Homily for Oct 17 - St. Ignatius, Bishop and Martyr

In the second century, the Roman Empire had a growing problem.  There were increasing numbers of these "Christians" everywhere, and they just would not cooperate with how the Empire did things.  And the Romans simply could not understand why the Christians held themselves apart like that.

Emperor Trajan

About the year 106, the Emperor Trajan, in thanksgiving for a great military victory, passed a law that all the people of Syria should offer a sacrifice to the traditional Roman gods.  But in the middle of Syria was the capital, Antioch, and the Bishop of Antioch was Ignatius.  St. Ignatius preached loudly, in his pulpit and in the streets, that Christians could not obey this law.

The Romans simply did not understand this.  Why couldn't the Christians do what everybody else did - offer the public sacrifice once, and then go home and follow their own religion in private?  Why couldn't the Christians compartmentalize their faith, like everybody else?

In our own time, our government increasingly acts the same way toward Christians.  There are many examples, but one of the most important instances is the HHS Mandate: that all employers must offer their employees, in their health insurance plans, the benefits - and "benefits" are in quotation marks - of contraception, sterilization, and chemical abortions.  And our government simply doesn't understand why we Christians cannot compartmentalize our faith, and perform our economic duties over here, in accordance with the law, and our religious duties over there, in private, however we want.

In the Gospel today, Jesus teaches us that, "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a grain of wheat.  But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit." (Jn 12:24-5)  St. Ignatius used this very Gospel passage in a letter to the Church in Rome.  He pointed to himself, saying, "I am the grain of wheat."  He called the teeth of the wild animals which would kill him in the arena, the "millstones" grinding the wheat into bread, a bread like Christ's own Body, that would nourish the faith of others.  He wanted to be that bread, to nourish the Church and to change the Roman world.

St. Ignatius in the arena

And that's exactly what he did as a martyr.  The witness of his death for the crime of being a Christian and not committing idolatry nourished the faith of others.  It took two hundred years, and thousands of martyrs dying for Christ, to change the Roman Empire, but it happened.  In the fourth century, the Roman Empire became the Christian Roman Empire. 

That's why, when our own government was founded in the 18th century, it could be founded as a Christian government.  But if we want to keep it a Christian government and a Christian country, we need to change the hearts and minds of our neighbors, by the witness of our lives.  We may not be called to "red" martyrdom, but we still preach about Christ, or not, by the actions of our lives every day.  Our actions show what are our priorities, and the daily witness of our charity shows whether we love God and neighbor. 

We are the only Christ, that those who don't yet know Him, can learn about Him by.  We are the grains of wheat, and our daily witness for Him grinds us into bread.  Will we be a tasteless and worthless bread of no value?  Or will we be the bread that we really are as the Body of Christ - the bread that nourishes the faith of others?

25 August - Excursus on Saint Louis IX of France

25 August, the memorial of St. Louis IX of France. St. Louis (1215-1270) was a contemporary of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, and, as a king, one of the better examples of medieval ideas of law and justice in practice. A short excursus into his life will perhaps help put some flesh to the ideas of law we’re getting from the Summa.

His mother, Blanche of Castile, one of the many grandchildren of the great Eleanor of Aquitaine, was worthy of her parentage. She was a very forceful person, an excellent organizer and administrator, and fierce in defending her family. When, in 1215-16 (remember the Magna Carta?), the English barons in revolt against King John offered the throne of England to Louis VIII, she organized the army and navy for the invasion of England to receive it, but in a land battle and a naval battle, the English forces loyal to John and his son Henry defeated them. She put down rebellions of French barons, and later defeated an English invasion of France in 1230. (The “English” and “French” barons tended to hold lands on both sides of the Channel; and the kings tended to be barons of each other, also, so the politics were rather convoluted; hence all the mutual “invasions” until the end of the Hundred Years War.) She protected and expanded the power of the French kings against the other great dukes and kings of England, France, and Germany. She was also a great papist in the various ecclesial politics of the day. She was, no surprise, chosen to be her son’s regent when Louis VIII died in 1226, and she continued to guide and support her son vigorously after his majority and marriage in 1234. She was regent again when St. Louis was crusading in Egypt, 1248-50.

