God and Caesar: Selected Essays on Religion, Politics, and Society

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As the democratic West seeks to defend its ideals against religious and secular fundamentalism and to export these democratic values to underdeveloped nations, Cardinal Pell argues that it weakens its own political and social architecture by becoming more secular and divorced from the Christian values upon which it was founded. Drawing heavily from the work of Pope John Paul II, the archbishop of Sydney, Australia, warns against the idea of supporting human rights by separating these rights from both the natural law and from the innate human dignity that is Christianity's core contribution to political thought. It is the secularists' "primacy of conscience," he writes, that conflicts with the Christian "primacy of Truth" and that poses the greatest threat to modern democracies. Not only is Christianity compatible with modern science and political thought, his thinking follows, but it is essential to obtaining a complete understanding of both those fields. Though some of his views on specific issues may inspire debate, readers of any political or religious background should enjoy this erudite and unabashedly rational exploration of the role of religion in all aspects of modern life. Recommended for all libraries.
—Shedrick Pittman-Hassett

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ISBN-13: 9780813215037
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
Publication date: 10/28/2007
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.40 (h) x 0.70 (d)

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GOD & CAESAR

SELECTED ESSAYS ON RELIGION, POLITICS, & SOCIETY

By GEORGE PELL
THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS
Copyright © 2007

The Catholic University of America Press
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8132-1503-7

Chapter One LAW AND MORALITY

Whether and to what extent the principles of morality, and in particular religious morality, should be incorporated in the civil law is a difficult question, although for some it finds an apparently easy answer. Those who argue that religion and morality are private matters hold that they should not be incorporated into law at all. The usual justification for this position is that because each person comes by his own lights to his own estimation of the good, not only is general agreement on the principles of morality practically impossible, but the impossibility of general agreement powerfully suggests that there can be no general moral theory applicable to all.

It is certainly true that because the law must apply to everyone, it cannot be seen to "privilege" unjustly one moral system over another, and this applies especially to religious morality in an age when the number of practicing believers is declining in many Western countries. Given this, it seems merely a matter of common sense that religion and morality on the one hand, and law on the other, must be rigidly demarcated.

One problem with this is that common sense is never as simple as it appears to be, and often obscures beliefs and premises that are taken for granted. The assumption at work in the proposition that law and morality must always be separated has a comparatively short intellectual history. When this proposition first made its appearance it was highly controversial, and despite its assimilation into the academic and popular wisdom of our age it remains controversial still. The massive public scrutiny that is brought to bear on nominees for senior judicial appointment in the United States and the growing criticism of "judicial activism" in other English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia are indications of how controversial the "separation" of law and morality continues to be, especially in the area of jurisprudence.

The morality that proponents of separation are particularly keen to exclude from the law is generally of course Christian morality. This term is understood very broadly to include not only expressly religious moral principles, such as those that trace the sanctity of life to its origins in a gift from God, but also moral principles drawn from traditions such as the natural law that uphold the sanctity of life and other key values on strictly philosophical grounds. Opponents of the natural law tradition view it, together with natural law principles still at work in civil law such as those supporting the marriage laws, as a disguised form of religious morality that has no place in modern secular law. Underlying this opposition are certain assumptions about religion and reason being in exclusively antithetical relationship to each other and about religion upholding only strictly "religious" principles.

The sundering of religion and reason emerged clearly in the middle of the eighteenth century. Before that religion and reason were most often seen as compatible, even mutually necessary, not only in the Catholic tradition of thinking and theologizing but also in, for example, English thinking after Henry VIII. Reason served man by deepening his understanding of God and the mysteries of both revelation and the created world. It was only in the eighteenth century that religion came to be seen by many as an impediment to the clear apprehension of the truth and that the explanations offered by reason came to be understood as destructive of the explanations offered by religion. From a situation where theology was queen of the sciences and reason's inspiration, religion became an elaborate system of superstition that clouded the understanding.

The historian Paul Johnson has identified the great Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume as "the first well-known European figure who not only proclaimed himself a genuine atheist in life, but died an atheist as well," which is undoubtedly the harder thing to do. One small difficulty with this claim is that Hume was not an atheist. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that though Hume produced batteries of argument against religious claims he never quite came to the point of an outright denial of God's existence. For him, belief in God could not be proved, though such belief could be said to be psychologically and socially beneficial. Hume did not believe in an afterlife, but on the question of an intelligent Creator perhaps we had better say he was-just possibly-agnostic. Nevertheless, Hume's death in 1776 was seen by Benjamin Franklin as a portent, although Samuel Johnson could not be convinced that Hume felt no pain at the thought of complete annihilation.

