Exploring the universe man discovers more and more of its laws, and, with each new law discovered, his freedom increases. If, at first hearing, this sounds paradoxical, that is only because we are thinking of the laws of the universe, God's laws, as though they were like the laws that man makes. Man's laws constrain us only when they are enacted, so that we may feel each new law as a new interference. But when a scientist, say, announces a law of nature he has not enacted it, but only discovered it.
For the laws of the universe are there all the time, and we are affected by them whether we know them or not. We do not need to know about Vitamin B to die of malnutrition for want of it; the new-born baby can be destroyed by the law of gravity as easily as Sir Isaac Newton. So that man's discovery of these laws is not the beginning of his subjection to them; on the contrary, once he knows what they are, he can learn how to cooperate with them, and by so co-operating increase his own freedom within them. His freedom can be only within them, never from them. By discovering the laws of flight, man was able to harmonize himself with them more perfectly, and so gained the freedom of the upper air. The utmost freedom for man lies in co-operation, obedience, harmony with the universe and its laws.
For a being with a mind there is no freedom, there is only degradation, in harmonizing himself with a mere mechanism, taking his orders from hydrogen and oxygen and such. There is only grotesqueness and indignity in being forced into harmony with things less than ourselves. One way or another all thinkers have told us that we must be in tune with the universe. But why shouldn't the universe be in tune with us? After all, we know what a tune is, and it does not. If we do not believe in God, we must see ourselves performing in an orchestra under a conductor who does not even know that he is conducting, does not even know that he is. There can be no enslavement so total as that of minds to the mindless. And if there be no Mind behind the universe, then mindlessness says the last word as it said the first. But the mind of God is there, and it is with Him that we are to be in tune, in obedience to His laws that we are to find freedom.
Looking at man, with no views already formed as to the nature of law, an observer would say that he is subject to bodily and mental laws, and that he subjects himself to moral laws. The first two, which may roughly be lumped together as physical laws, the observer might see as the statement of how bodies and minds work, so that men would be wise to act accordingly. The moral laws he might feel as being in a different category-man thinking that this is what God wants and that it would be virtuous to act accordingly. So feeling, the observer would be only partly right. That God's command gives the moral law a new quality that the physical laws have not got is true. But the moral laws are, just as much as the physical laws, statements of how things work.
We must not think that whereas physical laws operate with or without our consent, we have a choice about the moral laws: for they are not simply rules that it is virtuous to observe: they too operate. In this matter the position is exactly the same for both. We can treat either set of laws as though it does not exist. But that is the limit of our choice: we have no choice about the consequences in the one or in the other. The law of justice is as much a law as the law of gravity (the latter is more easily discoverable, but not therefore more important- more beneficial in its observance, more catastrophic in its ignoring). Every sort of consequence flows from this. Because each is a law, we cannot break either. We can ignore them or flout them, by walking over a cliff, for instance, or stealing: but the law of gravity is not broken in the one case or the law of justice in the other. Both laws continue to operate and it is we who are broken. Material law or moral law, either way you are living under God's law: and that applies to every creature of God from the ruler downwards.
It is exactly the same with the moral law. The mightiest despot cannot drive a Ford car save as Ford made it to be driven. If he wants to drive a Ford car, then like the humblest of his subjects he must study the maker's instructions. God is man's maker and the laws of morality are his instructions for the running of man. They cannot be broken but they can be ignored, and, with the man as with the car, the ignoring is destructive: this may not immediately appear-there may even be temporary gain-but the result is always loss.
As I have said, it is hard for the ruler to realize that the moral law is law in this sense. It is hard for everybody, because we have so free a choice whether we shall act morally or immorally. All health for men and communities lies in realizing two truths about the moral laws. The first is that they are laws of reality: to say for example that economics has nothing to do with morals is like saying it has nothing to do with physics: it is not simply morally wrong to go against God's laws to gain something for ourselves, it is plain foolishness: we cannot gain by going against them because they are a statement of the way things really are, observing them goes with sanity. The second is that this is not servitude but freedom, for in observing them man is more fully man and not a travesty.
The laws of morality, like the laws that govern our body and our mind, are written into our nature. That is to say, God made us with certain powers which can only function properly in the line of the moral law, and certain needs which can only be satisfied by action in that line: just as our bodies are made with the power to digest certain foods, and will only function if fed by them: the moral laws are in man's structure very much as the laws of diet are. If we do not observe the bodily laws, we get protest in the body, stomach-ache for example. If we do not observe the moral laws, we get that protest in the mind, a troubled conscience, which is in fact the protest of the spiritual part of man against misuse, that is to say against action contrary to the moral law which is woven into the very making of man.
In making this judgment of ought or ought not, the mind's standard is the law of God which is, in the sense already set out, in the very structure of man's nature. But a lot has happened to man's nature since it came new-built from the power of God; and too much of what has happened has damaged it and not perfected it. Men have damaged their natures by misuse, in spite of the protests of conscience, and have settled into certain routines of misuse. So that on all sorts of wrong actions there is no audible protest any more.
Some indeed of these aberrations have managed to impose themselves as duties, with conscience active on their behalf. Thus, there have been peoples who, when a man died, slew his wives to bury them with him, and would have thought it shocking not to. Even when conscience speaks loud and clear against some particular wrong action, some matter upon which our nature is still as God made it, we can find philosophies to explain away the protest, so that ultimately it too falls silent. And one way or another we grow comfortable in some at least of our sins. But they are, slowly or quickly, imperceptibly or spectacularly, damaging us all the same.
