Judgment and wrongdoing

In response to my suggestion that the Reformation was ultimately the product of evil acts, Tim Enloe replies:

Now I understand that it's much worse: in your view the Reformers were actually EVIL men inventing things from scratch to justify an EVIL program of OBVIOUS rebellion from God.

Because I think this stems from a serious error that has created conflict even among Catholic apologetics, this point bears some clarification. I don't think it is obvious, and I think you have taken me amiss because of a mistake that has caused similar conflict among Catholic apologists. One must distinguish objective wrong from subjective culpability. I don't think that what they did wrong was obviously wrong in the sense of some rationally self-evident mistake. They might well have thought that they had good reasons for what they did. Certainly, many people do things that appear to be right given the situation as it appeared to be that turned out not to be.

Take the Hiroshima situation that Dave Armstrong has discussed with other Catholics. I think Shawn McElhinney has articulated some good reasons why someone might have reasonably believed that it was absolutely necessary for the defense of innocent lives, so that it wasn't obviously contrary to reason to drop the atomic bombs in those particular circumstances. I also think that with the perspective of hindsight, one can recognize that there were other ways, better ways, to accomplish the end, so that while it was a legitimate matter of prudential judgment (since having nuclear weapons is not per se immoral, meaning that there are conceivable cases when they might be used), it was nonetheless unwise. One could speak of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki as objectively evil acts of imprudence, not wrong in principle but in application to that set of concrete circumstances. They are mixed with particular goods, not in absolute opposition to moral principle. In another example, the papal curia also considered the invasion of Iraq imprudent, but given that it has been done, they do not recommend pulling out of the country either. In each case, the decision reveals the limitations of the ability of human beings to perceive the underlying order and reason, the good to which all things are ordered.

We can grasp truth in a truly meaningful way with respect to the universal principles of natures themselves, although we don't even grasp those comprehensively. Thus, for example, there are universal moral principles derived immediately from human nature that should be clear from human reason, like the prohibitions on the deliberate murder of innocents or same-sex "marriage." Absent some sort of cognitive defect, these require at least some culpable, directed effort to deny what people know immediately from their experience of humanity and natural reason, so the act of will behind them is more purely directed against good per se. But there are other cases where the matter may be self-evident only to the wise (requiring good habits of rational judgment) or not self-evident at all (requiring prudential judgment in the application). Even matters of intrinsic evil are not always "easy cases," since intrinsic evils as theft, deportation, and torture may require case-specific judgments in their very nature. In mixing with the particulars, our knowledge becomes less and less certain, our judgments more and more dependent on habit and practice, since we cannot entirely grasp all of the relevant circumstances according to universal moral principles. In such cases, there are natural human limits to what we can know of particular events and our capacity to act in those situations, so we are acting not directly against a principle but against the order of the goods in their particular circumstances. And only God fully knows the ways in which all things are ultimately ordered to the good. That is why free will and evil, and to some extent even the acting person himself, inevitably remain mysterious to us; they are matters that only God can comprehend.

So if you're the leader of Israel hearing the jeremiad, and you don't have Jeremeiah's experience of God, it likely requires far more virtue for you to heed God's Word even than Jeremiah. To let your nation be destroyed on the word of a prophet would require a level of trust that would be well beyond the grasp of most people, and it is entirely understandable why a ruler could erroneously rationalize rejecting the Word of God that came upon Jeremiah. And even Jeremiah himself would rather have been dead than to have to do what the Lord commanded him (Jer. 20), so his own perception of the good was limited in its own way. Those limited ways of thinking produce wrong answers in the objective sense, because our capacity to perceive the order of the universe is limited. If it's your son on the altar, do you bring the knife down on him?

In some ways, one feels compelled not to blame people for these sorts of errors. What can you expect, after all? They did what seemed good, and it probably was good in some limited sense. But it is evil nonetheless, contrary to the order of the universe though accidentally mixed with some good. We should surely have mercy on those who "do not know their right hand from their left" (Jonah 4:11), not in such a way that we deny the error, but that we acknowledge the error as the basis for their need of mercy. And these acts are evil because the entire state of ignorance and confusion is the result of the original sin, because our relationship with God is broken, and because we have often rejected even what opportunities we have. That's why sin is inevitable absent grace; we can't perceive goods in their particular integrity within the cosmic order. Only divine grace can place us in perfect conformity with the divine will that produces such cosmic order.

As Scott Carson points out, the real purpose of prayer is that we might have the perspective to will the good that God wills for in everything. Jesus's prayer at Gethsemane thus becomes more poignant, acknowledging His own weakness and His own inability to perceive the good in His own destruction. It is entirely natural for Him not to will His own death, and He truly does not will that destruction for its own sake. But He is willing to lay His life down of His own accord (John 10:18) for the good that His Father wills in everything, calling this the reason that the Father loves Him (John 10:17). It is that ability to will something for its own sake but to abandon it for the sake of the greater good that distinguishes heroic virtue from ordinary virtue. It is one thing entirely to will the good that you know, but it is another thing to will a good that one cannot possibly comprehend except on the strength of one's relationship with God, who transcends limitations. That's why self-defense is a good thing, but martyrdom for the faith is cause for sainthood.

Suffice it to say that I view the Reformation the same way. They acted out of mundane virtue, when supernatural virtue is what is required to do God's will voluntarily, so what they did was disordered and evil. There is cause for greater sympathy in that the Reformers believed they were being led by the Holy Spirit on account of some dubious prophecies that they shouldn't have followed. It was understandable given the apocalyptic mysticism that influenced them, but given the survey of Christian history, it seems to be inconsistent with the judgment of Tradition and the model of the Saints. I do not judge them harshly, because they were limited men and they acted in limited ways, as well all do without grace. But they did not display heroic virtue, and even their martyrdom was not sacrifice to a Christian calling, but only a mundane one. They were, in the end, probably the best sort of men that humanism can aspire to produce, but grace aspires even beyond that. Either their calling was not Christian or, if it was, they failed to heed it. It was in the end a humanist movement, and its fruit has been humanist fruit, for good or ill.