Marc D. Guerra

Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, and Being Stuck With Virtue

W e are pleased to introduce this symposium on the moral, political, scientific, philosophical, and even theological dimensions of the thought of two contemporary American novelists and essayists: Walker Percy and Tom Wolfe. Astute and penetrating observers of modern America, Percy and Wolfe offer memorably critical portraits of the effect that popularized scientific and pseudo-scientific theories increasingly have on our view, both as particular persons and as a people, of who we are and how we want to live. They both think that what we can know through science supports the conclusion that human beings are stuck with virtue, and that characteristic forms of modern science—even or especially in its most advanced forms (such as evolutionary psychology and neuroscience)—are unempirical insofar as they fail to account adequately for the real human longings and capabilities that constitute the human self or soul. With one exception, each of the following articles was given as a presentation at a conference at Berry College last November on the transformative effects that the scientific thought of René Descartes, John Locke, and Charles Darwin has had on our distinctively modern, but by no means unmistakably coherent, ideas about the genuine foundations and purposes of virtue. This conference was sponsored by a grant we received from the University of Chicago’s Science of Virtues Project. We are grateful for that project’s generous support. We call our particular project, with a mixture of playful irony and deep seriousness, “Toward a True Science of Being Stuck With Virtue.” Each of the articles in this symposium makes a crucial contribution toward the development of that true science.

The Use and Abuse of Thanatos in Life

Mainline postmodern theory often makes Thanatos either the focal point or point of departure for its account of human existence. Radicalizing certain founding premises of modern rationalism, it typically exaggerates and distorts the role that awareness of human finitude actually plays in human life. In this article the author examines the way human finitude is treated in a form of thought that Peter Augustine Lawler has described as postmodernism rightly understood.

The Limits of Darwinian Natural Law

ew doctrines in the history of Western thought have proven to be more inherently controversial than the theory of natural law. The doctrine itself has undergone countless internal and external critiques, repeatedly generating spirited political, philosophical, and theological debate. Part of the controversy surrounding natural law undoubtedly stems from the wide variety of meanings that historically have been attached to the term “natural law.” At different times, the term has been used to refer to such diverse things as the cosmic order that rules the entire universe, the international law that governs just relations among nations, and, most commonly, the grounds of natural justice that always remain operative in social and political life. But for all of the confusion that has surrounded the specific meaning of the term, it is the question of the doctrine’s cognitive status that has made the theory of natural law so inherently controversial.1 Indeed, the precise theoretical grounds of natural law theory have almost always been treated as something of a disputed question. For example, St. Augustine famously observed that in the De re publica, a free imitation of Plato’s Republic that contains the earliest and fullest account of natural law theory that has come down to us, Cicero’s spokesman for philosophy, Scipio, subtly casts doubts on the ability of unassisted human reason to know of the natural law.2 The existence of such serious philosophic objections partly explains why Thomas Aquinas, the classical exponent of natural law theory par excellence, begins his discussion of natural law not by asking what the doctrine concretely teaches, but, more pointedly, “whether there is in us a natural law”3 at all. Given the kind of theoretical questions the doctrine inherently raises, it is not surprising that the doctrine has undergone so many periods of decline and rebirth. John Courtney Murray could wittily refer to “the eternal return of natural law” largely because the doctrine historically has been pronounced dead only to come back to life later, more times than one can count.4 The proponent of natural law theory, however, cannot but view this fact as something of a mixed blessing. For although such periodic revivals call attention to the theory’s enduring vitality, they also, if only implicitly, simultaneously draw attention to its equally enduring vulnerability. The most immediate, if not the most pressing, challenge that natural law theory faces today comes not from revealed theology or political philosophy but from modern natural science. Rooted in broad cosmological teachings drawn from natural theology, the very idea of natural law would seem to be irredeemably undermined by modern science’s alleged discovery of the nonteleological nature of the universe. Rejecting any grand claim of nature’s purposefulness, modern natural science characteristically advances a ruthlessly homogeneous and materialistic view of nature. It therefore necessarily calls into question the very kind of human distinctiveness that the doctrine of natural law traditionally has sought to uphold. Confronted with these scientific teachings, most contemporary natural law theorists seem capable of survival only by a massive retreat: willfully clinging, however incoherently, to the position that a nonteleological universe still somehow allows for a teleological science of man. As Leo Strauss perceptively observed a half century ago, “an adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved.”5 For the past decade, Professor Larry Arnhart has played a leading role in the effort to formulate a theoretically serious solution to the biological problem of natural right.6 Let me say from the outset that I greatly admire Professor Arnhart’s willingness to undertake this important and remarkably ambitious project. In sharp contrast to the majority of F

Beyond Natural Law Talk: Politics and Prudence in St. Thomas Aquinas's On Kingship

f St. Thomas Aquinas it has been observed that he has the distinction of having found a place within the history of political philosophy precisely by not being a political philosopher. St. Thomas neither wrote a treatise that directly addresses the nature of political life from the point of view of reason, such as Aristotle’n Politics or Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, nor a sin#,le, sustained theological reflection that considers the necesisity and limits of politics as did St. Augustine in The CiQ (ifGod. Any attempt to examine what might loosely be called St. Thomas’s “political teaching” thus requires the prior effort of piecing together several Thomistic texts, especlially his discussions of law and moral virtue in the Surntriti Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae, as well as hi% interpretive remarks in his commentaries on Aristotle‘s ,Yicomachean Ethics and Politics. I That St. Thomas did not produce any comprehensive political work partially explains why the political teaching he is most commonly identified with is not a proposal of the best {egime or an account of political life, but his doctrine of natural law (ST, 1-11, 94).2Yet despite both what its name