In the letter Archbishop Alemany deals quickly with divorce, which, like generous bankruptcy protection, was easily obtainable in California from its earliest days as a state.  Then he moves on to dueling, which was outlawed in the first state constitution of 1849.  Significantly, in contrast to divorce, he says, “We deprecate still more the unparalleled disaster of a duel, which no Christian or rational mind can countenance.”

Even so, the duel had become so common in frontier California that the very politicians who had been eager to outlaw it at the state’s first constitutional convention were later constrained to become duelists themselves.  Assemblyman George Johnston (1858), U.S. Sen. William Gwin (1853), and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California David Terry (1859) all engaged in famous duels, even though each of them had favored the proscription of the practice.

The Church’s proscription of the duel is very ancient, going back to the First Lateran Council (1170) and continuing all the way to the letter Pastoralis officii of Leo XIII (1891).  In 1917 it was included in the first Code of Canon Law (although it is nowhere to be found in the present code of 1982, in which all the penalties for dueling have been abrogated).  The duelists, their seconds, spectators, advisors, attending physicians, and clergy were all struck with excommunication reserved to the Holy See.  The duelists were to suffer infamia iuris, legal disgrace causing the loss of privileges (such as being a godfather or best man) and, before the 19th century, the confiscation of goods and the denial of Church burial.

The morality of the duel is evaluated in tradition by two principles.  The first is moderamen inculpatae tutelae, or the standard of guiltless self-defense, meaning that one is justified in using lethal means to defend one’s life against an unjust aggressor.  But the duel, which takes place ex convicto (by agreement) does not satisfy this criterion because, at the time the lethal force is to be taken, the “aggressor’s” action has been agreed upon by the offended party, and so he is not then and there an actual aggressor.  The second is that of the media apta, or apt means for repairing an injustice.  The loss of honor or reputation, which is ordinarily the reason for a duel, cannot be repaired by lethal combat, but must be repaired by other legal means.  The outcome of the combat itself cannot determine the injustice of the offense.  Consequently, the duel is both an unjust exposure of one’s own life and an intentional homicide of one who is not, at the point of the duel, a true, unjust aggressor but, rather, an accomplice in a crime.  Very different would be the case of one who is set upon by an opponent who says, “Take this saber or pistol and defend yourself like a man, for I am going to kill you now.”  In this scenario, a man would be justified in taking the offered weapon and defending himself.

In his letter, Archbishop Alemany writes,

Let us be permitted unhesitatingly to denounce the deadly contest, by which men laying claim to Christianity and refined manners, but acting as the red men of the forest, whose mental eye has never yet seen the least glimpse of civilization, divest themselves of all sense of duties which they owe to kindred or to society, and sacrifice, perhaps forever[,] the honor and welfare of parents, wife, or children . . . Deaf to every friendly advice, and thirsting after human blood, they go like beasts into the field to decide by brute force or impious chance who is right and who is wrong.  We pity the poor Indians whose want of mental culture leads them to determine right from wrong with the bow and arrow.  But what can exculpate the man who boasts of his civilization and intellectual refinement, yet who has not the strength of mind to discern that powder is not the standard of right!

In place of the traditional argument is an argument from urbanity.  Here we are confronted with an instructive example of what becomes progressively more common as a justification for Christian morality: the superior culture of modern men versus that of the savage, an argument from moral progress instead of a rational judgment of the injustice endured and the legitimate means to overcome it.  This is a rhetorical argument—not a presentation of the principles of natural law, but an appeal to human respect.

Family feeling, far from being violated by the duel, is precisely what justifies the duel in a man’s mind in the first place—a sense of identity and manly dignity that must be defended as a possession more valuable than life, just as a woman may kill a man seeking to violate her, even though such a violation would not take her life.  Its malice is not a primitive sense of honor but the illegitimate exposure of one’s life and that of another as a means to repair a wrong that cannot be repaired by force.  William Gwin’s 1853 duel provides a perfect example of this.  The senator from California faced U.S. Rep. J.W. McCorkle with rifles at 30 paces, wheeling at word and firing, which, in the signed account of the witness, “the two gentlemen did three times without harming each other, when the affair was brought to termination by the friends of the parties, having discovered that their principals were fighting under a misapprehension of the facts.”  McCorkle apologized to Gwin, and that was it.  In the meantime, the matter was relayed to Gwin’s wife.  After the first shot she said, “Let us thank God”; after the second, “Praise be”; after the third and the news of the apology, she expressed her disappointment in her spouse and his opponent: “There’s been some mighty poor shooting today!”  Family feeling might have something to do with the motive of the duelist.

All along, though, the Holy See continued to show that one may recognize the sounder instincts that were used as a pretext for an immoral practice.  In answering dubia proposed by the bishops of Central Europe as late as 1947, the Holy See pronounced on the question of going before a “tribunal of honor” to determine whether an offense equal to a duel had occurred.  Would doing so incur the penalties of canon law against dueling?  The answer, wisely, was no, as long as the parties did not intend to proceed to a duel but were only determining the cause of the contest to be resolved by other, morally legitimate means.  Even the greatest of practical moralists, St. Alphonsus Liguori, did not regard certain extenuating reasons for dueling as morally improbable—for example, a loss of honor before one’s military peers sufficient to ruin one’s livelihood—until Pope Benedict XIV forbade any dueling under any circumstances whatsoever.  A sense of honor based on a man’s name, or title, or profession, or even his physical strength has a very sound natural foundation, and this foundation ultimately is based on his family, present or future.  This is something that civilized Christians may have in common with savages, and without which they may become inferior to them.