St. Louis emulated these same qualities. He was politically astute and vigorous. But, he did not pursue royal power merely for the sake of accumulating more power. He was intent on using that power for the purposes everyone agreed he had it: to protect the poor and the Church against the abuses of the powerful; to govern with justice; to maintain peace as far as possible. He used diplomacy as much as he could, but he didn’t shy away from using force when necessary. He notably avoided a couple of “wars,” in France and in Sicily, that he could have pursued (and that someone like his grandfather, Philippe Auguste, would not have hesitated to pursue). He was not a great legislator, but he respected the laws and customs of his day, and extended the reach and the reliability of royal courts of justice. He himself sat as judge regularly, and his “king’s justice” was available even to the poorest peasants.

His own faith and devotion were very strong. As was the norm then, he used his power to curb abuses within the Church, and to fight against the Albigensian heresy (the “Albigensian crusade”). He built the fabulous Sainte Chappelle in Paris (pictures just don’t do it justice), and funded Robert of Sorbonne in founded the university that bears his name (originally as a theology school). His personal library numbered in the hundreds of books, and was one of the great collections of the day. He also pursued two extensive Crusades in Egypt, to defend the Holy Land by securing its approaches from the south. These were understood as wars of self-defense for Christendom. Both were ultimately unsuccessful.

If you read the Office of Readings this morning, you might have noted these ideas in the letter to his son which is the second reading for today. Faith comes first; from faith comes justice and right; and the king rules best when he serves as God’s instrument for the common good. “My dearest son, my first instruction to you is that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your strength. Without this there is no salvation…. If the Lord has permitted you some trial, bear it willingly and with gratitude…. Listen to the divine office with pleasure and devotion…. Be kindhearted to the poor, the unfortunate, and the afflicted. Give them as much help and consolation as you can…. Be just to your subjects, swaying neither to right nor to left, but holding the line of justice. Always side with the poor rather than with the rich, until you are certain of the truth. See that all your subjects live in justice and peace…. Work to remove all sin from your land, particularly blasphemies and heresies.”

That core definition of justice as “remove all sin from your land” is the point where faith fundamentally shaped politics. This goal is not mere human justice, a crude measure of “approximately fair;” the absence of sin is the only true justice there can be. Of course, if Christ is the unique Savior, then the absence of sin can only be achieved by the conversion of everyone, and therefore, quite unlike today, the medieval standard of justice judged the use of the state’s coercive power to defend and support orthodoxy to be not only licit, but even required. As we mentioned in class last time, it was not until the Reformation, Counter-reformation, and the devastations of the Wars of Religion and the 30-Years’ War that this idea really changed. Basically, before then, the consequences of not using the coercive power of the state in this way were thought to be worse than using it; but afterwards, the costs of using it became obviously higher than the costs of not using it.

Aside from these kinds of historical differences, St. Louis was justly renowned for being a strong king, but not abusing his power; regulating his royal courts for the rule of law, and being accessible himself as a judge, even to the very poor; leading with diplomacy, resorting to war only when necessary; self-restraint in his governing; patronizing the arts, learning, and so on; supporting the clergy while curbing abuses; and loving the Church and the poor. These are the sorts of actions which St. Thomas is implying in his definition of law as a rational, objective, and universal “rule and measure” of acts, enacted and promulgated by the sovereign and accepted as legitimate, for the common good.

Moral Theology 3 - Aquinas on Law cont'd: Qu. 90, art 4

Aquinas finishes his qu. 90, on the nature or essence of law, with Article 4: “Whether promulgation is essential to a law?”

As usual, wrong answer first: “It seems promulgation is not essential to a law,” because:

Objection 1: natural law binds without formal promulgation;
Objection 2: law binds or obliges not only those to whom it is promulgated, but also others;
Objection 3: some of those others are future persons who will be subject to the law, but promulgation takes place only in the present.

On the contrary, from Gratian’s (“The Jurist”) Decretals (a major compilation of canon law in the 12th cent.), “laws are established when they are promulgated.”

Given what he’s said about the rational (and therefore objective and universal) nature of law, it follows that laws that remain unpromulgated can’t be objective, and therefore can’t be law. Gratian is correct, in other words. If law is a “rule and measure,” Aquinas argues, then it must be applied in some way in order to regulate and measure. The promulgation is the application of the yardstick to the situation. Without the promulgation, the yardstick is only leaning in the corner, not doing anything.

