CP (#10) / The Invention of Morality

Medieval spiritual and temporal authorities in Europe wanted Natural Law to be about good, but needed it to be about evil. Virtue is good for the soul. But vice is good for business.

Mar 26, 2025

Chunk #1

One my strategies for limiting cognitive overload—to which I am prone—is to break this manuscript into 25 thematic chunks of approximately 5,000 words each. My recent Wikidworld newsletters about the medieval origins of Catholic natural law, together constitute one of these “chunks.”

Far more, even, than when I launched Wikidworld, almost three years ago now, it’s evident that Natural Law is the most significant throughline for understanding how we got from 1945 to 2025. Nothing else comes close. It’s like the massive undersea cables through which communications flow from continent to continent. In our case, however, the throughline runs from the 13th century to the 21st century.

From Aristotle to Aquinas

One of the major propositions of my book is that with Thomist Natural Law we witness the invention of the modern notion of morality. I also argue that the invention of this conception of morality distinguishes Western Civilization from other civilizations.

When I say that the invention of morality distinguishes Western Civilization from other civilizations, I’m also accepting the assumption that the medieval Christian Church was the historic wellspring of Western Civilization as we know it today. So the invention of morality is also closely connected to the development and enduring political and social influence of Catholic theology and philosophy.

In making these claims, I distinguish between morality and ethics (which not all philosophers do, and which pretty much no Catholic philosophers do). In this instance — despite the enormous debt of Aquinas to Aristotle — it is simply fact that Aristotle’s Ethics differed significantly from the moral philosophy of Aquinas in the Summa’s and Commentaries. Which makes sense, generally, given the separation of 16 centuries between them (twice the gap between Aquinas and us) and the perils of transmission and translation across that chasm.

But there are other, more substantive, reasons to isolate the ethics of Aristotle from the morality of Aquinas. First, the Ethics is decidedly practical and specific, essentially a model of human psychology that tells us what healthy human interactions within society would look like and how to measure or diagnose deviations from that healthy mean.

Second, Aristotle’s Ethics are naturalistic, based on environmental observation, provisional behavioral standards, and presented more as explorations into the human mind than definitive statements on right and wrong. By contrast, and despite the association of Natural Law with Natural Theology—Aquinas deduced pretty much his entire body of work from first principles (uncaused causes, first things, etc.), perhaps not fully dependent on scripture and revelation but by definition in harmony with them, an expression of God’s eternal will, and therefore universal and the opposite of provisional or contingent.

Another thing that distinguishes the moral philosophy of Aquinas from the Ethics of Aristotle is its systematic foundations. Aristotle’s Ethics have been transmitted to us as the notes of students listening to his lectures (perhaps peripatetically). There was nothing rigorously systematic about them (which accounts in good measure for their charm).

By contrast, in an enormous corpus of more than eight million words, Aquinas (who was definitely not writing peripatetically) unspooled his moral philosophy via the serial deployment of syllogisms, a logical process that required each statement to conform closely and deterministically to the statement which came before. In the end, the success of his project required formal rigor from the syllogistic logic and full acceptance of the initial premises—the cosmology—that underpinned them.

The inductive methods of Aristotle depend on no absolute truths and, indeed, presume the opposite, that we measure human behavior as shades of gray, not in black and white. No political agenda or imperatives attach themselves to Aristotle’s Ethics, save perhaps an instinct toward political moderation.

With its rigid premises and methods, however, the systematic moral philosophy of Aquinas could only fully realize itself to the extent the Church adopted it as an instrument of control, as an enforceable template for the behavior of those falling under the authority of the Church (which in the high Middle Ages was to say nearly everyone in Europe).

In other words, the systematic philosophy and theology of Aquinas almost literally required for its implementation and expression the enforcement instruments of a powerful religious authority—which could quite easily translate into a powerful political authority. In this respect, the medieval Catholic idea that politics is by definition about virtue, not freedom, also contains within this moral imperative a theology of power.

The hidden subjunctives that connect virtue and power within Natural Law moral philosophy — the veiled threat, the if I were you, the thou shalts and thou shalt nots — are but the underside of the instrumental assault on the Nature Environment sanctioned by, and even commanded by, the conception of the human as imago Dei.