A personalist, rhetorical defense of traditional morality can lead to the destruction of the most basic moral sense in modern people, who are so easily prey to ethical deracination.  A key example would be the understanding of marriage and marital relations as a remedy for concupiscence.  Teach young men and women in our coeducational age that only the highest spiritual motives can adequately account for married love, and you will have them refusing simply on account of their feelings the legitimate advances of their spouses.  The “marriage debt” can be much, much more, but it remains a debt and a duty without which men can be emasculated, not even able serenely to request a most basic right of marriage, and women can be doomed to perpetual suspicion of not being truly loved at all, because they are not loved perfectly here and now.  And so there is the vicious cycle in which the progressive moral account ends up rendering impossible the very love it so exalts.  That this approach and a mentality that is very open to divorce are aligned is clear.  So yes, a civilized Christian husband and a savage red man have a basic human value in common, and of this he must not be ashamed, but only of sin and infidelity.

In a society in which every standard is viewed as subject to a notion of progress that is, at root, technological and material, it can be dangerous to characterize fundamental human impulses as primitive or barbarous.  Even if they are impulses corrupted by fallen nature, by concupiscence and pride, they remain rooted in our nature and are meant for the good.  Drawing traditional moral conclusions from arguments based on social progress can utterly undermine and obscure the moral truths that those traditional conclusions imply.  Dueling is wrong, but not because an Indian brave might do the same thing and for the same reasons, and not because it is violent, but because the power to coerce is a property of law, and if there is no implicit threat of force, either moral or physical, then there can be no law.  At its most grave, this can be seen in John Paul II’s affirmation that the threat of an eternal Hell is a necessary guarantee of a fixed standard of morality.

Nowhere is the danger of the argumentum ad hominem rubrum more apparent than in the bishop’s use of divorce and the duel as a metaphor for civil war.  The conditions under which a defensive or an offensive war may be fought are clear.  In his letter he does not address them but merely describes war again as a descent into tribal barbarism.  But a war is not justly fought at all unless it is fought for the sake of one’s family and native common good.  We now live in a society in which fighting for one’s own people is precisely the only kind of war that is considered unjust.  Every interest, refined (oil!) and technological and financial, may excuse, but war for the sake of tribe, religion, or territory is deemed not only barbarism but terrorism.  (One nation is exempt from this contemporary prohibition, though, and it is not the United States.)  The Christian Croat or Serb, or the Palestinian, is a would-be war criminal, since he only seems to care about something as primitive as his own country.  Thus, wars will increase, because there is no motive limited to truly human goods which can restrain them.  Ideology at the service of plutocracy is the new order of things.  We now have “smart bombs,” after all.

And yet the good archbishop was in the right, in spite of himself.  In a very important passage of his encyclical Veritatis splendor John Paul II pointed out that theologians who reflect on the moral law are bound by the conclusions of the magisterium, but not by the arguments evinced for them, which they are free to replace with others that they find more sound or cogent.  To this we respond with a lusty “Q.E.D.”

The course of the last century and a half is instructive.  Those who have the duty of teaching in the Church and in civil society must always offer the genuine reasons for human conduct and use the rhetorical and odious comparison very sparingly.  Otherwise, the just who love family and honor may be relegated to the special reservations of the Brave New World, where we will all be red Indians.

This article first appeared in the February 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

“Si direbbe che persino la luna si è affrettata stasera—osservatelo in alto—a guardare a questo spettacolo.”

(“One might almost think that the moon—just look at him up there—hurried up tonight to see this spectacle.”)  These were words that Pope John XXIII extemporaneously addressed to the crowd gathered in Piazza San Pietro on the moonlit evening of October 11, 1962, the opening day of the Second Vatican Council.  The blessed pontiff spoke warmly of his expectation that the council would conclude “prima di Natale,” which being interpreted is “before Christmas.”  On this point at least, “Good Pope John” was not a prophet.  But how could he have thought otherwise?  Everything had been meticulously prepared; the documents were all ready, expounding the Faith and refuting modern errors with vigor and copious footnotes.  Well, no, as the saying goes, “the Rhine flowed into the Tiber,” and by Christmas the carefully worded schemata were practically all gone (except the “easy” one on liturgy: another less-than-prophetic but, in this case, collegial, not papal, surmise), and the council’s work indefinitely to-be-continued.

