to save his intended victim...
...The problem of swollen executive power was faced...
...Also, overconfidence in principles can devastate thought by suppressing questions...
...But above all, the call comes most strongly from humankind, our brothers and sisters suffering from structural injustices and oppressions in our own country and around the globe...
...Given the mutability and unpredictability of circumstances, only a very slippery ethics could result from factoring ever varying circumstances into ethical judgments...
...Human activity that operates under the false cloud of monosexuality could scarcely avoid dire and perverting fallout...
...He forged some tools that are of enduring utility, but he became a prisoner of good but overweighted categories like "direct and indirect voluntary...
...Dionysus was never effectively banned from Rome...
...All ethics must therefore be "principle-ist" and situational...
...When Paul wrote to the Galatians who had been enticed to listen to "another gospel" (1:6), he made it clear to them that through Christ and faith in him they had found not only justification and freedom, but also a new life...
...No activity could less afford to be defeminized and thus dehumanized...
...Aside from that men could go it alone...
...Obviously, too, all these themes are abusable...
...Among other things, it might show that the basic indictment against the moral theologian of the recent past is that he was so un-Catholic...
...His influence lives...
...For example, many people in evaluating the eroticism of persons who are homosexual, operate out of a principle that bans all homosexual love-making...
...True ecumenism should support diversity not blur it...
...This would limit woman and her role to genitality as all the bad myths have done...
...I will suggest a few...
...Following the directions of the old moralist, you could attain the "state of grace" (a quite unbiblical notion), and his idea of sin departed from ethical realism's basic insight that there can be no sin where there is no harm...
...With all of this said, we may still find relevance in Proudhon's remark that "The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the statesman's prudence...
...As Catholic ethics and Protestant ethics come together, it is to be hoped that a more sensitive and Christian ethics might come of the interchange...
...Note too...
...In the balance of this situation, life-saving conflicts with and outweighs truth-telling...
...And, as the first theologian of the Christian church, he formulated the thesis of the integration of Christian life: "I have been crucified with Christ...
...Response to this call has been lively and strong in recent years...
...Their breeding ground is history with all the pandemonium thereof...
...Discussion served only to rationalize the prohibition...
...First, a very clear call has been coming to Catholics in the past ten to fifteen years, the call to action on behalf of social justice...
...These subjects are foundational and will influence all the particular issues currently debated...
...It involvest much more than a discovery of the myths which have distorted the personal reality of women...
...And on the other hand, deep experience of religious realities, prayer, meditation, spirituality, is stirring ever-growing numbers of people...
...He speaks of "the necessary synthesis of the two principles, male and female, in the building of the human personality...
...An age that denigrates principles is open to ethical shallowness...
...it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me...
...Situation ethics is largely believed to be an attack on principles, stability and objectivity in morals...
...There were the long held depersonalized views of sexuality in biologistic, people-breeding terms...
...Karl Mannheim, in his Ideology and Utopia, observes that the Sophists grew out of a world in which "previous unambiguity" had been shattered...
...For one thing, this call comes as a result of deepening insight into the biblical concept of the Kingdom of God...
...We are badgered today by untrammeled questioning in all areas...
...Excessive confidence in principles may represent a timid hungering for a code, a code which might, in the words of the psychologist of religion, E. R. Goodenough, function as "an active and actual curtain from the tremendum...
...Being too serious is neither moral nor Catholic...
...He was linguistically naive and overconfident of his principles...
...It reaches beyond words to what eye has not seen nor ear heard...
...And my reflections are enriched as the result of sharing for the past year with a Task Force which specifically studied this topic...
...There are some recent historical dimensions to these trends...
...Our principles, like our statesmen, can be surprised...
...And there is the special threat and hostility of those whose own heterosexual identity is unsure...
...The call also has come in the form of repeated statements in major church documents from John XXIII, Paul VI, the Second Vatican Council, and the 1971 Synod of Bishops...
...104) The term "situation ethics" is a red herring...
...The liberation of women could easily be the mos profound ethical development in our day...
...Here Paul puts his finger on the essential role of faith in Christ in modern life: the ontological reality of life in Christ must be brought to the surface of psychological awareness through faith...
