Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P., in his book Morality: The Catholic View, describes two views of freedom. Fr. Pinckaers is a Belgian Dominican and has been described as one of the leading moral theologians in the Thomistic renewal of moral theology after the Second Vatican Council.

Fr. Pinckaers describes these two freedoms as: Freedom for Excellence and Freedom of Indifference. Freedom for Excellence has been the classical view of freedom since the advent of Western philosophy. It presupposes that man is naturally moral and so he has the capacity to act with excellence whenever he wishes. This freedom indicates that free will arises from the faculties of reason and will and from a natural longing for truth, goodness, and happiness. It is given to us in germ and develops through education and practice of the virtues until it flourishes in maturity. It unites one’s actions into an ordered whole that nourishes human flourishing with its end being authentic human happiness.

Freedom for Excellence was embraced and Christianized at the very early stages of the Church because it conformed so well with revealed truth. In fact, Christian teaching greatly strengthened this view. The Fall from grace and dis-integration of our reason, will, and affectivies (i.e. appetites and emotions) explained why we often experience conflicts in choosing the ultimate good, and confirmed the universal experience that when the lesser good (most often sensible goods) is too often chosen at the expense of the greater good (i.e. the moral good) momentary pleasure eventually gives way to problematic experiences, such as the deficiencies in self control, addictions, physical and psycho-emotional pathologies, and a general moral decline. Christian teaching of our renewed access to sanctifying grace in and through Christ, and our need to cooperate with this grace helps to explain the great capacities of the Saints to exercise tremendous self-control, to demonstrate consistently heroic moral lives, and the ability to experience joy in even the most difficult of physical and emotional circumstances.

But in the 14th century, there came a divorce between happiness and the moral life. William of Ockham, a Franciscan theologian, introduced his Ockhamist Nominalism that was to have a devastating effect on thought, religion, and society. We are still experiencing these deleterious effects today. Ockham set out to rescue God’s omnipotence from what he mistakenly saw as threats posed by St. Thomas’ integration of Aristotelian metaphysics into Christian theology. In the process he tore asunder the metaphysical structures of realism. He denied the reality of universals, arguing that God did not need what St. Thomas called the divine ideas in which all created entities participated. Instead, he said that God knew everything in their particulars, undermining the idea of nature, including human nature. He went further and advocated a voluntarist view of creation as totally arising from the divine will, such that God could actually command man to hate Him and then this would be moral.

Ockham also reversed the traditional relationship between freedom and nature. He now said that freedom precedes nature. Thus free will precedes reason and will on the level of action and so it is the first faculty of the human person. He defines freedom as the power to choose indifferently between two contraries. Because free will is first, one can choose between being happy and not being happy. There is no natural inclination to happiness, it is a matter of indifferent choice of the free will. Nature is no longer the source of freedom or happiness, it is choice. This is the freedom of indifference.

There is no longer a natural bond between the freedom of God and the freedom of the human person. We are now reduced to obligation imposed by the law. The law becomes juridicized and seen as arbitrary. Because happiness is divorced from nature, happiness is redefined and understood to have to be often sacrificed to obligation. Obedience to the law is emphasized and moral action as a response of love with a goal of happiness is pushed out of view. This Nominalist thinking gave rise to a morality of obligation. This view was accepted by the Protestant Reformers and institutionalized by philosophers like Immanuel Kant and his ethics of duty and so forms the predominant view that has influenced the modern West.

However, the logical consequences of Nominalism eventually took root and the primacy of the will, together with the denial of nature and the rebellion against authority gave rise to modernism and now post-modernism. The ethics of obligation has been rejected, happiness has been replaced with sensual pleasure, and the only moral absolute is the primacy of choice. When choice is king and there is no nature to guide one’s actions in the way of right and wrong, as a society we have come to be able to justify killing our unborn, glorifying sexual and alimentary hedonism, redefining human nature so as to accommodate as many number of disorders, that we now euphemize as sexual orientations and genders, as current societal limits will tolerate.

For Christian traditions that were founded on Nominalist metaphysics, man is totally corrupt and there is no possibility of a freedom for excellence. For nihilistic, post-modernism there is nothing to perfect except social structures dedicated the cult of choice. Unfortunately, many Catholics fall into both of these camps. To this Pinckaers responds that the need is great to rediscover and renew the understanding of the freedom for excellence to which the Holy Spirit constantly beckons us and offers us the grace to pursue and achieve. Excellence is what the human heart was created for and it is the only true path to human happiness because its end is Christ.

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