We live today with the consequences.

*The Garden of Earthly Delights* (Hieronymous Bosch, 1510-1515)

God is a Cosmic Sheriff

Let’s consider the idea that Natural Law exists as a social control mechanism — accessible to humans intellectually, via their capacity to reason. Let’s imagine God as a cosmic sheriff who has deputized humans to use Natural Law to establish and maintain good order within God’s Creation.

And what is this Creation, this everything that is not-Creator? Framed slightly differently, if one were to remove reason from the world, what would remain?

One word we can use to characterize the Abrahamic God’s Creation is carnal, a term that appears nearly 500 times in the Summa Theologica. Here are some definitions of carnal from Wordnik.

Pertaining to the flesh or the body, its passions and its appetites; fleshly; sensual; lustful; gross; flesh-eating; ravenous; bloody; impure.
Not spiritual; merely human; not partaking of anything divine or holy; unregenerate; unsanctified.

Let’s use the carnality of Creation as our lens. Consider the symbolism of carnal appetites as physical (and irrational) representations of sin — of everything that is disobedient, deviant, disordered, and dysregulated.

If carnality is the embodiment of sin, we can better appreciate the obsessive fascination — which otherwise might seem merely prurient — of Catholic Natural Law with its protean, shapeshifting capacity to define (and redefine) immorality.

Thomas Aquinas never confused the perfect with the good. Like both Aristotle and Augustine, he was always clear that the former belonged to the City of God, the latter merely to the City of Man.

But here’s the thing about Thomist-Catholic Natural Law. The synthesis is fragile and precarious. As a philosophy of morality, Natural Law has never been able to decide whether it wants to be about good or about evil, about love or about lust.

In some ways — to generalize grossly — we can say that medieval spiritual and temporal authorities in Europe wanted Natural Law to be about good, but needed it to be about evil.

The Catholic Church has never sorted out this conundrum. Virtue is good for the soul. But vice is good for business.

It’s All About “Unisexual Lust”

Of course, in the textbook, or canonical, reading of Thomist moral philosophy, Natural Law only concerns the pursuit of the common good, through the application of practical or applied reason (determinatio) to life’s quotidian decisions.

We only need to guide and true ourselves to the north star of a handful of self-evident precepts: that God exists; that God is the Creator; that all created beings seek their own good; and that the fullness of Creation itself occurs with the harmonic attunement of each of these specific goods to a higher good that brings all closer to God.

The first precept of law [is] that "good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided." AII other precepts of the natural law are based upon this: so that whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends as man's good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the natural law as something to be done or avoided.

Human (positive) law derives from and is guided by the Natural Law, which in turn is nothing but a participation in the Eternal Law, “for it is certain that such a law cannot err.”

The dependence of Aquinas on Aristotle requires him to focus on the specific natures of specific creatures, which determines the ends—or goods—they seek, around which specific virtues relevant to these goods can assemble themselves and be cultivated.

The problem is that Aristotelian natural philosophy is definitionally incapable of comprehending evil, which is never about deviation from specific natures, but which operates at a deeper and more profound layer of existence, where it consorts with NATURE itself, where one encounters what Aquinas calls “the exuberance of sin.”

Consider this distinction that Aquinas makes between “human nature” and “natures’s nature.”

By human nature we may mean either that which is proper to man- and in this sense all sins, as being against reason, are also against nature, as Damascene states (De Fide Orth. ii, 30): or we may mean that nature which is common to man and other animals; and in this sense, certain special sins are said to be against nature; thus contrary to sexual intercourse, which is natural to all animals, is unisexual lust, which has received the special name of the unnatural crime.

It’s perhaps not intentional—but also not accidental—that “unisexual lust” illustrates Aquinas’s notion of the “unnatural crime,” this ultimate offense against Nature itself. What we might propose instead is that Nature itself is replete with deviations from that which is “natural,” that Nature itself is “unnatural.”

Natural Law struggles when it must acknowledge that layer of Nature that dissolves the boundaries between humans and other animals, where we are defined by our carnality, where all are—by nature—inordinate and hence invariably disordered.

Catholicpunk Draft: #6
March 26, 2025