January 25 of this year marked the 50th anniversary of the surprise announcement of Pope John XXIII that he intended to convoke a general council.  From 1959 to 1962, the soon-to-be-jettisoned constitutions and decrees that would have been discussed were composed by preparatory committees of eminent Roman theologians.  Among these is one document that is remarkable for its keen prescience and consequent pastoral anxiety.  It never even made it to the floor of the council.  Its full title was Schema Constitutionis Dogmaticae de Castitate, Matrimonio, Familia, Virginitate.  Yes, there was a separate dogmatic constitution on chastity (marital, familial, and virginal) and every word of it now reads like a prophecy—not a Delphic utterance, but as clear-sighted as Daniel.  Reading the rejected schema, one cannot help but be struck by the sharp focus and clarity whereby chastity and all that opposes it in the modern world were confronted.  Nor can one deny—without questioning the value of the many other matters treated by the council—that in the face of all that has come to pass in the meantime this precision and firmness would have been the greatest thing the council might have offered to the world.

Practically every moral threat in the realm of human sexuality is addressed.  It deals with homosexuality: “It is most evil to hold that the most filthy affections for persons of the same sex are in fact a privilege of a higher level of culture.”  It deals with surgical sex changes: “Utterly wicked are those attempts to change one’s proper sex when it can be sufficiently determined.”  Genetic manipulation: “In no case can a right be given . . . to introduce into the human body procreative cells of another species, or the inverse, or to unite human cells from either sex in a laboratory . . . even if only the progress of science be intended.”  Sex education: “[T]hat kind of instruction is to reprobated which is in the presence of boys and girls together.”  Feminism:

The Synod reproves that evil form of emancipation by which the proper nature, function, and role of a woman are defiled, be she daughter, or wife, or mother, on account of the introduction of a false opinion of her equality with man . . . and moved by a false exaltation of freedom.

Immoral politicians: “The Synod most severely condemns those who directly assist or formally cooperate in establishing unjust laws regarding marriage and the family.”  The intrusion of civil government in education: “The Sacred Synod condemns as well all theories by which in whatsoever way the rights of the church and of the family regarding the education of children are denied or whereby the primary right in this matter is attributed to civil authority.”  The impeding of procreation by artificial means and the discouraging of fruitful families:

The Sacred Synod while it most insistently exhorts all that each one should according to his ability effectively assist families bearing a large number of children, at the same time severely reproves the recommending or spreading of immoral means of contraception for the limiting of children.

The objective origin and nature of marriage itself:

In the first place this Holy Synod takes up the duty to condemn all the radical errors of those who maintain that marriage in its order and establishment is a merely social phenomenon in continual evolution without any natural or supernatural weight, and that it does not come from God, nor is it subject to the Church.

The prohibition of civil dissolution of marriage: “Married persons are gravely forbidden from seeking a civil divorce as though it were properly a dissolution, as if a bond valid before God could be dissolved by civil authority.”  Legal sanctions against adultery: “It is erroneous to assert that the civil authority in no case enjoys the power of punishing both men and women adulterers.”  Contraception: “All means and techniques whereby in the use of marriage the procreation of offspring is impeded by human industry must be held to be intrinsically and gravely evil.”  Procured abortion: “It is illicit after the accomplishment of the conjugal act to interrupt the process of conception whatever stage it has reached, or to cause the direct destruction of the fetus not yet born, by which action they sin gravely against the commandment of God.”  Unnatural relations: “The chaste fidelity of spouses demands that in the mutual rendering of the marriage debt nothing should be done which is against the law of God, even if this imposes real acts of heroism.”  And finally, the mass media of entertainment:

With supreme aversion this Sacred Synod acknowledges how many and how great are the detestable traps set today against chastity . . . even though they are offered under the pretext of play, recreation, art, and information whereby souls are every moment and in every place, even at home, incited to evil, nay rather dragged to it.

These are only a selection of quotations.  There was much more.  The language is strong, precise, and formal, and most evidently not devoid of that note of indignation which commonly characterized the magisterial reproofs of days gone by.

What the council did finally say about marriage is to be found a chapter of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.  The tone of this document, in contrast to the original, is hortatory rather than definitive, using personalistic descriptive affirmation rather than essentialistic formal definition and condemnation.  In so doing, it clearly decries abortion and divorce, and mildly opposes contraception, but only refers in passing to the objective order of nature, while preferring to emphasize the experiential and contextual aspects of conjugal morality.  Given that the two documents do not contradict each other, what is the key to understanding the difference of outlook and—if I may deal in mere, alas, futuribilia—of outcome?  I was puzzling over this, until I came across some prohibitions in the “condition contrary to fact” schema that really struck me for their amazing foresight, and which regarded, not the various moral monstrosities condemned above, but rather opinions held by pious Catholics.  Here is an error, but a telling one: “The Sacred Synod reproves also the opinion of those who assert that the use of marriage is a specific means of attaining that perfection whereby truly and properly Man is the image of God and of the Most Holy Trinity.”
But isn’t this practically what many today teach?  That the marriage act itself, and not the married state or the bond of sacramental marriage, is a direct sign of the end of human existence: ecstatic union with God?  Do we not hear that the Song of Songs is not “just” a mystical allegory, but rather a description of how to get union with God by means of sex, albeit marital and chaste?  Are not marital relations sometimes referred to by preachers as the supreme and privileged signs of God’s love?  Isn’t this so much the case now that it almost sounds unchristian to assert otherwise?  Haven’t the dour strictures of Saint Augustine and Saint Alphonsus been surpassed?