...For a long time we did not even ask whether sex in marriage is always and necessarily more loving and moral than sex in another context...
...Had the Catholic moralist whose passing we marked in our opening lines drawn more from this debate, he would have been spared some of the corners into which he painted himCommonweal: 145 self...
...Indeed, they appear to mark much of the American community at large...
...2. The Executive Problem: Catholicism has combined a strong sense of structure and office with a kind of Italian cynicism about the good will and reliability of officers...
...It has been suggested that principles are not unlike the punt on fourth down rule that guides quarterbacks...
...If as Teilhard says, "Nothing is comprehensible except through its history," if history shapes us in fundamental ways, then ecumenical Catholics are not ecumenical Protestants and all pretense to sameness is the stuff of farce...
...S o c i a l j u s t i c e v s . t h e new Juteriorism AN INTEGRAL FAITH FOR TODAY PETER J. HENRIOT ~AITrt without works is dead...
...Open marriage, genetic manipulation, psychosurgery, civil religion, multi-national power, atomic proliferation, etc...
...And what does involvement in social change mean in terms of one's faith, prayer and religious response...
...The discovery of a principle is a sublime event in moral history...
...Principles are not ex nihilo...
...An Andr6 Dumas writes of the Judaeo-Christian God: "He does not preserve and maintain...
...Only a principled person may depart from principles safely...
...These and other matters such as divorce and remarriage, nonmarital sexual exchange, masturbation, and homosexual love-making were wrapped in taboo...
...That brief line from -!- the second chapter of the Epistle of James has been the occasion of many a struggle in the history of the Christian community...
...He was furthermore negligent of his Christian and biblical roots, and also availed himself too little of the real strengths in the Catholic tradition...
...3. Mirth: Belloc was on to something when he wrote: Wherever a Catholic sun doth shine, there is lots of laughter and good red wine...
...4. Liturgy: The Catholic liturgical instinct is geared to assert the reality of other dimensions and other possibilities...
...In the brevity imposed on me by stern editorial fiat, I can only intimate, not argue, that there is a distinctively Catholic ethic with much positive content that should not be allowed to drop out of currency...
...The second quote was from Fr...
...Therefore if there are principles urging that counterproductivity of violence, the fitting conjoinment of sexual exchange and commitment, the duty to company with a dying person and not hasten his death, the value of compassion, truthtelling, sincerity, promise-keeping, etc...
...The old moralist was more concerned with private, interpersonal issues of morality than with the social, political, and legal structures that control the inequitable and unjust distribution of goods and bads, of power and impotence on planet earth...
...At root it is inimical to the suttoeating vision of what Marcuse calls the "one-dimensional society...
...The pope condemned "absolute tutiorism," a moral system which said that on a debated moral issue, one may not follow an opinion that expands one's moral freedom unless it is clearly certain...
...Not all of that meaning can be packaged in principle...
...and as a result the very physical life (kata sarka) has to be lived "by faith...
...1. The Bonifacian Strain: It may seem unlikely to find a connection between the prophetic Berrigans and Boniface VIII, but look closely...
...Another moralist has charged that, oroperly understood, even "Catholic morality is, in fact, situation ethics...
...The visible powers and dominations, however awesome, are not ultimately decisive...
...A moral judgment is ultimately a judgment of how persons and things relate and what meaning they have in their concreteness...
...A few quiet, unbelaboring words about the deceased would appear to be in order if for no other reason than to justify our unseemly lack of grief_9 His features were all too familiar...
...His work was often hamstrung by an oracular hierarchical magisterium whose authority was sustained by a reductively magical use of the theological notion of the assistance of the Holy Spirit, implying ex olTu:io powers of discernment...
...See his Human Energy...
...The limits of valuable moral principles are many...
...In my own language I would say that every principle is reductively an experience of the value of persons and/or their environment and therefore principles are instructive even when in a particular case they may not be applicable...
...Rather her presence in ethics must be felt in the realm of theory where the foundations are laid and where questions are asked, or often, more importantly, unasked...
...Sometimes the charges are true...
