There are, as we know, seven principle virtues—four cardinal virtues and three theological ones—I a daresay that abortion manages to violate all seven of them. Few sins, I think, can claim such thoroughness in being so opposed to virtue.

Abortion and Prudence

"For surely anyone's love will grow feebler and cooler towards one whom, as he supposes, he will have to leave, whose truth and wisdom he will have to reject, and that after he has come to the full knowledge of them, according to his capacity, in the perfection of felicity. No one can love a human friend with loyalty if he knows that in the future he will be his enemy" (City of God, Book XII, Chapter 21).

Last week, I discussed this passage from Saint Augustine's City of God in the context of happiness and God as the total, supreme, and perfect good--the Ultimate Good. Today I want to explore a little more about what this means with regard to love.

What does it mean to love? This needs to be answered before much else can be discussed. There are a great many opinions about what it means to love, and most of them are wrong. This should not be surprising, since these mistaken opinions are I believe related to the various mistaken opinions about what constitutes happiness and what constitutes good. The three things--the good, happiness, and love--are, after all, related to each other.

Note: This post is meant as a sort of "bridge" piece which ties together a few loose ends from other previous posts. Thus, it is in part a review of previous posts both here and on my other sites, in preparation for a series of three posts on a related subject.

In his book Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law, Professor J Budziszewski discusses happiness as understood by Aristotle and his disciples, and also by other philosophers. He begins by suggesting a few "wrong" answers, each of which has been held out as "true" happiness by one school of thought or another. Thus, happiness is not pleasure, it is not honor, it is not the acquisition of bodily or material goods (that is, health and wealth), nor is it even excellence of mind, body, or moral character (e.g. Knowledge [1], strength, or virtue). That is not to say that a happy person must eschew all of these things, but only that none of them lead to ultimate happiness. Rather, ultimate happiness is tied to the ultimate Good.

"We have been asking in what the good of the human soul lies; maybe we should make better progress by first asking in what we think the good of anything lies—the good of a racehorse, the good of a knife, the good of an eye or what have you. The good of a racehorse lies in racing, the good of a knife lies in cutting and the good of an eye lies in seeing; that’s easy. But do you see what we’ve done here? In each case we have defined the good of a thing as an activity; not as any old activity but as its proper work or function....the function of a human soul will be whatever a human soul can do that nothing else can do, or at least that nothing else can do as well...Christianity points out that the human soul seems designed for at least two things, not one—at least two activities are unique to it and belong to its proper work. One is to understand, the other is to love; the former employs the reason, the latter employs the will. Both are directed to God and neighbor. To the extent that love and understanding are connected, any defect in one implies a defect in the other, and any defect in the comprehension of one also implies a defect in the comprehension of the other."

"Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Thy power, and Thy wisdom infinite. And Thee would man praise; man, but a particle of Thy creation; man, that bears about him his mortality, the witness of his sin…Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee."

Thus begins Saint Augustines’ Confessions, and these lines are among the most well-known ever written. I came returned to them after reflecting a bit on Mrs Jennifer Fulwiler’s discussion of Catholic misconceptions about atheists. Specifically, she notes that few if any atheists feel that they are “missing something” in their lives, and that few recognize the “God-shaped hole” in their hearts. Most atheists I’ve known, including those who are among my friends, would concur with this analysis, given that they reject the existence of said holes in their hearts. For her part, Mrs Fulwiler states that she only recognized that she was missing something after she had found it.

I was reading a reflection by Monsignor Charles Pope concerning beliefs, philosophies, and God. He opens by stating that

There is a tendency in the modern age, at least in the Western world, to trivialize the human person. One of the ways we do this is to say, in so many words, that it does not really matter what a person thinks or believes.

This is by no means a new sentiment (in the sense of being unique to today), but rather has permeated the "modern" era. For example, writing about 100 years ago, G.K. Chesterton said that this was often the attitude of the day. He continued by writing that

“It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages….But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period.” (Heretics)

It's been up for a while now, but I only recently found the site where the ISI book reviews get published. Here, then, is the link to my review of Professor J Budziszewski's "The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction." The book itself was well-written; Budziszewski is fast becoming one of my favorite writers and speakers, and is also one of the most welcoming professors I've met. Here is an excerpt of the review:

A little more than three years ago, when I first moved to Austin, I had very few friends of my own in the area. The nearest and dearest person I knew was my brother, who at the time lived less than a mile away from my apartment complex. He was a residential assistant at the time, and so lived in the dorms and had all of the duties and responsibilities which go with that post. I spent a good deal of my free time with him at St Edward’s, but he often had to make rounds or resolve some crisis or other, and so I spent a good deal of time talking to his fellow RAs and his residents.

I remember very few specific conversations which I had, but one stands out a bit in my mind today. One of the residents had taken up riding horses—my favorite activity growing up, and a thing which I still dearly miss—and so I had frequent short conversations with her. We talked a few times about horses, but on this particular night, we talked about something else. I don’t specifically remember how we got onto the topic of birth control and religion, but we did. It actually may have been a conversation about religion—she was an Anglican of some sort—but it drifted into the realm of birth-control. At some point, she mentioned that some relatives of hers were Catholics and that they insisted that one couldn’t use birth control. They didn’t know why they couldn’t, only that they couldn’t BECAUSE THE CHURCH SAYS SO.