Then I came across another passage just as telling: “The opinion is false and erroneous which holds that a marriage may be declared invalid or be dissolved on account of lack of love alone.”

I am sure that such a lack would, if attested to before a diocesan tribunal in the United States today, almost infallibly obtain just such a (fallible) declaration of nullity.  The reader is asking: “You mean to tell me that love is not a necessary condition for the validity of a marriage?”

Now I would be the last to deny that there may be some individual cases in which these two prohibited opinions could be taken as true, but their condemnation here is aiming at the common good, not at individual exceptions, which can be dealt with individually.  For example, the first proposition was true in a sense before Original Sin, and the second could be true if lack of love meant deceitful malice.  But there was a Fall, and there is such a thing as a minimum requirement for a valid marriage that has nothing to do with . . . romance.

There!  I found it.  Here is the problem within the fold, which has practically furnished the enemies of sound morality with a weapon to turn against us: the romanticization of marriage and procreation.  This is the vulgar version of the personalist approach to sex, which has its undoubtedly orthodox incarnations, but which is unable to take up arms against the enemy it is so eager to convince of the deeply fulfilling, richly complex experience of marital love.  The enemy is at the gate, and instead of aiming at him from the safety of your turrets and routing him, you attempt to show him what a lovely, serene, and productive city he is about to destroy.  In order to do this you must let him inside the gate.  If he is clever, he will ask you to let his companions in also, and so they occupy the city without a fight.

The teaching of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World on marriage and the family is sublime and true, but, in view of the evils in the modern world and the undoubted “signs of the times” evident in the moral state of our society, it hardly met the challenge.  The enemies of Christian morality are relentless and cruel and brook no resistance, and we are trying our best to reassure them that we are not mean, or uptight, or hateful; that we have a “positive message”; that it is all so beautiful, if they only knew.  It is as though Lot should have passed out happy-face buttons to the men beating down his door, or Joseph should have tried to sit down and have a heart-to-heart talk with Potiphar’s wife.  The effect of this is that our opponents do not change a bit, but rather those on our own side begin to view the robust expression of our teachings with suspicion.  Let’s be honest: Were we not just a bit troubled by the unapologetic tone of at least some of the affirmations given from the original schema on chastity, marriage, family, and virginity?  And how many Christians were and are and surely will be very quiet about their reservations regarding so-called same-sex marriage, lest they sound like they do not respect the attachment and warm feelings and needs of such couples?

What is at the root of this?  We still believe that the acts prohibited in the original schema are wrong, but we are ill at ease when these acts are reprobated in a certain manner.  This is because we have romanticized sexuality.  Here are the words of a dissenting voice at the council when the new schema on marriage, the one that was ultimately approved by the council, was being proposed in place of the original.  Archbishop Djajasepoetra of Jakarta in Indonesia complained—in Latin—at the council’s third session in 1964:

The schema is too Occidental . . . You in the West find it quite natural for those in love to marry.  But you are the exceptions if humanity as a whole is considered.  Our people love one another because they are married, which is not quite the same thing.  We differ from Westerners in that our marriages are contracted not out of love but by the will of the parents or tribe.  We marry to continue the race.

The romanticization of sexual love in marriage has led to the subordination of its objective cosmological role in the procreation of the human race to human desire and personal need.  “Our people love one another because they are married.”  This is a love of the common good of the family, or the tribe, or the nation, or of the whole human race.  On this view marriage is as much a matter of the common, public good as warfare, or capital punishment, or a stable means of exchange.  Of this perspective we have great need, and there are signs that it is being gradually recovered, if not with the rotund reprobations of the preconciliar age (these are now reserved only for certain offenses judged to be worthy of condemnation by the media), at least with the clear, essentialist thinking that looks unflinchingly and unromantically at the nature of things.

Just this past December the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an instruction on certain bioethical issues, among which was found the resolution of the question of the “prenatal adoption” into the womb of frozen embryos that would otherwise never be carried, the so-called “snowflake babies.”  Very much to the dismay of some (but admittedly not all) personalist moralists, the Holy See came down decidedly against this apparently merciful “saving” of a fertilized ovum, a human life.  Why?  Because not even the praiseworthy intention of saving a single life can justify an unnatural means of procreation outside of the marriage act.  The document contains this amazing statement: “All things considered, it needs to be recognized that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (emphasis original).  Analogously, the Holy See has also resolutely opposed the adoption of children already born by same-sex couples, and Catholic adoption agencies have ended their services in places like the United Kingdom where the state will not allow them to refuse to place children with such couples.  The good pro-life Christian may not see the analogy, but both are attempts to remedy an injustice or misfortune by immoral means.  In short, a romanticizing ethic absolutizes personal human desire or need; the ancient cosmological ethic accepts the limitations of human life and does the best it can in order to serve the common good.

