The Morning Star And Catholic Messenger

The Moral Law Among Pagan Nations.

The title of this article belonged of right to the preceding one, which was introductory to it; but whether through oversight on the writer's part or owing to the circumstances which compelled him to break off where he did, the omission was made anyway, and the sooner the mistake to which it may lead is corrected the better. In our last article we referred to the fragmentary traditions which drifted down the channels of time, and formed here and there, at first an island in the water's waste, and then an oasis in the arid desert of unbelief. These disjointed traditions were the legitimate conclusions of the eternal principles given to man to be worked out; and though the principles, of which they are the inevitable deductions, have, in the regions we are now traversing, long lain in abeyance or been utterly forgotten or denied, still they live and act, not only because in their origin they are to be traced back to the Immutable God, but also because without them society of any kind is impossible. There is society even in hell—society with its hierarchical order, with its narrowing, tapering pyramid of power and infernal authority—on the top of which the fallen but yet, in its fall, the mighty intelligence of Satan thrones itself in bad eminence. There is also society on earth, even where the vitalizing principles of society are ignored or repudiated. Let society, or the few individuals who in every aggregation of men arrogate to themselves the designation of society, do what they may, they can never succeed in blotting out from the people's memory and from their practical daily life the consequences legitimately drawn from the primitive intuition in which the people themselves have as liberal a share as the philosophers who seek to guide, and in guiding, for the most part, mislead them. It is the case with individual false philosophers, as with heretics in the second or third or any subsequent degree: both are better than the systems they profess or espouse, and live less in accordance with their private convictions, and therefore no convictions at all, since conviction implies principle, and principle is eternal, than in accordance with the good old public sense, which is the common patrimony of us all, and manifests itself to us in both public customs and private examples.

Such doctrines as these here proclaimed are by no means fashionable in our day. In brilliant, witty, facetious France they are set aside as too deep; in Germany they are simply ignored, because the profound, plodding genius of the German seeks elsewhere wherewith to employ itself. The educated reader, be he Catholic or not, will of course take for granted that in speaking of France and Germany we refer only to the infidel and pantheistic parties in those two great countries, and must excuse us for not alluding to either England or America, since the former never did produce a philosopher worth the name, and the latter is simply its servile imitator. In speaking of America, however, we must except one, to the manner born, O. A. Brownson, a genuine philosopher, but at the same time we must say, by his leave, that his eminence as a philosopher is due to his being a Catholic. Most of our modern philosophers and learned men are in the habit, not of tracing back to primitive traditions, but of seeking in what they choose to call the spontaneous development of the human mind the civil, social and intellectual patrimony of nations. This is the false principle, which vitiates the whole of a discourse we read this morning—a discourse in all other respects teeming with incongruities, delivered by Mr. C. F. Buck, a few days ago, at the State Military Academy at Baton Rouge. Now, to justify our difference in opinion, with all the abettors of this development, we beg leave to assert, since the word has the sanction of general abuse, that development necessarily presupposes antecedent germs, which can be developed only by the aid of reflection and language. Civil developments may be the work of man, but not so the principles of which they are evolutions. These emanate from two distinct sources, one of which is native and the other adventitious; the one internal and the other external; the one the acquisition of reason, the other the patrimony of tradition; while both together correspond to the nature and actual condition of man in the twofold substance of soul and body of which he is composed.

Now the external, traditional, and, in most cases, foreign element, whereby civilization is actualized and advanced, is language, taking this term, not in its restricted sense as a particular form of articulate speech, but in its broadest acceptation, as the incarnate, visible, tangible expression of all outward signs. In this sense language includes not only words, but also acts; it is tradition embodied, and in it we must look for all the oral and monumental as well as the written records of our race.

