on the dependence of human reason on Divine Wisdom

Nineteenth Century author and playwright H. H. Munro once remarked that “The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an agnostic conscience; you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.” Sadly I’m afraid his observation would appear to be far more fashionable in the twenty-first century than it was in the nineteenth.

Good or Bad

Precisely why this is so can be found in much of our current ethical pedagogy which readily and quite ardently dismisses the divine source of natural law. As Pope Saint John Paul II wrote “Some people, however, disregarding the dependence of human reason on Divine Wisdom and the need, given the present state of fallen nature, for Divine Revelation as an effective means for knowing moral truths, even those of the natural order, have actually posited a complete sovereignty of reason in the domain of moral norms regarding the right ordering of life in this world. Such norms would constitute the boundaries for a merely ‘human’ morality; they would be the expression of a law which man in an autonomous manner lays down for himself and which has its source exclusively in human reason. In no way could God be considered the Author of this law, except in the sense that human reason exercises its autonomy in setting down laws by virtue of a primordial and total mandate given to man by God. These trends of thought have led to a denial, in opposition to Sacred Scripture and the Church’s constant teaching, of the fact that the natural moral law has God as its author, and that man, by the use of reason, participates in the eternal law, which it is not for him to establish.”[1]

Earlier in the encyclical we read “Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values. This is the direction taken by doctrines which have lost the sense of the transcendent or which are explicitly atheist. The individual conscience is accorded the status of a supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil. To the affirmation that one has a duty to follow one’s conscience is unduly added the affirmation that one’s moral judgment is true merely by the fact that it has its origin in the conscience. But in this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and ‘being at peace with oneself”, so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment.”[2]

Saint Paul warned of this in his admonition to Timothy “For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths.”[3] We have indeed stopped listening to the truth and been diverted to myths created out of our own desires and insatiable curiosity. We have left God to His own devices and accorded ourselves to be the supreme tribunal of what is moral, what is good and bad.

We’ll continue this discussion next week.

[1] Pope Saint John Paul II, Veritas Splendor, Encyclical Letter, § 36, August 6, 1993.
[2] Ibid. § 32.
[3] 2 Tim 4:3-4.