The Importance of Humanism to Christianity

Carravaggio's "The
Entombment"--a fruit of
Renaissance humanism  

When Pope Francis announced to the Italian Church at their national synod in Florence this past November that there was a need to bring the idea of humanism to the front again, many of the Katholik Krazies went even more than usually berserk.  To those ignorant of the history of our Christian faith the idea of “humanism” is somehow opposed to authentic Christianity when, in fact, it is an essential component of our Christian faith.  The earliest writer on Christian humanism is no one less than the Apostle Paul himself who in his letters gives us a foundation for a philosophical view on what it means to be truly human.  For Paul we arrive at the fullness of our human nature when we

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8.)

The key to realizing full human potential is found in kenosis, the emptying of self and self-interest in favor of conforming ourselves to Christ.  In orthodox Christianity, we see Christ to be the ideal human person and to the extent that we conform ourselves to him even as he conforms himself in obedience to the Will of the Father, we reach our potential to be truly human.  This is very counter-intuitive and certainly runs contrary to most of the various humanisms advanced by the philosophers of the ancient world.  Christianity has always taken a remarkably unique approach to the human ideal and the understanding of what makes us human.  Both the various secular humanisms that have emerged since the Enlightenment and the perspectives offered by the other great world religions have some similarities with Christian humanism but also are, at the core, essentially different.  This is because Christianity begins with an understanding of the Godhead that differs not only from the religions of the East but from the other two Abrhamic faiths, Judaism and Islam.  Christianity sees the human person as having the potential to share in the Divine Nature.  The Church Fathers, notably Iranaeus and Athanasius, went to far as to speak of our being sharers in the Divine Nature when we so conform ourselves to Christ that we surrender our own selves to indeed become essentially united to Christ with Christ being the life-principle within us.  “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ Jesus who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:11).    “God became human so that humans might become God”—a statement which, were it not from the fathers, would seem to be counter to all Christian orthodoxy but which has become a cornerstone of all genuine Christian anthropology or humanism ever since. Beginning with Paul, the authors of the Christian scriptures—both Gospels and Epistles—laid the foundation for a genuine understanding of what it means to be truly human.  The parables of the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Publican, Lazarus and the Rich Man, The King and his two debtors, The man whose barn wasn’t big enough, Lowest Seat at the Banquet, The persistent widow, the Last Judgment and others all give us insights into human nature at its best and at its worst. 

It was Origen, and probably even more, Tertullian, the second/third century theologians who organized much Christian thought into a philosophical system, who gave us the more abstract or philosophical view of human nature—though Origen tended to be a bit over-positivist with his belief that all will eventually be reconciled to God, and Tertullian a big over negative with his objection to the idea that sins committed after baptism cannot be forgiven.  Perhaps for us in the West, the great Christian humanist is Saint Augustine. 

Augustine is, at least for us in the Western Church, the great Christian thinker who takes the Scriptures and the Apostolic Tradition and tries to weave a coherent Christian theology.  His appreciation for human nature is, I think, spot on—in this regard I am much closer to Pope Benedict than to most other Catholic thinkers.  Augustine is often seen as too negative, even sin-obsessed but sin, for Augustine, is not his topic but only the foil against which we can see Grace.  Augustine is the Doctor Gratiae, (the Doctor of Grace).  While Augustine thinks that the human person without grace (should such a creature be even conceivable much less a reality) is pretty much the bottom of the barrel, transformed by Grace the human person mirrors the God in whose image and likeness we are created.  Augustine was an extensive writer who looked not only at the human person in se (I love Latin except for Mass) but in our place in The City of God and in the context of the City of Man.   What I like about Augustine’s humanism is that it is not iced with that overly sweet frosting of a supposed innate human goodness but recognizes the far more bitter-sweet ambivalence of the human heart as it is caught between our natural concupiscence and supernatural Grace. 

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The answer is not “The Shadow” but Saint Augustine.  My friend, the late theologian Monika Hellwig, used to rag me about my Augustinian leanings but I just find him to be the most honest and soul-searching of Christian writers.  