The moon that looked down on the spectacle of the council is, after all, in ancient and medieval cosmology the immediate cause of the bodily dispositions needed for procreation.  Omnis motus geniturae fit a luna: “Every movement of the generative faculty is from the moon,” said Albert the Great.  The lunar connection was inferred from women’s monthly cycle.  Just this last Epiphany, in speaking of the star of Bethlehem, the star of the greatest of procreations, Pope Benedict made this observation about the ancient, cosmological Weltanschauung: “There is a special concept of the cosmos in Christianity which found its loftiest expression in medieval philosophy and theology.”  May the lunar star pointed out by Pope John at the opening of the council be at last a genuine prophecy and sign of a return to the order of things, the visible cosmos of the Creator, of which we poor men born of woman are but a part, albeit the noblest.  And then, perhaps, men will love their wives because they are married to them, and that will be something for the moon—in our hemisphere at least—to hurry up and see.

This article first appeared in the March 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Too bad that, since 1966, they are no longer adding titles to the Index of Prohibited Books.  My more than ten years as diocesan censor librorum—was it this past distinction that gained me the happy task of writing this review?—would lead me to grant Thomas Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition an imprimatur after a few nugatory adjustments, but what a book such as this really needs is a condemnation.  Let me explain.  A place on the Inquisition’s Index would recommend this text to three groups of potential readers.  The first are readers who already are in sympathy with the author’s sound principles.  They would compare him to the soon-to-be-Blessed (imagine the Church of the 22nd century giving this honor to Dr. Fleming!  Stranger things have happened since Pentecost A.D. 33) Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, whose Five Wounds of Holy Church, a work of similar courage and good sense, was later removed from the list of offending texts.  The second are those liberals who would in principle support the diffusion of any work that was the victim of censorship.  (They might even get The Morality of Everyday Life in major bookstore windows, with reviews in America.)  The third group needs most of all to read this book.  They are well-meaning old movement conservatives and neoconservatives, the folks who read publications that depend for matters of social ethics on authors whose works figure on the Index, like Locke, Hume, Comte, Acton, and Mill.  So, if you read National Review without being outraged, or First Things, or even Latin Mass, then get your confessor to let you read The Morality of Everyday Life.

The penitential context for reading this work is most apposite to Dr. Fleming’s main thesis, since he calls for a return to premodern casuistry in the evaluation of the morality of human acts, a casuistry whose apogee, after centuries of development, was the 18th-century Theologia Moralis of St. Alphonsus Liguori, whose method he judges “a mature and humane approach to moral problems that has never been equaled.”  This book of informal essays, written in a style that is accessible to the casual reader while remaining intellectually sumptuous, has, as its main thesis, that genuine moral reasoning

is based on two principles: first, that there are general and universally applicable moral laws governing human conduct; second, that these laws may not be applied simplistically and uniformly to the great variety of human circumstances and situations.

The subtitle, Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition, however, should make clear that this set of essays is not merely a serene, positive exposition of this thesis but, more importantly, a rhetorical refutation of the opposing rationalist ethics that both dogged post-Cartesian “mere conservatism” and willingly accompanied post-Kantian revolutionary voluntarism, while having perhaps the most plausible success with their milder ally, Anglo-American utilitarian empiricism.  Dr. Fleming shows a wide acquaintance with the principal texts of this modern philosophical tradition in ethics, yet his greatest strength lies in his domination of classical and vernacular literature in finding the loci most adapted to his arguments.  Add to this a keen eye for the realities of ordinary family and professional life and the surrealities of contemporary social and political relations, and you have the concrete synthesis (almost a redundancy!) that I have just described as intellectually sumptuous, and I mean after the manner of one of the better Sunday brunches (or dinners, if you prefer) available in your area.  You will gladly graze on the well-presented fare served up—and with a smile this time, I promise—by the good chef-maître of Rockford.

The prospective reader should not, however, expect a kind of ironic Chestertonian romp, triumphant and carefree.  Dr. Fleming has two characteristic modes of expression: the practical and the poignant.  The former is predominant, and rightly so in a work promoting classical casuistry.  The essay chapters “Too Much Reality” and “Growing Up Unabsurd” will convince any Chronicles reader that the magazine should feature a regular Dear Tommy column—if I may risk the crimen laesae maiestatis in so naming it—answering casus conscientiae.  The poignant mode, though, takes you by surprise, and there are passages in the essays “Problems of Perspective” and “The Myth of Individualism,” and the “coda” in “Goodbye, Old Rights of Man,” which will make you weep, or want to.

If there is a statement among these closely consequential and yet self-contained essays that presents the most fundamental moral perspective for the resolution of cases of conscience, it is the following:

For non-liberals—that is, nearly everyone in the history of the human race—there is simply no dilemma.  Family relations take precedence over any claim from any stranger no matter how good or holy, and Christians are under no less obligation than nonbelievers.  “If anyone does not take care of his own,” says St. Paul (1 Tim. 5:8), “and especially of his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

From this perspective, you can make all the proper judgments about the claims of government, employment, friendship, and philanthropy and descry as well the proper realm of heroism, which consists not so much in leaving behind this most particular of contexts as it does in sacrificing all to preserve it.

