Kolnai on the "immoralism" of humanitarianism (and its "hypermoralism," too)

"irreligious humanitarianism necessarily involves a certain bias for immoralism inasmuch as it has no room for the concept of intrinsic moral evil, and of the moral scissure in human nature. Rejecting all intrinsic discrimination between human 'needs,' and interpreting moral 'evil' merely in terms of impulses which in given conditions are likely to interfere with the fulfillment of more imperious, general, and permanent 'needs,' it is bound to profess an ethical 'positivism' cleared from all experience of 'sin,' which is tantamount to a flattening out of all moral life into a technique of the gratification of desires. . . .
"The humanitarian attitude will lean towards making the goodness or badness of any type of conduct dependent on the part it may play in a functional framework of situations; placing instincts and moods on a footing with the direction of the will, manifestations of the 'subconscious' with decisions enacted by man's central personality, deficiency in 'training' or 'development' as well as 'disease' with malice and deliberate wickedness; and substituting 'cure' or 'prevention,' 'education' or 'elimination,' for all retaliation [(retributive justice)] proper. To the humanitarian mind, Raskolnikov's 'claim' to slaying and despoiling the old usurer will probably appear 'erroneous,' but not altogether absurd . . . ; while the public authority's right to execute the murderer must obviously appear absurd and fictitious--for the infliction of death and suffering will not be made undone but merely aggravated by the consequent infliction of more death and suffering. Under humanitarianism, the judgment of crime will tend to degenerate into a mere protection of 'majority' interests: to shrink to a mere repression of the inconvenient--or again, perhaps, to expand into a suppression of whatever may be deemed inconvenient. The self-same mentality that rejects the concept of punishing the evildoer as 'superstitious' or a 'mere disguise for the primitive urge of revenge' may glibly accept the 'elimination' of the 'unfit for life' or the 'maladjusted' as an act of 'higher humanity.'"

Aurel Kolnai, "The humanitarian versus the religious attitude," The Thomist 7, no. 4 (October 1944): 444-445. This "immoralism" Kolnai proceeds to associate with what, in humanitarianism, is paradoxically its reverse, a kind of "hypermoralism": "Certainly moral values taken in any specific sense of the term seem to be engulfed and transposed here entirely in concepts of material or 'psychic' welfare; but the less content attaches to the idea of moral perfection and the less moral substance appears to be left over, the more pretentious and cocksure becomes the pursuit of the claim to a formally 'perfect' world, a morally 'waterproof' and indeed a 'foolproof' reality as it were" (446).

Hart on Julian the Apostate

"The truest sign of the [Christian] revolution's triumph was . . . the reign of Julian. Not because of his personal defeat: the old and rather nasty Christian legend of his last moments—filling his hand with the blood pouring from his wounded side, flinging it at the sun, and crying 'Thou hast conquered, Galilaean!'—is nothing more than a spiteful lie. In fact, his final hours were adorned by a moving profession of faith on his part, full of gratitude to the divine, and free of any trace of resentment or self-pity. The real proof of what the gospel wrought in its first three centuries lay in Julian himself, as he was in the full splendor of his pagan prime. From Constantine to Theodosius, the emperor most genuinely Christian in sensibility—in moral feeling, spiritual yearning, and personal temper—was Julian the Apostate. . . . It is simply one of the great ironies of history that everything Julian wanted from his chosen faith—personal liberation and purification, a united spiritual culture, a revived civilization, moral regeneration for himself and his people—was possible only through the agency in time of the religion he so frantically despised."

     David Bentley Hart, Atheist delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 198.

Hart on the cultural contingency of charity

"Compassion, pity, and charity, as we understand and cherish them, are not objects found in nature, like trees or butterflies or academic philosophers, but are historically contingent conventions of belief and practice, formed by cultural convictions that need never have arisen at all."

     David Bentley Hart, Atheist delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 16. On p. 169 he makes the same comment about conscience, and on p. 180, about our "solicitude for human equality". But this is also, of course, the point of the entire book.  See, for example, pp. 32-33:

modernity is not simply a 'postreligious' condition; it is the state of society that has been specifically a Christian society but has 'lost the faith.'  The ethical presuppositions intrinsic to modernity . . . are palliated fragments and haunting echoes of Christian moral theology.  Even the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal equality, or basic human dignity that pre-Christian Western culture would have found not so much foolish as unintelligible.  It is simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to believe in any of these things—they would never have occurred to us—had our ancestors not once believed that God is love, that charity is the foundation of all virtues, that all of us are equal before the eyes of God, that to fail to feed the hungry or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, and that Christ laid down his life for the least of his brethren.