Over the century that followed in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution things moved quickly. Among the many important figures in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century intellectual life whose influence contributed to the secularization of the European mind, perhaps the most seminal was G. W. F. Hegel, especially through his influence on Karl Marx, who (drawing on the work of Ludwig Feuerbach) turned Hegel's spiritualism upside down, and even on Max Weber. Although at times religiously orthodox, Hegel propounded a view of human history as "an inexorable progression from lower to higher forms, from ignorance to knowledge, from unreason to reason." Hegel held that in this process religion has an important place, but one that must be ultimately superseded by higher forms of consciousness.

The notion that belief in God is part of a lower phase in human development took a tremendous hold on the Western mind. Paul Johnson claims it "penetrated every aspect of intellectual life, from the physical sciences to the burgeoning social sciences such as philology, economics, sociology and history, and even biblical studies." This development was accompanied by certain scientific breakthroughs that seemed to undermine further the foundations of religion and morality. In the 1820s and 1830s the world's geology was totally recast to undermine fatally the traditional chronology and historicity of the Old Testament. This was followed by the Darwinian revolution in the 1840s and 1850s, which totally demolished the scientific authority of the book of Genesis as it had previously been understood by many believers.

In 1860 Thomas Huxley, Darwin's most fanatical devotee, famously debated Samuel Wilberforce, the Anglican bishop of Oxford, on evolution at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, virtually declaring "intellectual war on Christianity" in the process. "Thereafter it became almost a commonplace, in intellectual circles, to assume that religious belief was a receding force in human spirituality, and this applied whether you valued or despised it." Sigmund Freud provided a means of reinforcing and extending this view when he published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, laying out the basis of psychoanalysis's powerfully disenchanting approach to human nature. Committed to the advancement of an expressly atheistic understanding of reason, Darwin, Marx, and Freud were to become the three most powerful intellectual forces in the first half of the twentieth century. Darwin alone among these nineteenth-century idols remains to continue this project today.

Matthew Arnold's oft-quoted lines from his 1867 poem "Dover Beach" offer an accurate and powerful presentation of the prevailing sentiment of his time. Arnold wrote that "the sea of Faith"

Was once too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

Others were not so elegiac. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche shared nothing of Arnold's romantically expressed sense of loss. "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" he famously wrote in 1882. Nietzsche had scathing contempt for the English utilitarians and rationalists, holding that they did not go far enough. They had renounced the Christian religion but did not dare to renounce the morality of Christianity, which continued to hold sway in secularized form despite the death of God. "For the English," Nietzsche wrote, "morality is not a problem yet." A generation or two would have to pass before it became so.

The twentieth century was an unimaginable catastrophe. Technological progress, one of the great blessings of the period, has massively extended the capacity of tyrants to kill. Between 85 and 100 million people were killed by Communist regimes alone, and another 21 million were killed by the German National Socialists. According to one estimate, perhaps as many as 170 million have been killed by state-sponsored violence to 1993, more than four times the number of those killed in battle in local and international wars since 1900. Three of the four most murderous regimes, those of Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, openly proclaimed atheist materialism, while Hitler's regime was avowedly pagan. All four tyrannies were radically opposed to religion, morality, and law.

We should be very cautious about attributing the crimes of these regimes directly to the ideas of the Enlightenment, although we are on safer ground in drawing a link to the worst practices of the French Revolution, particularly in the use made of law to authorize terror and mass murder. There is no doubt, however, that the great totalitarianisms of the twentieth century shared some of the foundational presuppositions of the secularism that Enlightenment thought promoted. Totalitarianism held religion in contempt, seeing it as a source of weakness and superstition. It might be manipulated for short-term political advantage if necessary, but the morality that upheld the value of human life, and insisted on respect for the weak-unborn children, the disabled and mentally handicapped, the old and sick-was always regarded as a deficient point of view, the perspective of "decadent" bourgeois democratic societies.

This contempt for morality and religion led to a particular approach to the law. The totalitarian regimes mocked law and the rule of law, enacting legislation enshrining extensive rights and protections while ruling through terror administered by pseudo-legal procedures. It was no accident that the law was degraded in this way as religion and morality were attacked and undermined.

