A Guide for Those Unwilling to Know Themselves

A Guide for Those Unwilling to Know Themselves | Fr. James V Schall, S.J. | Ignatius Insight | April 26, 2011

"The reason it is so difficult to argue with an atheist—as I know, having been one—is that he is not being honest with himself."
— J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know. (Revised and Expanded Edition; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 66.

"If Sophists are to run the courts and the civil service, they need plenty of help. From somewhere there must come a stream of people, who think as they do, to fill vacancies as they open up. Universities fill this need. Ordinary people who have not spent time on college campuses find it difficult to believe just how thoroughly they subvert the mind and how little they train it."
— J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know. 181.

I.

Among those scholars who write so well on natural law—Rommen, Lewis, Finnis, George, Matlary, Hittinger, Veatch, Kries, Simon, Grisez, Maritain, Kreeft, McInerny, Fortin, Syse, Dennehy, Koterski, Bradley, Glendon, Smith, Rice, Sokolowski—J. Budziszewski, at the University of Texas, holds a special place. In addition to a first-rate mind, he is probably the best rhetorician of them all. He leaves no argument before he has taken it step by step to its logical conclusion.

Budziszewski does not allow those who refuse to see the truth of an issue to have the satisfaction of thinking that the problem is with the truth and not with their own minds and souls. The only protection against the Budziszewski logic is to refuse to listen, to refuse to engage in argument, mindful of those fierce men in the Acts of the Apostles who, at the stoning of Stephen, held their hands over their ears lest they hear the truth they refused to listen to (Acts 7). In argument, Budziszewski combines the tenacity of a Georgia Bulldog with the weight of a Texas Longhorn. It is thus not surprising that he is a professor of philosophy and politics at the University of Texas.

Budziszewski's first book on natural law—Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (InterVarsity Press, 1997)—was published while he was a Protestant. It is a remarkable book that I have used in class. It is an especially useful book that approaches natural law with the full armor of Scripture behind it. Obviously, as mentioned in the introductory citation above, before Budziszewski was a Protestant, he was an atheist. So he has been around the bend with considerable experience, which happily shows in this book, What We Can't Not Know. He became a Catholic a number of years ago, much to the relief of his admirers. The notion that someone with the noble name Budziszewski was a Protestant or an atheist, with all due respect to both, just did not sound right, especially since everything he said seemed so Catholic. But that is another story.

A book that should be given as a Christmas gift to your favorite lawyer or law student is Budziszewski's short, to the point, Natural Law for Lawyers. His recent study from ISI Books, The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction, begins with the profound sentence from Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being," a passage with an obvious debt to Plato. And, of course, it is the theme of this book. All things, both of order and disorder, begin and end in the wills and souls of men and—even more obviously in this book—women.

We are used to hearing that the natural law is old hat, that no one agrees with it any more, that we have a "new" morality. This is pretty much the case. But that is precisely the point where Budziszewski begins the argument. Is it really possible to deny the natural law? What happens when we do seek to justify our "reasons" for rejecting it? What happens is that someone like Budziszewski will come along to examine just what we use for arguments against the natural law.

In every case, it turns out that the denial of any element in classical natural law depends on the natural law for its validity. When we sort out the meaning of the argument that is purportedly against the natural law, we find that we are necessitated to claim some basis in truth that justifies our position that opposes the natural law. When we dance around this issue, we find ourselves implicitly affirming one natural law principle against another. Once we straighten out this confusion or deliberate blindness, we can see that classical natural law position was in fact the correct one and the more human one.

The present book has eleven chapters and four appendices, and is divided into four sections: 1) "The Lost World," 2) "Explaining the Lost World," 3) "How the Lost World Was Lost," and 4) "Recovering the Lost World." The "lost world" obviously refers to Budziszewski's provocative title, What We Can't Not Know. Clearly, there are things that we do not know, or do not know yet, or have forgotten. Likewise, there are divine things that we only know if they are revealed to us. But once they are revealed, much of our ingenuity is spent on avoiding the implications that what God intended for us to know is either important or required of us. We find that this revelation and thinking about it makes us more philosophical, not less.

Budziszewski does not confuse reason and revelation. His first three appendices are devoted to brief but accurate statements about how the Decalogue, and the Noahide Commandments, as well as Isaiah, several of the Psalms, and Paul are related to the natural law. Basically, the natural law and revelation on these basic points say the same thing. This agreement suggests to us that they are both from the same source. Indeed, this fact of the same content suggests that revelation was directed to the human mind itself as it thinks what it means do "do good and avoid evil."

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Comments

[Gail F]

I just finished this book, it is wonderful. Buy it!