Torrell on Aquinas on immediacy

“This [much] is too clear to be open to debate, but one could draw the wrong conclusion from the fact that Thomas adds that 'among theologians . . . one adopts the contrary order, such that the consideration of the Creator precedes that of the creature'. There can be no question but that he thinks that the revelation made by God is presupposed to the work of the theologian, and that this knowledge can be taken as theological reflection's point of departure, in a manner analogous to the way in which one starts from creatures in metaphysical investigation. In fact Thomas thinks also that in the order of explication the mystery of God must be placed in [the] position of [the] supreme explicative reason from whom everything derives and to whom everything returns. . . . From this point of view, in contrast to that of metaphysics, the knowledge of God is of course the way of access to the knowledge of creation: the theologian projects onto the created world the light that he derives from revelation. [And] in this sense, [Thomas' theology] is a theology of 'descent' [(une théologie 'descendante')]. Yet one mistakes the intention of Thomas if from this one concludes that theology’s point of departure exempts [the theologian] from [the necessity] of appealing to sense experience. The descending process ‘in its pure state’ . . . took place on only one occasion: among the first addressees of revelation. The prophets and the apostles are the only ones to have received directly, ‘from above’ and simultaneously, [both] the content of revelation and the light of faith that made it possible for them to accept it (and even here sense experience was far from uninvolved [(absente)]). All other believers who come after them do receive directly from God the light of faith (fides qua, the virtue by which one believes, or revelation understood subjectively), but the content of the faith (fides quae, the faith that one believes, revelation understood objectively) they receive, like all of their other knowledge, by way of sense experience: the announcement of revelation communicated by its first addressees, [and] today set down in the Bible and transmitted in the Church. Fides ex auditu! (Rom 10:17). In that sense, while guided by a faith that illuminates his reasoning, the theologian, too, proceeds [(va . . . cheminer)] from below to above, putting constantly into play everything he learns from an ecclesial experience of centuries, centuries that separate him from th[is] initial experience; and also—and this is the point [(point de vue)] that interests us here—from the other human sciences and especially philosophy. [Or,] to put it a little differently, the recourse to the light of faith does not relieve the theologian of [his responsibility] to appeal to the light of his agent intellect and to the first principles of natural reason, for they are the condition of [the] possibility of all thought, including the possibility of reflecting [upon] the faith itself. To put it briefly, this simple reminder permits [one] to grasp the significant difference [(de comprendre toute la difference qui existe)] between the [merely] suggestive sketch of St. Anselm (fides quaerens intellectum) and the [more] nuanced formula of St. Thomas: ‘ratio manuducta per fidem excrescit in hoc ut ipsa credibilia plenius comprehendat, et tunc ipsa quodammodo intelligit [(reason led by faith increases in this in order that it might itself more fully comprehend those things that can [also] be [simply] believed, and [only] then itself in a certain measure understand [them])]’ [(Sent. I, Prol. q.1 a. 3 sol. 3)]. Faith as such doesn’t seek, it adheres and submits; it is reason that seeks under its [(under faith’s)] light.”

Jean-Pierre Torrell, “Philosophie et théologie d’après le Prologue de Thomas d’Aquin au Super Boetium de Trinitate: essai d’une lecture théologique,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale: rivista della Società internazionale per lo studio del medioevo latino 10 (1999): 319-320. Presumably this "one occasion" was that of the reception of the key "God-given images" (not propositions) (David B. Burrell, "Philosophy," in The Blackwell companion to modern theology, ed. Gareth Jones (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 37-38).

The Didascalia apostolorum on James 2:1-7

"if, as you are sitting, some one else should come, whether a man or a woman, who has some worldly honour, either of the same district or of another congregation: thou, O bishop, if thou art speaking the word of God, or hearing, or reading, shalt not respect persons and leave the ministry of thy word and appoint them a place; but do thou remain still as thou art and not interrupt thy word, and let the brethren themselves receive them. . . . But if a poor man or woman should come, (whether of the same district) or of another congregation, and especially if they are stricken in years, and there be no place for such, do thou, O bishop, with all thy heart provide a place for them, even if thou have to sit upon the ground; that thou be not as one who respects the persons of men, but that thy ministry may be acceptable with God."

Didascalia apostolorum XII.ii.58, trans. Connolly (pp. 123-124 from http://www.bombaxo.com/didascalia.html for now). I was put onto this by David Bentley Hart, Atheistic delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 170.

Wojtyla on what today gets defined as nature

"In the world of persons . . . instinct alone decides nothing. . . ."

Karol Cardinal Wojtyla (John Paul II), Love and responsibility, rev. ed., trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981), 226, as quoted by Janet E. Smith in "Conscious parenthood," Nova et vetera: the English edition of the international theological journal 6, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 931. Smith points out that the phrase in Humanae Vitae 10 translated "responsible parenthood" is really "conscia paternitas" (946 ff.).

Hart on "the true essence of modernity"

"The modern period has never been especially devoted to reason as such; the notion that it ever was is merely one of its 'originary' myths. The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free, as I have said [in chap. 2]; and the Enlightenment language of an 'age of reason' was always really just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual infancy of 'irrational' belief. But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to 'my truth' than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead. The myth of 'enlightenment' served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant. Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of responsible rationality. Freedom--conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will--is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth. It is true, admittedly, that the modern understanding of freedom was for a time still bound to some concept of nature: many Enlightenment and Romantic narratives of human liberation concerned the rescue of an aboriginal human essence from the laws, creeds, customs, and institutions that suppressed it. Ultimately, though, even the idea of an invariable human nature came to seem something arbitrary and extrinsic, an intolerable limitation imposed upon a still more original, inward, pure, and indeterminate freedom of the will. We no longer seek so much to liberate human nature from the bondage of social convention as to liberate the individual from all conventions, especially those regarding what is natural."

David Bentley Hart, Atheist delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 104-105.