Nor should it be assumed that this sort of logic unfolds only in totalitarian dictatorships. Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae warned that when "the original and inalienable right to life is questioned or denied on the basis of a parliamentary vote or the will of one part of the people-even if it is a majority," the right to life ceases to be a right based on "the inviolable dignity of the person, but is made subject to the will of the stronger part." A society that takes to itself the power to determine who does and does not enjoy a right to life is no longer "a common home" for all. The apparent legality of its processes and decisions in this regard is a betrayal of legality, for unless the democratic ideal "acknowledges and safeguards the dignity of every human person, [it] is betrayed in its very foundations." For a state to recognize in law a "right" to infanticide and euthanasia is to "attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom."

Abortion and euthanasia are at the center of arguments about the relationship between religion, morality, and law. Supporters of abortion and euthanasia "rights" regularly describe (or deride) opposing principles as "religious" in an attempt to disqualify them from being taken into consideration by legislators and jurists. A related argument tells opponents they have no right to "impose" their personal moral views on the community as a whole. Notoriously, this particular argument is also offered by legislators who want both to retain the support of a traditional constituency and to support bad laws.

Both arguments are deeply problematic. The suggestion that religious views should be silenced or that believers should be excluded from taking part in public debate cannot be accepted in a democracy. Religious people have as much right as the nonreligious to state their views and to argue for them. The argument that personal moral views should not be imposed on others when it comes to lawmaking is incoherent and misleading. It is incoherent because a great deal of law implicitly "imposes" a particular moral view on the wider society. It would be disingenuous to pretend that the legalization of abortion on demand or euthanasia does not impose a certain moral view on the rest of society. This is especially true when arguments for abortion and euthanasia are based on rights. The appeal to rights is a moral argument, and it is this appeal to moral authority that gives force to laws enshrining rights.

The argument about imposing personal morality is also misleading, and this is perhaps the more important criticism to make, especially from the practical perspective of those actively involved in the defense of life in the public square. In the passage from Evangelium vitae quoted above John Paul II does not invoke the law of God or the Ten Commandments as reasons for opposing attacks on life, although elsewhere in the encyclical these explicitly religious and Christian grounds for opposition are set out at length. Instead he bases this opposition on "the inviolable dignity of the person," the concept on which most mainline theories of rights also base themselves. Is defending life on the basis of the inviolable dignity of the person really the same thing as imposing one's personal moral views on the rest of the community?

If it is, then the same must hold for laws against genocide and slavery and unjust discrimination, which are also based on the inviolable dignity of the person. If opposition to abortion or euthanasia is no more than a "personal" matter, a product of idiosyncratic religious or moral beliefs, then so too is opposition to slavery and genocide. It is an interesting indication of the depths of our confusion that while a legislator who was personally opposed to the legalization of slavery but voted for it anyway would be regarded as a humbug, a legislator who does the same thing on abortion is treated as a moral hero.

In this confusion we begin to see what lies behind John Paul II's startling warning about democracy "effectively mov[ing] towards a form of totalitarianism." It begins to happen at a practical level when we simultaneously hold that rights which arise from the dignity of the person are also a matter of "bargaining." New rights can be claimed or created, and whatever privileges can be negotiated around them are then secured by reference to human dignity, even when these new rights are directly contrary to the human dignity of some, for example, the unborn or the elderly sick. This confusion about the nature of rights debases their currency and undermines the first principles of democracy. Such freedom gradually becomes a tyrannical "freedom of the 'the strong' against the weak, who have no choice but to submit."

The confusion about rights in democratic societies stems from a fundamental confusion about freedom. As Pope John Paul emphasizes in Evangelium vitae, the prevailing concept of democratic freedom is radically individualistic, "exalt[ing] the isolated individual in an absolute way," giving "no place to solidarity, to openness to others and service of them." Coupled with this idea of freedom as absolute autonomy is the fading of the notion of universal moral principles and the decline of binding moral truths. "Freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth." If each individual becomes "the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices, [not] the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion," interest, or whim, "social life ventures on to the shifting sands of complete relativism." As agreement on foundational moral principles is taken to be impossible, majority votes and the decisions of judges determine contentious issues absolutely. This is not a sufficient basis on which to safeguard the long-term public legitimacy of the law.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from GOD & CAESAR by GEORGE PELL Copyright © 2007 by The Catholic University of America Press. Excerpted by permission.
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