By Charles J. Chaput, October 2017

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.” Those are strong words, written by the Czech activist Václav Havel in his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” one of the twentieth century’s great calls to “living in the truth” against a culture based on violence, manipulation, and lies. Havel finished his text in October 1978, shortly before his arrest by Communist authorities. In the same month, Karol Wojtyła, a seemingly obscure bishop from Communist Poland, was elected Pope John Paul II.

The two men were very different. Havel, a poet and playwright, became a leading political dissident. Wojtyła, an actor and playwright, took the path of priest and philosopher. But they shared a set of concerns. Both had a passion for truth, which they saw as the foundation of human dignity. Both had emerged from regimes grounded in lies. Both admired the freedoms of the West. And yet—tellingly—both doubted that the democratic West was in any sense immune to the sort of casuistry, poisonous political thought, and systematic intellectual deceit that had destroyed Europe.

Nearly four decades have passed. The great ideological wars are over. The good guys won. Or at least that’s the story we in the “developed” world like to tell ourselves. We in the wealthy nations enjoy astonishing technical progress and material comforts. But the wound to man’s self-understanding and moral reasoning caused by the events of the last century has never really healed. Instead it has deepened, spreading a peculiar kind of confusion into our public discourse, political institutions, popular culture, the lives of religious believers, and entire communities of faith—including, at times, the Church herself.

Addressing that wound was a major focus of Karol Wojtyła’s pontificate.

Next year, 2018, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Veritatis Splendor, John Paul’s great encyclical on the “splendor of truth.” Written to encourage a renewal in Catholic moral theology and a return to its classical Catholic roots, Veritatis Splendor grounds itself in a few simple convictions. Briefly put: Truth exists, whether we like it or not. We don’t create truth; we find it, and we have no power to change it to our tastes. The truth may not make us comfortable, but it does make us free. And knowing and living the truth ennoble our lives. It is the only path to lasting happiness.

In the years that have passed, the crisis of truth has only seemed to grow. Our age is one of cleverness and irony, not real intellect and character. Today the wisdom of Veritatis Splendor is more urgently needed than ever.

It’s common, even among people who identify as Catholics, to assume that the Church’s moral guidance is essentially about imposing rules, rules that breed a kind of pharisaism. But this is exactly wrong. It’s an error that radically misunderstands the substance of Catholic teaching. It’s also one of the worst obstacles to spreading the faith.

John Paul II knew this. Thus the first chapter of his encyclical is a meditation on the encounter of Jesus with the rich young man (Matt. 19:16–26). The rich young man seeks to enter into eternal life, and this, John Paul writes, is the starting point for Jesus’s teaching on how to live as a Christian. In other words, Christian morality is about seeking fellowship with God, which is our true happiness, the goal of our human existence. Yes, moral rules, laws, and commandments do exist. But they have value because they point to something far more profound: how to live in order to grow in virtue and attain fullness of life.

Every parent knows the importance of what might be called “common-sense virtue ethics.” When children are young, a family’s rules serve as guardrails against accidents; later, they become guides toward virtue, maturity, and the capacity for self-command. In other words, good parents want their children to be happy. That’s why they give them rules. And that’s also why they sometimes need to admonish their children for breaking the rules. But the reason behind the rules is not arbitrary. The rules are an expression of love. Their motive is a desire to raise children who will become happy, virtuous, mature, flourishing adults.

God treats us in much the same way. Catholic teaching as a morality of virtue and happiness is not hard to understand. Like any good parent, God does indeed give us rules. The Ten Commandments are central among them. But this is not because he’s interested in displaying his power, or making us obey him. God does not “need” our obedience. It adds nothing to his sovereignty. But God is love, and that means he exercises his sovereignty to protect us from danger and lead us to grow in virtue. In the end, the reason for God’s commandments is very simple. He loves us and wants us to be happy.

This truth—that Christian morality is not a clutch of dead legalisms but a path to happiness—was a key theme of John Paul’s ministry. It was already clear in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (“Redeemer of Man”), where he announced the basic program for his pontificate:

Christ, the Redeemer of the world, is the one who penetrated in a unique unrepeatable way into the mystery of man and entered his “heart”. Rightly therefore does the Second Vatican Council teach: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come (Rom. 5:14),Christ the Lord. Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.”

Jesus comes to reveal to man his true dignity. He sets man free with the truth of the Gospel, free to become by grace what God calls humanity to be: adopted daughters and sons in the joy of his love.