...To say "I never heard of such a thing...
...Or it could, as it did for Socrates, lead us to deeper appreciations of the mystery of humanness which is unfolding helter-skelter about us...
...As is the way with taboo, which is the classical escape from doing ethics, no circumstance could justify them...
...Is it possible to be a person of faith without at t h e same time being a person committed to the work of social justice...
...He was all too alien to ambiguity and to the borderline case (not necessarily a rarity) where the moral person has to admit that different and possibly contradictory courses of action are arguably moral, where moral inquiry does not yield one clear "right answer...
...More about the outcome of that Task Force later...
...The Christian must manifest in his/her very physical life (kata sarka) that he/she is a Christian, that he/she is motivated by faith in Christ Jesus, and that the fascination of the Risen Jesus can captivate a man or woman of the twentieth century as well as it did Paul of Tarsus...
...The papal action here constituted an acknowledgment of moral ambiguity and a signal endorsement of human moral freedom...
...6. A sense of moral ambiguity: If more Catholics knew what Alexander VIII did on December 7, 1690, Alexander VIII bumper stickers might have become a commonplace...
...With all due thanks to the chastening Protestant sense of sin, it is unnaive, active hope that is the undergirding of moral and social evolution...
...With all, he was ingenious...
...He is dead, but with difficulty does he rest in peace...
...5. Hopefulness: Because of a strong belief in realized eschatology and a strong disbelief in the total corruption of persons by sin, Catholicism is heavy with hope...
...What is right for me may be wrong for you...
...and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself to me" (Gal 2:20...
...Persons are such that a promise made to them has a sacred force apart from all calculation of what a breach of promise would do to the needed practice of promise-keeping in society...
...All of which would seem to justify a conclusion that the art-science of ethics is in a state of dangerous disarray...
...This is a kingdom of peace and justice, a kingdom "already here but not yet," which we all have a part in building up...
...Deposition of popes, thoroughly ingrained and orthodox streams of conciliarism, and the wisdom of orbis major urbe relativized and limited top-heavy papalism...
...Noting the existence of a spiritual and material sword, Boniface averred with distinctively Catholic gall that "Both of these are within the power of the Church . . . . "Granting the Bonifacian excesses of fighting the divinization of the state by divinizing the Church, it must be allowed that there is a mind-set operative here that is antidotal to statist pretensions...
...He was further an Apollonian man, confident of his abilities to draw lines...
...The issue of homosexual love-mak~g 15 November 1974:144 cannot be handled by reasonings which simply resonate such tainted origins...
...is not a sufficient argument against surprisingly new ethical positions...
...On the one hand, social involvement, the commitment to change unjust social structures, continues to occupy the attention of many...
...There is the instinctive threat posed by otherness in deeply felt matters...
...This had to lend a primordial partiality to his probes into the mysteries of the humanum...
...First of all, he was a man--always a man and never a woman--and usually a celibate man...
...If Bernard H~iring is right when he says that Catholic moral theology might now be better termed "ecumenical ethics," the positive challenge is to develop the best possibilities of this ethics...
...Like laughter, it has socio-political significance...
...The wife of an adulterous quarterback would be quick to perceive that difference...
...One who values highly the moral constancies housed in principles is liable to charges of having a classicalist mentality, contextual insensitivity and similar blights...
...Louis Motlden, S.J...
...Is t h e r e a d i s t i n c t l g C a t h o l i c e t h i c ? DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF MORAL THEOLOGY DANIEL C. MAGUIRE p ity the Catholic moralist of the recent past...
...In getting a sense of what is moving in the Catholic community in the United States today, it does not take much sophistication to note two strong trends...
...He rushed in to systematize neatly where the more modest hesitated to tread...
...And indeed, one moralist with a huge following has written that "human actions are good or bad according to their circumstances...
...There is an irreducible uniqueness about persons and their situations...
...Questioning the unquestionable could make disjointed and skeptical Sophists of us all...
...or whether omission and "letting nature take its course" might at times be more cruel and less moral than direct positive commission to end a life...
...The old moralist had more answers than questions _9 . . a danger signal in any intellectual endeavor...