Aquinas goes on to note that promulgation is not only functionally necessary for law, it’s also part of the nature/essence/definition. He puts all these four articles together thus:

Law is nothing other than “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.” That is, law is rational, implying also objective and universal; law is properly made by the sovereign, not by private interests; law is for the common good, implying that partisan laws are unjust, along with various forms of discriminatory laws; and law must be promulgated.

From this, his replies to the objections are fairly obvious.

Again, remember that his use of terms can be a bit different than ours, especially in things like “common good.”

Discussion: What do you think about this definition of law? Does it work today? If not, what would be a better definition? Do the laws we make at national, state, and local levels generally aim at this standard? If not, why not? What are the implications here for what we call “checks and balances”?

Moral Theology 2 - Aquinas on Law cont'd: Qu. 90, art 2-3

II-Ie.90.2: Whether law is always something directed to the common good?

Having offered in Article 1 a definition of law as a rational, objective “rule and measure of acts” which operates on the will to regulate and form, Aquinas now turns in Article 2 to another fundamental question. As usual, he starts with the wrong answer: “It would seem that the law is not always directed to the common good as to its end.”

Objection 1, from the difference between individual goods and the common good: concrete laws aim at some individual good, but not at the common good per se.

Objection 2, from the same, but with reference to the human actor: concrete human actions regulated by laws aim at particular goods, not the common good per se.

Objection 3, from authority: “Isidore [St. Isidore of Seville] says (Etym. v, 3): ‘If the law is based on reason, whatever is based on reason will be a law.’ But reason is the foundation not only of what is ordained to the common good, but also of that which is directed private good.” Therefore law might aim at either private or common good, and therefore not always the common good.

You might predict already that this difference between the private and the common good is going to be part of the answer as well. Specifically, how are they related? Is it possible to aim at the private good, without also implying a contribution to the common good? Modern notions of “the common good” and “the private good” generally allow that implication to be absent. But, remember that he’s not working with a modern definition of the “private good,” which opposes the private good of individuals against each other. He’s not Hobbes or Rousseau, positing a “zero-sum game.” To be good, even the private good must exclude real harm of others, and be compatible, not in competition, with the private good of others. The appearance of competition or exclusion comes rather from human imperfection and sin, than from the imperfection of law as such.

And indeed, this is the argument he deploys. Individual goods are related to the common good as parts to the whole, or as imperfect to perfect. Because individual laws aim at individual goods specifically as part of the common good, law as a whole must aim at the totality of individual goods, which is the common good.

He continues in Article 3 with the same thrust: Whether the reason of any man is competent to make laws? In other words, how is law in its nature related to the individual?

Wrong answer first: “It seems the reason of any man is competent to make laws.”

Objection 1, from Paul: Gentiles don’t have the OT Law, so they are “a law unto themselves.” (Rom 2:14). He means this generally, and so man’s reason can make laws.

Objection 2, from Aristotle: the intention of lawmaking is to lead men to virtue (by forming good habits and inhibiting the formation of vices), which (at least in a natural sense) any person can in theory do for another.

Objection 3, from analogy: the governor of a state makes laws for a state; the head of a household makes laws for the household in the same way.

These objections are pretty forceful. For us in the modern world, the analogy argument is particularly potent, because who wouldn’t agree with the basic justice of a “rule of law” and accountability of the lawmakers to their subjects? And to have that kind of basic structure of justice, you need the human competence to make law. You assume it, in fact, because without it the whole modern project of classical liberalism (democracy, no legally-privileged aristocracy, parliamentary rule, religious freedom, personal freedom for the sake of the common good, and so on) just falls apart.

So how does Aquinas respond to these objections? He starts with his “on the contrary,” another interesting quote from the same Isidore: “A law is an ordinance of the people [the sovereign], whereby something is sanctioned by the Elders [the governing elite, whether they form a class or not] together with the Commonalty [the citizen-voters].” In other words, a law must be accepted to be law; it must be agreed to, as part of the shared vision of the common good and how to get there.

This is a fundamental point, even to the objections. Even if you argue for a basic human competence to make laws, you’re still presuming that this understanding of law includes its legitimacy, along with its rationality and its goodness.

But what this means, he argues in his “I answer that,” is that the only “person” competent to make legitimate (and therefore just) laws is the sovereign. And the sovereign is not a human person at all, but a “body politic.” Even in the case of monarchy, when the sovereign is reduced to one in the person of the king, one still distinguishes between the king as a person, and the king as sovereign. (This is why the power of monarchical kingship can in fact be shared, as by Diocletian, or as by crowning an heir even before the king’s death, for example in order to prevent a civil war.) This was a basic point of medieval political theory, and its echoes in our familiar system of representative democracy surprise us only in the antiquity of their origins.

