Moral Philosophy Without Revelation?

MORAL PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT REVELATION?* IN THE EARLY thirties the noted Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain, published several books in which he claimed that without the guidance of Christian theology there could be no adequately developed ethics.1 Maritain closed his survey of ethics, in his last big book, with a description of the human condition as an unhappy situation in which man finds his "spirit united in substance with flesh and engaged in the universe of matter." The philosopher, he said, has no solution to the problems arising from this combination. "It is only with Christianity," concluded Maritain, "that the effort t go beyond the human condition comes to real fruition." 2 My old professor, Etienne Gilson, came to agree with Maritain that a purely philosophical ethics is of little practical value. Oddly, many Catholic theologians disagreed. The great Benedictine historian of theology, Dom Odon Lottin, firmly maintained that " without direct recourse to God human reason can prove the moral obligation of performing certain actions , just as it is able to prove . . . the moral obligation to incline toward the moral good which is its natural end." 8 Similarly J.M. Ramirez, 0. P., argued that Maritain was undervaluing the contribution that moral philosophy can make to our awareness of the good life for man.4 Of course the view that philosophical ethics is quite inade- *A revision of the Wade Memorial Lecture delivered at St. Louis University, March 7, 1976. 1 J. Maritain, Science and Wisdom (New York: Scribner's, 1940) is the main English source of this teaching. 8 Maritain, Moral Philosophy (New York: Scribner's, 1964) pp. 452 and 458. a