Alecto, I've been unable to write much lately. I started this reply last week and just got done touching it up a little; it's not as comprehensive as I'd planned, but I'll post it for now...
::The tradition which overthrew these customs, whatever their intrinsic moral value, was brutal and militant. It came at the same time as the conflation of church and state that banned other religions, non-standard versions of Christianity, and created the apparatus for the "execution" of "heretics"...
A Vital Principle
.
Bear with me for a moment, I have to kill a number of birds with one stone so I must draw upon the aid of Chesterton, Lewis and Gilson and tie their insights together.
In a fictional dialogue by Chesterton (from The Ball And The Cross), a Catholic responds to an atheist:
"[T]here are only two things that really progress; and they both accept the accumulations of authority… they have steadily increased in certain definable manners; they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things, it seems, that ever can progress. The first is strictly physical science. The second is the Catholic Church… I say that if you want an example of anything which has progressed in the moral world by the same method as science in the material world, by continually adding to without unsettling what was there before, then I say that there is only one example of it… [a]nd that is Us… Catholic virtue is often invisible because it is the normal… It keeps the key of permanent virtue… if you really want to know what we mean when we say that Christianity has a special power of virtue, I will tell you. The Church is the only thing on earth that can perpetuate a type of virtue and make it something more than a fashion."
Touching on the same principle Lewis, from the essay Dogma and the Universe, writes:
"[W]herever there is real progress in knowledge, there is some knowledge that is not superseded… the very possibility of progress demands that there should be an unchanging element."
Finally, Ettienne Gilson writes:
"[the Western Creed]…inherited from the Greeks by the Romans; transfused by the Fathers of the Church with the religious teachings of Christianity, and progressively enlarged by a countless number of artists, writers, scientists and philosophers from the beginning of the Middle Ages up to the first third of the nineteenth century… [featured the] "immanent dignity of man… [assuming that] "reason is the specific difference in man…[that] the rational nature of man is the only conceivable foundation for a rational system of ethics."
He goes on:
"Morality is essentially normality; for a rational being to act and behave either without reason or contrary to its dictates is to act and behave, not exactly as a beast, but as a beastly man, which is worse…
Here's the point: Rights, freedom, a Constitutional Republic, respect for human dignity; these things developed from a principle conception of man which grew up in the soil of Catholicism. Catholicism combined the underlying Judaist ethic that man was created in God's image with the Greek insight that man is a rational animal and charged this conception with both a transcendently supernatural light (faith, hope and love in Christ - the supernatural virtues) and an immanently inquisitive motivation to see further and further with the aid of that light (preservation in faith by obedience to Christ's injunctions). You can neither despise the senses and matter; nor can you diminish man's reason; and expect a widespread perception and propagation of the existence of a natural law, which is grasped through rational reflection on the data of the senses (the material world). Every matter of faith which the Catholic Church dogmatizes through Council or Papal Decree, and every teaching of faith and morals found in the "Mind of the Church" (in the consistent teaching of the Early Church Fathers, Councils and Papal Encyclicals); in short, dogmatic theology, moral theology, creeds and sacraments (which form the pure essence of the Church -- the only boundaries within which imperfect Christians are perfect) secure the immutable pillars supporting the sole conception of man, the "unchanging element", from which ethical progression is at all possible. I'm not saying this is the primary purpose of the Church, but it's certainly a necessary by-product. Like Chesterton said, "After the Incarnation had become the idea that is central in our civilisation, it was inevitable that there should be a return to…the serious value of matter and the making of the body. When once Christ had risen, it was inevitable that Aristotle should rise again."
In sum, the Vital Principle is three pronged, and it is this: 1.) moral knowledge must progress from an "unchanging element", 2.) that unchanging element is the idea that man is a "rational animal" 3.) The Catholic Church has this specific element at it's core and, by virtue of it's creeds, sacraments and saints, has fostered it's growth and unpacked it's implications -- though often slowly and in spite of it's members, even lending it to others outside it's fold -- up to the present.
Moral Perception
.
Now, there's a certain impatience or unease I sense underlying the responses and it has to do with the use of abstractions, of rational reflection on, in this case, the moral law: it appears as though the individual is left out of the equation. But, like anything, like any progressive knowledge, when the general intuitions are challeneged then the use of reflection is forced and we must work in the arena of abstractions. Now, there's a thin line between sophistry on the one hand (that is, divorcing and isolating common sense principles from their contexts to make them look silly) and drifting into the thin air of unconvincing abstractions to butress common sense principles on the other. Therefore, to keep us on the solid ground of "middle abstractions", of common sense, I'll put one angle of the natural moral law argument concerning homosexuality as simply, and in as generally accepted, understood, and concrete terms as I can. I'm going to do it by stringing together some basic ideas.
The short version:
The first idea is that all men are created equal; that what’s good for every person defines our equality, unites our common cause. The second is that might-makes-right denies our equality. The third is that homosexuality does not define our equality (it is not good for all), but (monogamous) heterosexuality does (it is good for all). The conclusion: law works on the equality principle when it recognizes the equal, thus natural, good of (monogamous) heterosexual marriage, but can only work on the might-makes-right principle when promoting the unequal good of homosexual unions.
The more elaborate version:
The first idea is that all men are created equal: we are united by our common needs toward the same end -- happiness. The things we hold in common define our essential nature, our equality. The second involves the first, and it is this: "might makes right" is the default principle of any government which does not have the idea that all men are created equal as it's first principle, derived from nature. The might-makes-right principle holds, in practice, that government gives you your rights--and can thus take them away. The all-men-are-created-equal principle holds that these rights are derived from nature, thus "inalienable"--they simply exist in our human nature as the laws of physics or the rules of mathematics simply exist, and they bind us together through a bond of reason by which we are obligated to one another--because we need one another. Government must therefore recognize laws derived from nature, not create them, and issue federal laws accordingly; nor can state laws contradict natural priniples governing federal law. So then, does the recognition of homosexual unions by the federal or state government fall into the first or second form of government? The answer is the second, so it must be rejected in the name of liberty. Why doesn't it fall into the first? The answer is, quite simply, that it is not a common good! for if it defined our nature, our equality, there would be no human nature. Heterosexual, monogomous marriage, on the other hand, is quite clearly an undeniable universal good without which the pursuit of happiness could not be achieved--for man wouldn't exist. Conversely, could the pursuit of happiness be achieved without homosexual unions--let alone homosexual sex period? Of course! So homosexuality is in no way part of our equality, nor is it part of a person's nature in so far as his nature desires happiness--it appears good to the person with homosexual desires, I'm not denying that, but it is an apparent good, not a real good: all disordered and/or inordinate desires appear good (just because a person inherits a tendency to obesity doesn't mean obesity is good), but that does not mean they're really good.