Perhaps the most practically trenchant and applicable analysis offered among those found on literally every page in the book is the brief treatment of “the pornography of compassion.”  The insight offered here, if applied to one’s use of the media of communication, could alone provide the lion’s share of the moral ascesis needed for persevering in the good nowadays, dealing as it does with what is most peculiar to precisely contemporary moral dilemmas.  In this, as in practically everything else, Dr. Fleming shows himself to be a disciple of Aristotle, who is the single most often cited author in these essays.  The author for whom one suspects Dr. Fleming has the most affection and respect, however, is Samuel Johnson.  The contrast of his moral attitude with Voltaire’s, which Dr. Fleming so revealingly expounds, has made me resolve to take up Boswell again for my benefit.

Here, I hope, is an accidental boon of this work: to get the reader to go back and read the literature he has been lacking or has forgotten.  Like a kind of latter-day St. Isidore of Seville, Dr. Fleming (we keep canonizing him by analogy) has extracted the essential nectar from so many stories and provided us with a florilegium in essay form that provides a model of the intelligent use of literary authorities.  The ensemble of concrete example and literary precedent is a fine and attractive argument a posteriori ex usu for a robust classical education.  One can see clearly how, even in the absence of a formal moral theory, rightly determined literary culture can provide a man with the necessary matter for sound practical judgment.

Yet alas, Dr. Fleming’s strongest point also reveals a defect, albeit a venial one.  Although he is a master of letters, he is still a student of theology.  There are a few errors in the work, which a censura praevia would have excised.  One is his description of the differences between Saint Peter and Saint Paul regarding the observances of the Mosaic law.  A closer reading of the case as it develops in Acts and in the epistles will show that the case is not just as Dr. Fleming describes it, but far more nuanced, evidence in itself of an original Apostolic casuistry.

Another error that is more to the point regards the characterization of Saint Alphonsus’ moral teaching as “probabilism.”  Quite precisely, his theory is called “aequiprobabilism.”  This school of casuistry holds that the opinion favoring liberty over law may be followed if it is intrinsically probable, all things being equal.  This last condition means that, in cases where there is question of the cessation of a law that has already been in force, the opinion favors the law even if the other opinion has probability, but, when there is question of the law having yet come into force, the opinion favors liberty.  The simple probabilist holds that any truly probable opinion may be followed, even if an opposing opinion may be more probable.  An aequiprobabilist holds the same view but gives greater weight to laws already presumably in force.  In casuistic practice, however, these views are merely useful for persuading the penitent, because the confessor may not impose his theory’s resolution of the moral case in question on the penitent, if there exists another view not condemned by authority.  In reality, the only two systems of moral evaluation condemned have been rigorism (as in the case of the Jansenists) and laxism (as in the case of some Jesuits), so all the others are practically probable and certainly licit.  The Q.E.D. is that the probabilist view wins out, if the penitent wants it to and the confessor keeps within the bounds of his authority.  The Thomist Dominic Pruemmer explains in his classic Vademecum:

If one prescinds from rigorism and laxism, each of the systems described is tolerated by the Church, and so the confessor has no right to impose his system on the penitent, or strictly require anything of the penitent which he is not bound to do according to the approach of another legitimate system.  Thus the confessor may prudently counsel safer or more probable opinions, but he cannot strictly impose them (that is, in preference to merely probable ones).  In practice let him choose those opinions which, considering all the circumstances, he foresees will produce the best fruit for the spiritual health of the penitent.

Thus, Dr. Fleming’s intuition is fundamentally sound: Probabilism, which favors liberty because of a respect for circumstances, is the default system of classical Roman Catholic casuistry.  Even so, it is not Roman Catholic casuistry he is promoting but rather a return to any casuistic system at all (including Talmudic or Caroline) within the traditions that have made up our society, for such systems by their very nature harmonize with life as it is actually lived and use morality to preserve and strengthen rather than to break down and overturn ties of blood and soil and common endeavor.  Apart from those few things one may never do under any circumstances—such as blaspheme, murder the innocent, commit unnatural acts, or steal from a man poorer than oneself—it is almost impossible to indicate specific acts that must always be done regardless of circumstances.  For this reason, then, there must be casuistry, since the possibilities for doing good are literally infinite.

For every manual of casuistry, there needs to be a speculative presentation of general principles.  Otherwise, the ethics inculcated may be merely a kind of positivistic integralism, a “this is the way its always been, so don’t ask questions” attitude, unable to defend itself from the critical and revolutionary spirit.  This companion volume to The Morality of Everyday Life has yet to be written, but here the reviewer dares to present a suggestion as to what its overarching, unifying insight should be.  The exposition of nominalism in the sixth chapter points in the direction of the deepest level of moral reasoning.  Whereas Dr. Fleming’s interpretation and application of the genesis of the notion of individualism is not one to which I would subscribe, this is the one place in the book where he brushes up against the larger philosophical issue underlying any account of the morality of human acts and transcending any given instance of moral reasoning.

In his Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, book 12, lesson 5, St. Thomas Aquinas makes the following observation:

The opinion of Plato in positing eternal substances is of no worth . . . for we cannot explain permanent movement by making up some eternal separated substances . . . For the Forms posit nothing other than separated universals, but universals as such cannot move another, for every active or moving principle is something singular.