Over the Middle Ages a number of Christian authors continued to deal with the subject of a Christian humanism.  The Early and Central Middle Ages was not a great time for intellectual life in the West, though Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job is highly significant for our topic.  The Renaissance of the 12 century however opened the flood gates of Christian literature and crucial—but conflicting—approaches to Christian humanism were taken by Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard.  The dispute between Bernard and Abelard also marks the divide between the Fathers and the Scholastics and while Bernard may have won the day it was Abelard who would ultimately win the war.  While Thomas Aquinas and the other Scholastic theologians shied away from embracing Abelard by name or by explicitly affirming his more radical ideas, they embraced his Aristotelian method and did, in fact, come up, as Abelard did, with a much more positivist anthropology than Augustine and most of the Patristic tradition had.  Personally, I think the Scholastics’ positivism regarding the human person have provided the seedbed for the semi-pelagianism that has plagued our Catholic tradition ever since.  But then Monika Hellwig always chided me for my attachment to Saint Augustine. 

Christian humanism exploded in the Renaissance with such figures as Dante Alighieri, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II), Nicholas of Cusa, Geert Groote, Desiderius Erasmus, Basilios Bessarion,  Baptist of Mantua, John Colet, Thomas More, Giles of Viterbo and many others.  The impact of these thinkers in turn created the magnificent baroque and rococo art with Donatello, Durer, Ghirlandaio, Grunewald, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Tiepolo, Caravaggio and so many more.  Indeed, without humanism the renaissance would not have hatched and the Tridentine Catholicism which so many hail as the apex of Catholic faith and culture would have been—at best—a pallid and ghostly shadow of the energetic and animated revival it was in its day. 

Hopefully Pope Francis’ call for a new humanism can trigger the same energy that was unleashed in the Renaissance.  I will look at Francis’s suggestion in an upcoming post, but I think my next posting will bring you some recent comments by one “FrankieB”—a Katholik Krazie if there every was one and let you see just what we faithful Catholics have to deal with when the self-appointed magisterium gets on our tail.  

Source of Revealed Truth: God Meets Adam Smith or The Best Freaking Pope in History

Before Laudato Sii was released this past week I was in the middle of a series of postings on the Enlightenment as it both is relevant to my series on the Church of England in regard to its effects on the C of E in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries and it raises a number of questions I want to explore such as the issue of secularism in the public square.  In the most recent of those postings last week I mentioned Adam Smith, the Scottish philosopher who laid the philosophical and ethical groundwork for modern capitalism.  Smith lived through the very time of the American Revolution and our founding fathers very much subscribed to his theories.  Liberty was a crucial value for him and he law liberty as one of the pre-requisites for individuals to be empowered to acquire wealth.  Though born a Scots Presbyterian in the strong Calvinist tradition of that Church (or, as it is known in Scotland, The Kirk) Smith evolved throughout his lifetime to the vague non-dogmatic sort of ambiguous Latitudinarian Christianity characteristic of the genteel upper crust 18^th century Brits.  In his journey into that comfortable Christianity he abandoned the idea of original sin but clung to its anthropological foundations. Let me explain.

The doctrine of Original Sin is found only in Western Christianity and is absent from the Orthodox theological framework. This is because it is the construct of Western Church Fathers, especially Irenaeus of Lyons and Augustine of Hippo.  The essence of original sin is the sin of concupiscence or inordinate desire.  Unfortunately the emphasis has usually been places—falsely—on sexual desire but Augustine had a much broader understanding and it would better be seen as greed.  To illustrate what he means, Augustine in one passage uses the example of the greed with which a child nurses.  This example usually appalls modern readers and Augustine doesn’t mean that the act of nursing isn’t a beautiful gift of the mother for the child but only wishes to point out that the child, even in the pre-rational state of infancy, naturally seeks out his own self-interest.  It is natural for us to wish to acquire and safe-keep those things which we need for our survival and our comfort.  One doesn’t have to make a moral judgment about this in the pre-rational person it is just our nature.

Unlike the orthodox position of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists—all of whom recognized this “original sin” as part of our “fallen nature;” Smith saw our natural inclinations towards greed as something good.  Indeed, he saw it as the motivating virtue of a healthy economy.  As I desire more and more and you desire more and more we will work harder to make our desires into realities.