...More than mere empirical generalization, principles are rather the fruit of affective, intuitional, and creative appreciation of what befits persons in view of what they are...
...Hard empirical experience tends to show that a certain general practice produces better results...
...Tar and feathers were his final portion and jeering cries of "legalist" and "manualist" attended his undignified demise...
...The Catholic tradition put the state not only under the judgment of God, but of the Church...
...we should pause at length before the counsel of these principles before we leave them for a more morally valuable alternative...
...I think that the critical faith challenge in the immediate future will be the task of integrating religious experience and social involvement...
...Furthermore, we may have to leave our principles when we discover they have spurious origins...
...Immanuel Kant was also at the nub of ethical experience when he wrote that being honest when dishonesty would have enormous advantages and be perfectly safe, has an experiential value which "elevates the soul and arouses the wish to be able to act in this way...
...Too often "sin" offended not persons or God but the reigning categories of moral theology...
...Of course, the first author cited above was Thomas Aquinas who in his Summa (I, II q. 18 a.3) asks whether circumstances determine the goodness or badness of actions and concludes in intelligible Latin "'actiones humanae secundum circumstantias sunt bonce vel malae...
...If ecumenism means homogenized Christianity, it is doomed to failure or to dullness...
...This would appear to be a basic rule for the humanization of our activities whether those activities be in government, art, education, medicine, or ethics...
...The worst of errors occur when the best of insights go awry...
...the debate is not irrelevant to contemporary moral ambiguities...
...Hope is liberalizing and yields a capacity for risk...
...Also fruitfully explorable within the Catholic tradition would be the sense of law and its relationship to morality, the institutionalization of prophecy attempted in religious orders, the relationship between contemplation and action, the priestly tradition with its stress on the value of personal symbols...
...He avoided the untidy avenues to moral truth such as feeling and affectivity and he did not acknowledge the primacy of creative imagination as a moral faculty...
...If offense has been given by speaking such ill about dead moralists, then consider the motive of the attack: the deceased was a good teacher and his teaching is still influential in official and unofficial ways in Catholic schools, churches, pastoral letters, and codes of Catholic hospitals...
...But sometimes they result from the mood of a time when flux is so normal, and often productive.of so much good that constancy is suspect, whether it be in the form of principle, personal commitment (as in marriage), Or in tradition...
...And that is why the Jesus of the New Testament is essential to Christian faith even today...
...While granting that femininity is not confined to women or masculinity to men, it is a fair contention that a proportionate presence of women in the field of ethics is necessary to achieve for ethics a humanizing duality...
...he breaks through...
...Whither Ecumenical Ethics...
...Let "ecumenical ethics" take heed...
...Without denying the pervasive commonality of our experience, it can be said of every erotic encounter and every death, of every spoken word and every corporate merger, that there never has been another one like it...
...It is widely believed that somewhere out there in the misty moors of ethical inquiry, there roams a monster called situation ethics whose breath is fire and chaos...
...In matters of church law, the old moralist was handicapped by a very un-Italian literalism which did not recognize the essentially hortatory character of church law...
...Obviously I am not saying that none of these themes is in any way present in other forms of historical Christian experience or elsewhere...
...Today it appears to be gaining a new meaning--and consequently becoming a new source of strugglemin the evolving understanding of authentic Christian faith...
...Beyond that perelanial squabble, however, it must be noted that in today's ethical climate, principled morality seems to be under constant attack, almost, as it were, on principle...
...A valid principle is rooted in the foundational moral experience . . . the experience oJ the sacred value of personal life...
...These are questions which inevitably arise when we look around at the contemporary awareness growing in the American Catholic community of the need for a faith which both enables us to believe and demonstrates the reality of our belief...
...In the weird atmosphere of this distortion, we came to think that the only task that had to be shared by man and woman was biological reproduction...
...However, there is a qualitative difference between the punt rule and "Thou shalt not commit adultery...
...Much of what was generating the heat here arose from what James Gustafson aptly termed a "misplaced debate" about principles and circumstantial context...
Vol. 101 • November 1974 • No. 6