To his grandmother trying to make him eat his greens by saying, “Remember the starving children in Ethiopia,” we can imagine a little Thomas Fleming responding as did an old acquaintance of mine when asked the same imperative-masked-as-question.  “Name one,” he said.  Morality is in the end about cause and effect, indeed about the “road which must take many a twist and turn” on the way to final causes and ultimate perfections.  “The good cannot be found in mathematical entities,” said Saint Thomas, because they are mere universals that cannot exist as they are defined.  And yet it is the good that must move us, and, unless the good is a concrete good and not an abstraction, it cannot effectively move us.  This holds true whether we are receiving or bestowing a good.  Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (here comes the third hagiographical parallel), whose one-person-at-a-time ethic so closely resembles Thomas Fleming’s, had this to say, much in the line of the overly clever turnip-green hater:

Sometime when I encounter parents, I tell myself if [sic] it is possible that these parents worry about those who are hungry in Africa, in India or in other countries.  It is possible that they dream of ending the hunger felt by any human being.  However they live unaware of their own children, of having that poverty and that hunger of heart in their very own homes.  Moreover, they themselves are the ones who cause that hunger and that poverty.

One last question: Does Daddy really love faraway Fatima and Hajar as much as he does Jenna and Barbara?  We hope not, but I wish Dr. Fleming would send the White House a complimentary copy of his book very soon.  The Index is passé, but there is still the PATRIOT Act.

This article first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

At the beginning of 1999 . . . my wife Cathleen Schine, announced that she no longer wanted to be married to me.  She had to leave, she had to get away for a new life, for she had mysteriously changed in her affections . . . I stood there like a rejected petitioner, chewing my innards but unwilling to fight.  “I have to go to sleep now.”  “But I want to talk.”  Talk was the center, we used to talk over everything, endlessly . . . For almost two decades, I had felt that no thought of mine was complete until I had conveyed it to her . . . We spoke every day, we were amiable and affectionate . . . I was in a rage, but I suppressed it.  Of what use was anger?  I was determined not to become one of those embittered men encountered at work, at a party—men a little too articulate about “women.”

Thus David Denby, movie critic at the New Yorker, describes his reaction to his novelist wife’s leaving him in his brand new and not-particularly-recommended-here book American Sucker.  What was it that had “mysteriously changed” in her affections?  At least one thing for sure: She was leaving him for a woman.  When we examine his response to her announcement, we can say that Mrs. Schine-Denby’s move may have come as a surprise to Mr. Denby, but it is definitely no mystery.  It is one individual instance of a species whose “genesis” I will describe here, using the second chapter of the homonymous book, without even needing to refer much to the nineteenth, in the hope that some reader may, by serious reflection on what follows, begin, even if only slowly at first, to flee his moral Decapolis (Manhattan? L.A.? Vermont? Massachusetts? Crawford, Texas?) without looking back—not before, but because, it is too late.

If it was not for help in producing children that a wife was made for the man, then what other help was she made for?  If it was to till the earth together with him, then there was as yet no hard toil to need such assistance; and if there had been the need, a male would have made a better help.  While if it was expedient that one should be in charge and that the other comply, to avoid a clash of wills disturbing the peace of the household, such an arrangement would have been ensured by one being made first, the other later, especially if the latter were created from the former, as the female was in fact created.  The same can be said about companionship, should he grow tired of solitude.  How much more agreeably, after all, for conviviality and conversation would two male friends live together on equal terms than man and wife?  For these reasons I cannot work out what help a wife would have been made to provide the man with, if you take away the purpose of childbearing.

These are the words of Saint Augustine in the ninth chapter of his On the Literal Meaning of Genesis.  They bear careful attention beyond the initial shock they might cause.  The real, historical inequality of women to men clearly implied here is, nonetheless, in Augustine’s view, extrinsic to womanhood as such.  Indeed, it is later presented as a punishment for the Fall in the third chapter of Genesis.  Similarly, a friendly equality between man and woman as between men could never explain their partnership.  The relationship of man and woman is based neither on inequality and servitude, nor on simple equality and friendship, but on something which transcends these poles and thus moves freely between them: procreation.

Thus it is that friendship and hierarchy between members of the same sex have always been more unambiguously friendship or hierarchy than when these are found between members of the opposite sex, whose relationship as male and female is defined by its procreative foundation.  An army (before the days of little Jessica Lynch) or a monastery (of men or of women) or colleges (before Oberlin) have traditionally exemplified this fact: Where are men and women more clearly under authority, while remaining clearly peers, than in these places?

Our society, for ideological reasons, has chosen to judge all human relationships according to the standard of equality and inequality, even the rapport between the sexes.  Thus it was only consistent that the relationship between man and woman would be freed of its original and essential foundation in procreation, a good not precisely measurable by any standard of social equality, since, in a sense, birth and family ties are the natural foundation of any evaluation of equity and inequity within the human race.  The development of effective means of contraception and the promotion of abortion gave the impression of solidity to this putting asunder of what God hath joined together.  So what could the new, nonprocreative standard of male and female be, if not the friendship that obtains between equals?  (We can leave to some of our nation’s Muslim allies the other possible option: servitude.)