I remember as a child that one of my favorite fairy tales was the fisherman’s wife.  You may remember it.  In it the fisherman seeks from an enchanted fish whom he has set free a larger house for his wife.  She then sends her husband back to ask for a mansion.  Getting the mansion, she wants to become a Queen.  Becoming a Queen she then desires to be Pope.  And so it goes.  Ever more and more until her greed makes her demand to rule the earth and the heavens—to become God—and then she loses it all.  This story is just a twist on Smith’s theory: we always want for more and strive for more.  Whereas the Catholic tradition and even more Martin Luther and more yet, John Calvin, all saw this greed as sinful, Smith saw it as the foundation of a healthy economy.

Adam Smith’s writings are, as I said, that foundation of modern capitalism.  James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were both huge fans.  Margaret Thatcher allegedly carried a copy of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in her handbag.  (We still haven’t found out what the Queen carries in hers.  Why do those British ladies all need such oversized bags?)  Smith’s theories are that this natural desire of the human person for wealth will drive the markets and allowing the markets to be free of control is the tide that permits all boats to rise equally. 

Pope Francis is not a subscriber to the theories of Adam Smith. Like Saint Augustine he sees greed as inherently sinful, and indeed the root of all other evils.  Like his two immediate predecessors he subscribes to the doctrine of solidarity by which he means that we all have responsibility for the welfare of one another.  These ideas come out loud and clear in Laudato Sii. 

In fact, Laudato Sii is a major threat to the doctrines of Adam Smith and thus to our modern free market capitalistic world.  And the troops have risen in rebellion.  Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote a stinging and far less than objective critique of the Encyclical in today’s paper.  He betrayed his hand by labeling the Pope and his allies as “catastrophists,” while he and other disciples of Smith are the “dynamists.”  Really?  You don’t think this is prejudcing the argument in a way that wouldn’t pass the editorship of a junior-highschool newspaper?

Dynamists are people who see 21st-century modernity as a basically successful civilization advancing toward a future that’s better than the past. They do not deny that problems exist, but they believe we can innovate our way through them while staying on an ever-richer, ever-more-liberated course.

Thank you Adam Smith. 

Catastrophists, on the other hand, see a global civilization that for all its achievements is becoming more atomized and balkanized, more morally bankrupt, more environmentally despoiled. What’s more, they believe that things cannot go on as they are: That the trajectory we’re on will end in crisis, disaster, dégringolade.

My heavens, Mr. Douthat, wherever did you learn a word like dégringolade?  My spellcheck doesn’t recognize it.  Given the remainder of your article and its level of argument I can only presume you own a thesaurus. 

Francis X. Rocca wrote a somewhat more objective and more thoughtful reflection—though certainly not an endorsement—for the Wall Street Journal.  What I want to focus on now, however, is not Rocca’s article but the response of readers to the article.  The sharks are circling!  I am not surprised that Wall Street Journal readers are not ready, by and large, to endorse the papal teaching, but I was amazed at the levels of both bias and stupidity so many readers—90% of the—displayed.  Let me just give you a sample for your reading pleasure.  I have cut and pasted (as well as edited) them so that the various spelling and grammatical errors remain in place.  Of course, we all make mistakes in those realms so the mistakes are not meant to be indicative of the intelligence level of the writers.  I will let their messages speak for them selves.

Steve Volla

The words of despair from Commissar Pope Francis. Best stick to the moral angle and leave the political burden to politicians.  He best not carry the political burden for worsening the very people he tries to save.

Steve Volla

@bassam madany Just as our leader has re-written the Constitution, Pope Francis has taken on the task to re-write the scriptures.

Steven Frankel

By the way, has the Pope reviewed the results of Communist and Socialist control on environmental quality as opposed to free market countries? What type of foot print did the soviets leave, or the South Americans? Nothing good.

Michael Thompson

No wonder the Castro brothers and Obama like this guy so much. Put down the Communist Manifesto and read the Bible instead.

Richard Beleson

The Pope should stick to religion - what did Jesus say? "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's."  I get enough political garbage stuffed down my throat by Obama and his sycophants.  I do not need a "holy man" posing as a wannabe politician.