The traditional forms of emanationism, inasmuch as they cloak over instead of eradicating the intrinsic viciousness of the doctrines which are its inevitable result, can only furnish a code of morality, roughly sketched, one-sided, unjust, riddled all over with deficiencies, and liable to the most monstrous misinterpretations. For this reason emanationism begets a variety of ethological systems, each one of which is true in that it represents the cosmic order under a certain aspect, and false, inasmuch as, taking that aspect as the only one under which the cosmic order can be considered, and assigning to it a universality which does not belong to it, it ultimately denies and rejects, or at least tends to weaken and mar that order itself. Among these forms, two in particular claim our consideration, as being distinctly prominent, one of which belongs, in an especial manner, to intuition and the other to reflection—that is to say, to the two sources from which human knowledge is derived. In the progress of this essay it will be demonstrated that these are the two poles of all unchristian or anti-christian civilization, and that real civilization consists in their reciprocal checks upon each other under the harmonizing influences of the Christian religion. Intuition, as we have proved, is involuntary, fatal, and springs up necessarily out of the substantial activity of the mind, which for this is so absorbed in its object that, without the interposition of another principle, it cannot turn back upon itself. This other principle is reflection, which, unlike intuition, is free, presupposes intuition, and presupposing it and working it out, gives the mind at once the cognition of itself and of the object of intuition, whence in it knowledge in its fulness resides, and to it must be traced the man's moral personality in the free exercise of his powers. Accordingly it is the medium traversed by thought in its passage to act, since the radical activity of the soul manifests itself as will, and therefore deliberates and acts, inasmuch as, with the aid of reflection guided itself by the landmarks of thought which language has set down, it selects, now here now there, on the vast and shadowy canvas of intuition, a determinate point on which its activity impinges. Will always implies a particularized activity, and stands in the same relation to the radical activity of the mind that reflection stands in to intuition itself. From this it is evident that reflection leads to action, which, whatever our Calvinistic neighbors may say against it, is the fruit of free will, while simple intuition consists in that contemplation in which the mind fixes itself on no one determinate point, but is rapt and absorbed in the universal object of all knowledge. Now, although intuition and reflection can never be actually divorced, (since intuition cannot know what itself means without the concurrence of reflection, and reflection without intuition lacks the material to work with,) yet their respective intensity can and, as we shall see, often does vary, and one of the two powers, if the balance between them be once broken, prevail to the prejudice of the other; and from the loss of this essential equilibrium two different psychological states are an inevitable consequence—the contemplative and the active, in which intuition or reflection respectively predominates. To these two states there are two several ethical systems to correspond, each logically deducible from the eternal principle of law, according as it is viewed in contemplation or copied and reproduced in action. These two states, however, are, in the design of nature, eminently compatible: nay, they mutually require each other to incarnate in its excellence the Idea of the Good, which is the vital principle of all ethics, but the precise point, in which both meet and are harmonized, was never hit upon by mankind save when indicated to them by the God-given wisdom of Christianity.

Heterodox peoples having, through the false principles they took up with, lost sight of the true conception of the moral archetype, were not slow in forming the most vicious, exaggerated and absurd ideas of the contemplative and active states of life which we are now considering. But the reader must bear in mind that we are speaking of the Pagan, not of the Christian world, and that if, while we apply the terms contemplative and active to the false mysticism of Eastern and the aimless activity of Western nations, we do so simply to indicate with greater brevity the two leading theories of Pagan morality, whether ancient or modern, we must by no means be supposed to refer to the serious, deeply meditated action and the laborious and fruitful contemplation inculcated in the Gospel and practised by the Saints. These shall be considered in their proper place.

In every moral system the ruling idea is taken from the ultimate end assigned by that system to human actions, in other words, from the determining conception of the second ideal cycle. This cycle, having to correspond to the first, implies, according to the doctrine of the emanationists the creation of one's own personality, for the emanationist, considering the production of things as a simple phenomenal transformation of the one original substance, and therefore a mere transplanting of it out of its perfect state, must place the end of the second cycle and ultimate beatitude in the dissolution of all these vain appearances and his own annihilation. And as ulterior perfection in this life consists in anticipating as far as while in it is possible the ultimate bliss of the life to come, in hastening the fulfillment of the last cycle and getting a foretaste of its unutterable enjoyments, the emanationist's absorbing duty is, by all means, to abdicate his own personality, and keep it in abeyance, since he may not utterly destroy it. To succeed in this, he must make every effort to suspend reflection and concentrate all his faculties in the single act of intuition—because one is centrifugal and the other the reverse: reflection draws man to the consideration of himself, and intuition absorbs him into the object of all knowledge. And as the intuitive act predominates in contemplation, contemplation must characterize distinctively, with Pagan nations, every manifestation of the moral law, whenever their practical ethics differs not from their speculative systems. This is no less true of the imperturbable politics of remote and abstemious India than of the accommodating "higher law" prevailing nearer home in restless, dyspeptic America. But this sort of contemplation, while it is absurd in its principle, is immoral in its consequences, because whoso addicts himself to it, having at all times to lose sight of himself and all external things, neglects also his civil duties, or if he performs them at all, it is more by way of compromise with expediency and for saving appearances than to comply with the requirements of a state in life which he would commit a grievous sin in not heeding. His sole duty, in his view of duty, is to identify himself as far as possible with the object which he contemplates, not, however, with the active love which characterizes Christian contemplation, but with a sterile inertia of the mind, which by not exercising paralyzes all the other spiritual powers. Since the affections will not so easily adapt themselves to this arrangement, he takes it to be his duty to extirpate them, but with the wicked and inordinate propensities of nature he roots out also its best and most generous elements: he repudiates (we refer to old drowsy India, albeit the reader may think we are delineating the character of the modern Presbyterian,) enjoyments the most harmless, not by any means for a greater good, but because he holds for wicked and intrinsically bad, whatever interferes with his favorite predestinationism, or disturbs that complacent stupor, which might be not inappropriately termed the dolce far niente of the soul.