The second way of learning the laws of morality, by hearing what God explicitly teaches, brings us to the real distinction between physical and moral laws. Physical laws God leaves man to discover for himself; moral laws He tells man-not only tells him what they are, but tells him to observe them: so that His moral teaching is at once information and command. One can see a twofold reason why God should tell us the one set of laws and not the other. For in the first place the moral laws are harder to discover, and in the second they are more essential to be known.
The teaching of the moral law by God to man has been progressive. It would be outside the scale of this book to give more than the main stages in the progress. In the Ten Commandments God gave to His chosen people, through Moses, the essence of the natural moral law, the law as it might have been discovered by the mind of man from the way God had made man-provided, of course, that man's nature had remained as God shaped it and man's mind interpreted that nature aright. Fifteen hundred years later Christ restated the law given to Moses, perfected it, and uttered its profoundest meaning in the two commands that we love God with all our power and love our neighbor as ourself. These two commands were not meant to supersede either the great mass of detailed commands for the application of the natural law, or the new precepts that Christ gave-as in the matter of Baptism, for instance-in relation to man's supernatural destiny. But they give us the life principle of all laws, that without which all of them would only be sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. In the two thousand years since, Christ's Church has carried on the teaching work, taking the Ten Commandments to the uttermost ends of the earth, and applying the moral teachings of Christ to the new situations that social, political and economic changes have produced.
It will be the worse for us if we do not keep the commandments. Any contravention of the moral laws damages man, because they are laws: one does not have to know the laws of morality to be damaged by coming into collision with them. But the damage is not fatal unless we have broken a command of love-that is, unless we have deliberately chosen love of self as against love of God. That, and only that, makes sin mortal, death-bearing.
The average man's first reaction is that this is totally unrealistic: it is a nice sentiment, charged with idealism, but impossible: that He should have uttered ~t shows that Christ was indeed the friend of man: if only He had known men better-as well, say, as we do-He would have known that it couldn't be done. But this is folly. As man, Christ experienced all the possibilities of malice that the heart of man can find within itself, indeed human malice seemed as if driven to new ingenuities at new depths for His destruction. He tells us to love our enemies; and who has ever had enemies like His? And if, as man, Christ knew the cruel possibilities of human nature by experiencing their sharpest edge, this was still only the fringe of His knowledge of man: for Christ was God, and as God He knew the being He had created, knew above all the potentialities in man by His gift, and His own power to aid men to realize them. That we love all men is the command of God, who made us. He would not give us an impossible command.
We must, then, will the good of all men, not merely wish it, but will it, will it effectively, will to work for it, will it as we will our own. Observe that Our Lord does not say that we must love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves, but only as we love ourselves. The degree of intensity will vary, but the love will be of the same sort. We shall not love others as much as we love ourselves- most people we shall love less, a small handful of people we may love more than ourselves. But towards all men it must be real love, a genuine willing good to them, good in the next life good in this life.
We have seen that the love Christ commands is not an emotional love. But normally there will be some stirring of emotion, some warmth in it. It is true, as we are so often reminded, that Christ commanded us to love everybody, but gave us no command to like everybody. Yet there is danger here. A strong drive in the will which has no warmth in it at all is psychologically something of a monstrosity, and in practice is very difficult to maintain. We should come to feel love for men, as men, and not simply hold grimly to the duty of willing and working for their good. Love, thus felt, adds something specific, something for which there is no substitute, something that reverence does not provide something that pity not only does not provide but may even betray.
But if there should be some warmth of emotion in our love for all men, there should be no sentimentality. Emotion is a legitimate product of love, sentimentality means that the energy has gone out of it to the point where it is denatured and only a parody. The absolute test as between love and sentimentality is whether we can see another's faults, hate them as faults, not minimize or idealize or romanticize their faultiness, and still love him. After all, we see faults in ourselves, and love ourselves still. With the same clearsighted love, we must love our neighbor.
Love is not something soft and mushy that simply asks to be imposed upon. If a man is a liar or a thief or a murderer, I must love him, just as in the same sad circumstances I should love myself. I must face the fact, I must be prepared to act upon it. Love does not mean, for example, smiling foolishly while murderers murder. If a man tries to kill me, I have a right to resist him; if a man tries to kill some other person, I have a duty to resist him. Willing good to all men does not mean leaving some men free to do evil to others-as when a criminal attacks a more decent citizen or when a nation commits brutal aggression upon another.
Our first instinctive rejection of this as impossible is partly based upon the false idea of love as purely emotional. We must love a man, even if we have to kill him. That does not mean we must be feeling strong affection for him. It does not necessarily mean feeling at all (although one who realizes his duty of reverence and love will probably be stirred emotionally to the very depths of his being by the cruel necessity of actions so hard to reconcile with them). I say it does not necessarily involve feeling. It means something far deeper-that we must still, with all the strength of our will, will him good. By his own act he has made it necessary for us to hurt him, to prevent his attaining something he wants but is not entitled to have. Yet we still will him all the good he has left it in our power to will him. And it is no pious platitude, but the plainest reality, that the eternal good we can still will him is more important to him than this earthly life that he forces us to cut short.
The difficulty begins with the elements, whatever they may be, that do in practice prevent the instinct from functioning. Such elements there must be, for love is not the dominant element in human relationships. The plain fact is that love in this sense stops short when the other man arouses our dislike, by his character or his actions or his principles. To love our enemies, to do good to them that hate us-that is the testing point. Only the exceptional person does it. But Christ commands that we all do it. We shall not do it without some more powerful motive than is provided by simply looking at men. The knowledge that God loves them, all of them, provides a reason: yet, as we saw earlier in the matter of reverence, a reason may be clearly seen by the intellect, yet not stimulate men to act. The one thing that can bring love, like reverence, fully alive is the realization that God loved all men enough to become man and die for them on Calvary.
The Augustine Club at Columbia University, 1996-2002