Karl Noell

This is what happens when a liberation theologist from South America is elected Pope. He is anti-capitalism, pro-collectivism, ignores, nay tramples, the teaching of Jesus to give up to Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God what is God's. He is the equivalent of an Obama undoing what the Church's Reagan, Pope John Paul the Great, accomplished.

Tom Painter

@Steven Chen "Still, his argument on this this issue commands a moral high ground that shows his concern for the future of humanity."

No. His argument is moral pretense, not moral high ground and it is not moral high ground because the theological view is not standing on either EMPIRICAL scientific or economic high ground to inform it.  It is Marxist pretense, pure and simple.

William Fehr

I have always thought that all Popes were frauds, after all who can claim to be a deity on Earth. My conclusion about the Church and the Pope was just affirmed that again. He really confirmed that he is just another Maxist/Socialist Liberation Theology idealist. 

Maureen DiRienzo

The Pope's marxist slip is showing, He has no place in commenting on things other than religion and faith. I will ignore his encyclical as much as I would ignore a cyclical from him on surgical techniques.

Having been born raised and educated a Catholic, I am seriously considering a protestant conversion.

Edward Kinsey

"Climate Change" is the excuse for taking over more and more control of our lives. The "inadequate distribution of resources" is the rationale for socialism/communism. This Pope would know that more than others coming from a South American socialist country.

Thanks for the tip, Pope. And thanks for telling the non Catholic world how to live its life, as if it's your business. Catholics can make up their own minds on how to deal with this document, others can be guided by their own beliefs in science. JNow that you have made this proclamation, what do you suggest we do? Do we All join some Commune and share each other's food, clothing, toilets, kitchens and diseases all under the careful and caring Argus eye of the Catholic Church, like in the Middle Ages? Live under Church control and believe in church approved science? Go back to the pre-industrial age without indoor plumbing, water purification or mechanized travel? I don't see the Church selling off its holdings and moving to thatch huts from grand Cathedrals. What I do see are a lot of empty churches all through Europe and simmering, crouching Moslem communities all over Europe waiting to pounce on the self emasculated Christian states and populations. The only thing overheated is the rhetoric contained in the document.

Anthony DeAngelis

Not sure where this Pope is headed, embracing a vehicle invented in the old USSR to undermine capitalism.  Concerned that next he will adopt the pagan Mother Earth doctrine.

Marco Martins

it was only a matter of time before marxist liberation theology hit the vatican. hopefully this pendulum will swing back to normal before too much damage is done by this. Ask the Pope what other system of economic engagement has lifted more people out of abject poverty, subjugation, indentured conditions, etc., than the system that relies on free choices, open exchanges, respect for personal property and competition. lets see what he comes up with. of course, a cynic could point out that the church, like the democratic party of the USA and most left parties worldwide rely on a constant supply of poor and ignorant for their power. 

Giselle Toth

Since when is the role of the Pope to pontificate politically charged issues from a strongly partisan aspect, an extreme left as such? The guy is nothing but a communist hack. How will the world's Catholics react to that?

 Alan Then

The Pope is an espoused communist, what would you expect?  His contempt for free market economics is belied by the fact that it has lifted more people out of poverty in the world in the last 40 years, than in all of human history.  

Michael Selden

The Pope should stick to religion——oh wait, he is talking about a religion. The religion of socialism and statism. Same church Obama attends.

James McManus

He is sounding more like Obama everyday

Andrew Eppink

The Pope speaks against abortion, 'gayness' in his encyclical and elsewhere, then invites proponents of precisely these and other of the revolting lib agenda to Vatican conclaves. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that evil and disgusting politics is being played.

He stubbornly rejects capitalism, which obviously has many of the faults he enumerates, stupidly preferring instead thoroughly discredited socialism.

Things are getting pretty crazy, evilly destructive. It's little wonder there's such confusion.

