PrefaceThomism and the Challenge of Integral Ecology

The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus said that a “Thomist of the Strict Observance,” was one who believed that the thought of the Angelic Doctor is the intellectual hardware that can run any software. He was thinking, he said, of the Jesuit scholar Norris Clarke, whose philosophical work aimed at showing how Thomas Aquinas could make sense even of the process philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. At Fordham University my then-girlfriend Cathy (now my wife) would take me to lunch with Father Clarke, then in his late eighties, a spry gnome-like character who would regale us with his intellectual adventures of bringing St. Thomas to every conceivable endeavor. Upon his mentioning a lunch date with the Dalai Lama, I asked him what he had said. Father Clarke looked at us and said very seriously, “I told him, ‘You have wonderful meditative practices, but your metaphysics are terrible!’” The Thomist of the Strict Observance then attempted, well, to enlighten him.

I’m not sure I agreed with everything Father Clarke said about metaphysics or Thomas Aquinas, but that impulse to bring Thomism to bear on intellectual projects and problems out there in the world was remarkable to me. The tribe of old-fashioned Thomists is often fiercely protective of their master in such a way as to ward off anybody attempting to bring him out of the thirteenth, the greatest of centuries, and into our own milieu. I do not doubt the intellectual seriousness, the learning, or the rigor of their work. If these, the E. F. Huttons of the perennial philosophy, speak in order to tell me my metaphysics is terrible, I listen. But their conversation is too often about pinning down the meaning of his texts and too little about applying his thought to the problems of the twenty-first, perhaps not the greatest—but hey, it’s what we’ve got—of centuries.

Therefore it can be particularly frustrating when tribal members tell me that they are bothered that what the public too often sees as Thomism is the intellectual project known as New Natural Law Theory (NNLT). This version of natural law reasoning, which its proponents say is not really new in the sense of wholly detached from the past but reflects substantial development of the mind of St. Thomas, was articulated by the late philosopher-theologian Germain Grisez, along with the late philosopher Joseph Boyle and the legal scholars John Finnis and Robert George. Broadly speaking, its basic position is that natural law precepts cannot be deduced from the facts of the world by what the ancients would call speculative reason. Instead, they propose that humans are capable of discerning the correct principles of reasoning and actions through a reflection on the first principle of practical reason (do good and avoid evil) and toward a group of goods such as life, work, religion, beauty, and others, the pursuit of which, they argue, is essential to understanding the logic of human free choices and actions. These goods are available to practical reason through a consideration of what it means to live a life characterized by integral human fulfillment. These goods, they say, are basic goods not resolvable into anything more primary and are “incommensurable,” meaning that one cannot either measure them against each other or order them according to importance. I think there are some definite problems with this construal, but my point here is not to rehearse or evaluate the criticisms of NNLT (in a future issue, theologian Christian Washburn will critique NNL thinkers on their treatment of capital punishment). It is simply to note that whatever one’s evaluation of their theory, no one can deny that this school of Thomists has done yeoman’s work in trying to bring natural law thinking to bear on the subjects of our day. The most prominent contemporary figures, John Finnis, Robert P. George, Ryan Anderson, Christopher Tollefsen, Samuel Gregg, and my colleague Robert G. Kennedy, have written on, among other things, issues of abortion and bioethics; sexuality and what is now called gender identity...