Go back and look at David Denby’s words.  What do they reveal if not that he felt bound to view his marriage as primarily a friendship?  Leave it to the embittered to grouse that it had to do with her being a woman!  He had been formed in a milieu that views a man’s expressing rage or shame at being cuckolded—not by another man, but even by a woman—as a tisk-tisk imperfection: as if his marriage was really about being a man and woman after all!  Small wonder, then, that his wife might find a more satisfying friendship with a woman, one with whom her equality was less ambiguous.  So what is wrong with that?  Is that not the case for millions of men and women whose best friends are not their spouses but members of their own sex?  Nothing and yes indeed, but this friendship ended their marriage.  It claimed to take its place.

The replacement of procreation with equality as the foundation of relations between the sexes has required our society to accept homosexuality as legitimate.  After all, the foundation and ideal for the relations between members of the same sex is seen as morally the same as the foundation for relations between the sexes: undifferentiated equality and friendship.  What is wrong with this?  Let the feminist Dame Rebecca West shed some light here for the perplexed reader from her study St. Augustine, a horrible hatchet-job of a book but full of the finest, useful insights, as long as she is not concerned directly with her subject: “[Augustine teaches] in a sentence which with characteristic insight, puts its finger on the real offense of homosexuality, by pointing out that it brings the confusion of passion into the domain where one ought to be able to practice calmly the art of friendship.”

The unhinging of the relationship between man and woman from its procreative framework has led to the sexualization of relationships which ought to remain serenely free of this momentous burden.  Onan has slouched all the way to Gomorrah singing, “Get me to the church on time.”

I am not so much concerned here to give a Dr. Dobson argument against “gay marriage” or even homosexual relationships in general.  I am asserting a self-evident fact that such relationships, to the extent that they are sexual (if this were not the case, then there would be no issue), are, on the witness of Creation, fictitious, illusory, and, yes, perverted.  In the 11th century, St. Peter Damian, in his notorious and devastatingly relevant letter 31 on clerical sodomy, the so-called Book of Gomorrah, made this psychologically and morally trenchant observation:

Tell us, man, what do you seek in another male that you do not find in yourself?  What difference in sex, what varied features of the body? . . . For it is the function of the natural appetite that each should seek outside himself what he cannot find within his own capacity.  Therefore, if the touch of masculine flesh delights you, lay your hands upon yourself and be assured that whatever you do not find in yourself, you seek in vain in the body of another.

What should one man seek from the body of another man?  Only the union of wills, expressed in speech, shared thoughts, expressions of mutual interest.  Let us hear the robustly heterosexual Saint Augustine in an often mistranslated passage of his Confessions:

The union of two in one: this is what is loved in friends, and so loved that a man’s conscience must confess his guilt if he does not love one who loves him in return or does not love in return one who loves him, seeking nothing from his body, but the expression of good will.

The natural law requires the love of friendship between members of the same sex.  Homosexual relationships, however, are inherently dishonest, in both the Latin and the English senses.  They imply a foundation beyond the relationship that is not there.  They outrage the simplicity of equality and—unlike the transcendent, procreative relationship of man and woman—have no alternative to friendship but submission.  By this description, of course, they differ, it would seem, only aesthetically from the NPR-New Yorker ideal of “heterosexual” marriage, which denies its foundation.  And so Mr. Denby and “Ms.” Schine seethe with frustration, while striving to be amicable.  Small wonder, then, that not all homosexuals support giving binding, legal status to their “marriages.”  Here is the great irony of the “equality of the sexes”: It destroys what natural equality there truly is and denies that there is a basis in human society for the sublimation of inequality into a greater, common good.  True marriage has both of these and something even greater.

What is it?  The creation of Eve is about procreation, but not only according to the flesh.  According to Augustine, in the same ninth chapter of On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, the ecstasy of procreative union has its archetype and final cause in the creature’s ecstatic union with God, for which end, the filling up of the number of the blessed, man and woman bring forth new life:

That ecstasy, which God cast on Adam, to put him into a deep sleep, may rightly be understood as cast upon him precisely in order that he in his mind through ecstasy become as it were a member of the angelic court, and so “enter into the sanctuary of God and understand the last things” (Psalm 73:17).  Finally, on waking up full of prophecy so to say when he saw his wife brought to him he immediately burst out with what the apostle holds up to us as a great sacrament: “This is now bone out of my bone and flesh of my flesh, this shall be called woman, since she was taken out of her man: and for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife and the two shall be one flesh.”

Marriage was, from the beginning, the Great Sacrament of the union of God with mankind, of Christ and His Church, in which new birth there is “neither male nor female, Jew or Gentile, slave or free,” but “they shall all be like the angels in heaven, neither marrying nor giving in marriage.”  After all, it was the Bridegroom who said, “I no longer call you servants, but friends because I have revealed to you everything I have heard from my Father.”  There is thus a very profound sense in which a certain supernatural equality is the standard for all relationships—that is, the capacity of man’s heart for a marital union with God.  This is what led David, son of Jesse, foreshadowing the love of the God Who was procreated from him, to cry out (II Samuel 1):

The beauty of Israel is slain upon thine high places: how are the mighty fallen! . . . How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!  O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places.  I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

May God grant such love to David Denby and his many modern brethren.

This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.