Roger Potocki

Sadly, the Pope's thinking is so wrong headed that it is embarrassing to all rational people. All of the poor among us in this world aspire to be consumers. People need products for basic life, health and advancement. It is market capitalism that has provided the highest standard of life to God's creations. It is socialism and all of its forms that have brought misery. It is authoritarianism and the worship of the state that keeps entire continents at a constant level of poverty. The Pope's "moral content" is at best confused. 

Robert Mayfield

@RODGER POTOCKI You are completely right! This (second-string) pope is hoping to convince the world that we should all be brought down to the living standards of the "developing" world.  Sure hope that doesn't happen in my life time.

Gina Liggett

First, there is nothing more "filthy" than then the running sewage, germ-infested drinking water, and toxic fumes of cooking over burning dung fires. Industrialization and human-inspired (not Gaia-given) ingenuity have freed people by the hundreds of millions the world over.

Second there IS NO catastrophic global warming, NO impirical evidence that human activity has any significant impact on climate. The "studies" are invented computer models.

Third, the Pope has a vested interest in condemning capitalism, the only political-economic system liberating ordinary people from abject poverty and repression. If the Pope is successful in keeping people poor, then the Church has greater sway.

This Pope and Climategaters have a core world view that human beings are subordinate to God & Mother Earth, which makes them perfect bedfellows.  They view humans as vermin, imbued with sin. And they reject in principle the notion of the pursuit of individual happiness in life on earth

Henry Lyczak

Here we go again.  The "North", through exploitation, is responsible for all the ills of the "South". With this message, the South American dictators will have Vatican coverage to continue exploiting their own people.

If Catholic churches in the US start to "preach" this political victim/redistribution message, will the IRS revoke their religious tax exempt status and re-label the churches as political organizations?  Just asking.

Tomas Pajaros

I was not ashamed to be Catholic till now.    …

Free markets have raised the standard of living in just a few hundred years, from lives that were universally "nasty, brutish and short"  to today's long life expectancy filled with good food, fantastic health care, and decades of family enrichment as grandchildren, children, parents and grandparents.  

No Utopian society, and no totalitarian society, ever produced such advances.   EVER.    

Markets are not the problem - markets are the answer.    Pronouncements such as this carry a great risk of moving societies toward socialist dictatorships, and we have seen over and over how badly those turn out.    We miss Pope John Paul II more than ever.

Scott Horsburgh

@Charles Easterman

Mr. Easterman, you are citing economic policy according to Easterman, not according to the Pope.  He has given no indication he believes in capitalism.  Every indication is that he is a redistributionist (or socialist or Marxist, if you prefer).  Accusing the industrial North of "exploiting" the resources of the southern hemisphere is Marxist language.  That the North owes an "ecological debt" to the South is anything but capitalism.

Peter Drucker

I am sorry, may be i am rude. But it seems Pope is busy with other people's business. He should serve God, help Christians do it. But he is busy with talks about business, markets and their impact on environment. This is Obama's deal to talk, talk and talk about climate change. And take some Muslims. Pope, cause of you we are losing Christianity in America

Gene Lebrenz

This Pope is very disappointing. He speaks of liberal "causes" of which he has no personal  expertise nor scientific data to support his personal opinions and "pontifications." He clearly has no lucid knowledge of how capitalistic systems have enriched more lives than all socialistic systems combined -- which he clearly advocates. His anti-capitalistic comments are enigmatic and egregious. 

This Pope  would be far better prepared to condemn the barbaric activities of the Muslims in the world against Christians than to attack Capitalism--of which his comments indicate he is totally ignorant. 

Based upon this Pope's  perfidious comments and hubris, nothing he says in the future  is worthy of belief.

Walter Hauschildt

"Pope Blames Markets for Environment’s Ills"

the pope is  plainly stupid;  markets are the voice of the people! 

Lee Gaffrey

@MITCHEL GALISHOFF  As a Christian since my Baptism 82 years ago and a former Roman Catholic I believe that the reason the Church is in existence is to spread the Good News; The Gospels. I do not know what this Pope has in mind about the former; but, I believe he is wandering around on unholy ground with his encyclical on global warming and economics of global markets.