This is why John Paul placed such stress on truth, especially the truth about man and his vocation, a vocation to lasting happiness in friendship with God. In the Gospel, Jesus gives us a new commandment, the new law of love. This new law does not abolish the Mosaic Law and the Old Testament commandments. It does not override the natural law written on every person’s heart. Rather, it fulfills them and helps us live them in a more perfect way. Jesus teaches us the truth about right and wrong, and this truth does not diminish our liberty: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32).

As a result, John Paul II called for a deep renewal of Catholic moral theology, and also of the ways in which Christian moral teachings are presented to the faithful and to the world. He wanted the Church to recover her zeal in affirming that no richer life exists than one lived in the fullness of truth.

It’s precisely here—how the Church presents her moral guidance—that we still face serious challenges. Ironically, legalism is very much alive in the Church, even though it no longer looks like the rigorist, “conservative” legalism of the past. Legalist minimalism is just as deadly to the life of faith as legalist maximalism.

Many of today’s confusions about Catholic moral teaching stem from a one-dimensional morality of obligation. In this view, moral truth limits human freedom by constraining what man can legitimately choose. It “binds” his choice. A morality of obligation can only move us negatively, by teaching that disobedience carries the threat of divine punishment. The drama in moral reflection is thus reduced to figuring out exactly what we are “bound” to do by God’s law, and then what residual room is left for our freedom.

This kind of moral theory has a questionable Catholic pedigree. The great patristic and medieval Catholic synthesis of the High Middle Ages saw God’s commandments not as arbitrary acts of his will demanding obedience, but as expressions of the wisdom by which he teaches us what we’re made for, and how to become what he intended us to be.

This synthesis was attacked, starting in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, first by nominalist philosophers and later by the secularizing Enlightenment. When combined with the polemics of the Protestant Reformation and other splinter groups like the Jansenists, many moral theologians—including some famous early Jesuits such as Francisco Suarez—lost sight of the classical focus of Catholic morality on virtue and happiness. They began to turn to distinctively modern moral theories that stressed law, obligations, commandments, and conscience. Rather than a quest for happiness, the moral life came to be portrayed as a difficult navigation of detailed rules.

This approach became standard in many seminaries. And too often, it produced a demanding legalism. In this view, a good Catholic must know the moral law. He or she must then apply it rigorously to his or her own case to avoid falling into grave sin. Our native freedom simply needed to knuckle under, with our will submitted in obedience to divine commandments and to the laws of the Church. Moral theology thus judged actions mainly by whether or not they conformed to the duties of the law. Acts of virtue aiming at holiness and union with God belonged to a different domain (as “supererogatory” counsels, rather than mandatory commandments).

Against this backdrop, Vatican II (1962–1965) called for a broad reform of Catholic moral theology, one that reconnected moral truth with our desire for happiness. But many moral theologians remained trapped by the preconciliar theories that had formed them. They continued to presume a framework of divine commandments and obligations that bind and restrict man’s liberty.

Instead of reading the council as a call to deepen the life-giving power of moral truth, they believed—incorrectly—that Vatican II marked a break from the “oppressive” moral commandments of the past. They assumed that Catholic moral theology can be more life-affirming to the degree that it cedes territory to our unfettered freedom. But in practice, they only managed to exchange the rigorist legalism of their teachers for a new legalism with a laxist, progressive bent.

Many moral theologians of the last generation, including men like Bernard Häring, felt they were bringing the Church into the modern age by exploring new moral frontiers. In practice, though, most of these theologians stayed on the same old school bus, which they now ran in reverse. That is, they “solved” the problem of onerous moral commandments by eliminating some rules and generating doubts about whether this or that commandment applied in every case, or whether some exception might exist to rules that, before, had seemed absolute.

Those who favored this rebranded legalism made it their business to create doubts about the application of a law or commandment to particular cases, thus “freeing” the individual to exercise his “liberty of conscience.” This felt like a new turn in moral theology, one that released Catholics from the old regime of rigorous rules and duties. But in fact things didn’t change, at least not theologically. The new laxist thought stayed stuck in the old rut of legalism. Morality, in the end, remained about the rules, with a new generation of moralists essentially arguing for fewer of them.

 

Full article at:  https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/10/the-splendor-of-truth-in-2017

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Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is archbishop of Philadelphia.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/10/the-splendor-of-truth-in-2017