In saying, then, that any man’s reason is not competent to make laws, Aquinas is not saying that only God may make laws – he’ll get to the relationship between human and divine law in qu. 91 – but rather that laws made by just any man are necessarily arbitrary, rather than sovereign and legitimate; and if they are arbitrary, then they are neither rational, nor aimed at the common good, and therefore not truly law at all.

Moral Theology 1 - Aquinas on Law

Starting your reading of the Summa Theologica with this question (II-Ie.90.1, if you’re keeping score) is not a terribly painful place to begin. His first question on the law is: “Whether law is something pertaining to reason?” In other words, is there something inherently rational and objective about the law, or is it arbitrary, or is it merely self-referential?

Remember, here, Plato’s insistence that justice (we’ll come back to how justice relates to law) can’t only be the limited, somewhat erratic, merely human kind of justice we strive for at our best – much less the “might makes right” kind of justice so often actually acted on. Remember also the status of “Law” in the Scriptures, as revealed by God for a certain end. This is the foundational heritage Aquinas receives, and he has no interest at all in changing it. What he’s trying to do is define it, using an Aristotelian language and framework.

First, the objections: “It seems that law is not something pertaining to reason.” (This is the wrong answer, but he tries to establish it first, as I explained about his method in class.)

Objection 1, from St. Paul: “I see another law in my members, etc.” He takes this quite literally: if law is “in” the members, it can’t be inherently rational, since reason is not anything “in” any bodily organ.

Objection 2, from the nature of reason: reason is composed of power, habit, and act (he’s taking this from Aristotle, of course). But law is not any of power, habit, or act, for the reasons he lists. So it’s not inherently related to reason.

Objection 3, from the nature of law: law moves its subjects to right action, that is to say, in their will. Therefore law pertains to will, not to reason.

None of these objections, probably, will strike us as particularly forceful or concrete. Frankly, I think he’s fishing for objections here, because, given what he’s already established all through the first part and most of the first-of-the-second part, it should be pretty obvious that law, taken as an ideal or type, is derived from the Logos, therefore it is indeed something pertaining to reason. Indeed, his “on the contrary” doesn’t even need to cite a more authoritative source than the Summa itself! But he’s trying to be completely consistent in his method, so he proceeds as usual.

In fact, Objection 2 is not that weak a counter-argument. If the nature of reason does not overlap with the nature of law at all, then how can they pertain to each other in any way? But of course, the rebuttal is also fairly self-evident: law acts on the subject through reason’s power (law limits it), habit (law forms it), and act (law regulates it).

His “I answer that” always introduces the meat of the argument. “Law is a rule and measure of acts, whereby man is induced to act or is restrained from acting…” with respect to some end (toward a good, away from an evil). But the nature of man is reason, and the end of man is toward perfect reason (he doesn’t say so here, but of course we know this is the Logos). So reason itself is the fundamental “rule and measure” of all man’s acts; therefore law, as part of that “rule and measure,” pertains to reason.

Then he replies to the objections. To objection 1, he distinguishes the literal “in” versus the metaphorical “in.” To objection 2, he rebuts as above, laying out with considerable precision exactly what parts of the rational faculties are involved, and how. This is pretty meaty, itself. To objection 3, he notes the rational nature of the will itself.

So we conclude, then, not only that the law pertains to reason, but also have an idea of how it pertains. It is referential to the Logos; that is, law is, in its own nature, divine, and we know it by means of “natural law” and “revealed law,” exactly parallel to “natural revelation” and “special revelation” of other aspects of the divine Will and Persons. Law is non-arbitrary, therefore, and has an objective content that can be known. (He’ll get into that much more in question 91.) Law acts on the will of the subject, both directing (“Hey, there, Will, you should eat vegetables before dessert.”) and limiting (“Will, if you grab that cookie, you’ll get 5 lashes!”).

Ultimately, all of this hangs on his definitions of what reason is (the Logos, and its reflections in the created world, both personally, in my reason, and impersonally, in the intelligibility of stuff), and what law is ("a rule and measure of acts"). His definition of reason is pretty secure. But do you agree with his definition of law? What other definitions are possible, and do they still lead to the same conclusion, or to a different one?