Philip Pick

Having come from a socialist society, the Pope is continuing to reflect on the socialist approach to solving the southern hemisphere's (mainly South America) economic problems.  I'd suggest that he concentrate on trying to solve those economic problems by trying capitalism.  In the meantime, maybe those of us from the "evil capitalist economies" should withhold our "ill-gotten" financial support from the Vatican.

Philip Pick

@Joel Nicholas @Bernard Nachman The only really stupid people are those who voted two times for the current socialist in chief in the White House.  Doubled the nations debt in less than eight years.  Not sure who the bigger socialist is, the Pope or Obama.

Charles Jones

To the Cardinals that elected this Pope...did you knowingly place a Marxist as Pope, because while his views may raise people spiritually...his political views will doom millions to poverty.

Michael Jessup

Honestly, being a practicing and HEAVILY donating Roman Catholic. This REALLY turns me off. I won't say more regarding this but this is really getting old. While he talks of Climate Change perhaps he needs to focus more on issues like Women in the Priesthood, birth control, and the litany goes on.

John Sobieski

Truly the worst Pope in history

Ari Chutjian

"He just need to go away"? HA! I think this is the best freaking Pope in modern history and I'm an atheist! 

Well, thank you Ari.  I have more respect for someone who will not put his faith in God than those who put their faith in Adam Smith.

More on Sex and the Synod

Saint Augustine and his
mother, Saint Monica: the
tensions of Catholic Sexuality

The synod address by Ron and Mavis Pirola, the Australian couple who are co-directors of the Australian Marriage and Family Council that is advisory to the Australian Bishops’ Conference on issues of Pastoral life was a wonderful call for the Synod Fathers to examine their own attitudes on human sexuality.  Too many Catholics—and perhaps especially those who are leading celibate lives—consciously or unconsciously view sex as something sinful but which is given some moral legitimacy in marriage if accompanied by a willingness for procreation.  Our attitudes on sex and human sexuality are greatly shaped by Saint Augustine.  Now, I need to say that I am normally a great admirer of Augustine.  I think he is the greatest mind in the two thousand year history of the Church,  including the Apostles.  But even Augustine didn’t always get it right.  Augustine himself had flirted with Manichaeism for about ten years, from his mid-thirties to his mid-forties and Manichaeism tinged his attitude about human sexuality with its Gnosticism.  Augustine believed that every sexual act, even in marriage, was sinful and was only justified by the desire to reproduce.  While the Church does not explicitly teach this negative theology of human sexuality, this attitude has never been effectively expunged from the Catholic mind.  The requirement that a couple seeking to be married must “be open” to the possibility of having children for the marriage to be valid is one indication of this.  The prohibition of contraception is another.  In practice, of course, the Church understands that sex provides for married couples a depth of intimacy that is inseparable from the physical pleasure; it does not bar from marriage couples who for reasons of age or health are unable to conceive and, indeed, it requires the sexual union of the spouses—at least once after the vows have been made—for the validity of the marriage.  But lurking in the shadows of the Catholic consciousness is the conviction that something so pleasurable as sex must not be completely right.   It was therefore a milestone of change in Catholic thought when a married couple stood up in an assembly charged with shaping the magisterium and declared that the fullest expression of grace in their sacramental life was found in their sexual intimacy.  As one priest I know expresses the same idea: the spouses making love is to the sacrament of Matrimony what the priest celebrating Mass is to the Sacrament of Holy Orders.  Maybe we have finally slipped the bonds of Augustine’s own anguish over the guilt his mother, Monica, instilled in him about his relationship with the unnamed love of his life whom he abandoned at Monica’s directive.  (Augustine tells us in the Confessions that Monica had arranged a marriage for him with a woman of his own social class that required Augustine to abandon the fourteen year “common-law” relationship he had with an unnamed woman.  He expresses the deep love he had for this woman, his faithfulness to her throughout their relationship, and, of course, she was the mother of his son Adeodatus.)   The marriage Monica arranged never took place as Augustine instead embraced a quasi-monastic life after his baptism.  One would think that as a good Catholic, Monica would have been more concerned to have her son regularize the union that had produced his son rather than arrange a new marriage that would advance his career, but Monica is not quite the spiritual figure to which popular Catholic hagiography has reduced her.  Read the Confessions: it is enlightening about the complexity of the mystery of sin and grace, in Monica’s life as well as her son’s.) 

Ah yes, the complexity of the mystery of sin and grace.  That leads us to the point of conflict for many in the Synod and for even more of those following it from our armchairs and monitors.

Now for what I am going to write, I am not a theologian and am not giving a theological evaluation, only an explanation of the phenomenon to the best of my ability.   “Gradualism” or “the Law of Graduality” is a proposed principle in moral theology that recognizes that the Moral Law (as revealed in Scripture and Tradition) sets a standard for which we must all strive but to which we do not all achieve immediately.  It is sometimes simplified to “you can only do the best you can do” but such caricatures reduce it to moral ambivalence.  An example of gradualism, one presented by Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, would be of a woman who marries a man who was abandoned by his first wife and left with three children.  Granted, the woman should not have married the previously-married man in the first place until he received a Church annulment.  But now that she is married to him, the Cardinal said, she cannot abandon him and the care of the children.  Of course, it can be argued, that yes she can stay with him, but live in a brother/sister relationship until his first marriage is resolved canonically.  Maybe she can; maybe she can’t.  She loves the man, he loves her, and they find great blessings in their marriage—including in the sexual expression of their love.  Maybe they can’t find the strength to live without this intimacy.  Maybe they try to live in a non-sexual relationship and from time to time they fail. “The grace is always sufficient for us to do the right thing,” one person once told me when I presented a similar situation.  Yes, it is.  But maybe the right thing isn’t what we outsiders to the situation always think that it is. We need to listen attentively to the stories of sin and grace before we unilaterally—like the scribes and the Pharisees—make up our heavy burdens and lay them on others’ shoulders. 

The law of gradualism acknowledges that we develop morally.  We are not all the way yet at perfection.  We take two steps forward and fall one step back. 

This isn’t the same as moral relativism in which there are no moral absolutes—it is the acknowledgement that we all grow in our relationship with God and we all have room yet to grow in our relationship with God and none of us will be all the way there by the time we are summoned to the judgment seat.  If we were we would not need a Redeemer. 

If you check my entry for July 19, 2014 you will see that I wrote then about the theory of moral development which Lawrence Kohlberg, a Harvard professor of psychology, developed a half-century ago.  There has been criticism of Kohlberg’s schema over the intervening decades, but I think it still has great validity.  We move in our moral development from a fear of punishment through a fixation on law to a genuine appreciation of the moral good.  (I am skipping several steps here—check out Kohlberg for a more nuanced appreciation of his ideas.)  I think this corresponds to the principle of gradualism.  As I mature both psychologically and, from a Christian perspective, in my relationship with God I come to an ever-deepening appreciation for what is right and what is wrong.  As I move along the spectrum, I can not only move beyond a fear of punishment or the hope for some eternal reward, but I can transcend the bonds of the law and see the moral good for itself.  I can also see evil, not simply as it is defined by the law, but as it takes on its evil character from the situation in which it finds itself.  An example of this—to resort to the trivial for ease of understanding—I like my glass of whiskey at the end of the day.  There is nothing wrong with a glass of whiskey.  However as the first leads to the second and the second to the third and so on, the moral good (the relaxing glass of whiskey) takes on an evil character.  Another example, somewhat more complex.  I make love to my wife.  That is a good thing.  It is, as the Pirolas point out, a celebration of the Sacrament of Matrimony.  On this particular evening, my wife is not sexually responsive and I force her, not physically but still force her, to have sex with me.  A moral good has become evil in a way that the moral law does not foresee.  The moral law says that the wife has an obligation to satisfy the husband—and vice versa.  But the Law of Love, which is the true moral good, knows that this must be done freely and without coercion.  Those who focus solely on the Moral Law most often can’t get a clear vision of the Law of Love (aka the Gospel), which, again, was the flaw of the scribes, and the Pharisees.  There are those who are frozen in their own moral development and confident in their own righteousness without compassion for the complexity of others’ lives.  This moral fixedness is neither spiritually or psychologically healthy and can’t be allowed to be the moral guideposts—they are the blind guides leading the blind (Matt 15:14).