“Reorienting Discussions regarding ‘Knowledge of the Natural Law through Connaturality’”

Brief Explanatory Note: This text is a draft for a paper to be delivered orally at a conference dedicated to cognition of the natural law. Its written form retains a great deal of orality in order to facilitate live delivery to a group. (I will partly deliver the paper extemporaneously, using this prewritten copy as something to ground me so that I clearly retain the speculative account’s narrative.) No footnotes are provided here (though, it will be noted that on several occasions I directly cite brief comments from Francesco Viola, Étienne Gilson, and Heinrich Rommen.) A complete and very detailed footnote apparatus will be completed, along with detailed editing, for a published version of this text.

We are gathered here today as a group of scholars coming from different philosophical traditions. Even though we all, in some way, share a broad interest in theories of natural law, we are also all quite well aware of a seeming perennial truth: every bookseller’s fair could host at least eight new systematic accounts of natural law. And a collation of journals would seem to reiterate, mutatis mutandis, the witticism that “every fair and every war brings forth a new natural law” (Maritain, Natural Law, ed. Sweet, p. 23) Probably this conference will make all of us feel the same way—for, to be honest, most, if not all, of us (even the various Thomists) are separated by important differences of first principle regarding the nature of moral reasoning, the being pertaining to the moral order and its specifying objects, and perhaps even what it means to do philosophy. Differences of this kind reverberate completely throughout the accounts that are given for the same data. Whether or not we should desire a reduction to unity in philosophical and theological thought, reduction to a single synthetic viewpoint, I think it is quite safe to say—on long-standing, experiential and historical grounds—that pluralism, or perhaps plurality, is the coin of the human condition at least de facto, until the end of time.

Of course, such pluralism, or plurality, of system does not mean pluralism of reality or of mutually contradictory truths. And this fact manifests itself when a group like our own meets. For despite the differences that separate us, we realize that many of the truths that we affirm are mutually acceptable—in a way that we do not share with many other accounts of moral agency. It is only when these shared truths are viewed within the overall systematic philosophical and theological wholes to which they belong that their objective divergences become manifest. It is then that we begin to talk past each other even while we talk about the same reality, the natural law.

Therefore, when a group such as our own gathers together, it can be helpful to present a kind of full account, even if only an outline format, so as to provide the possibility of fusing the horizons of different philosophical schools—at least in part. That is what I will attempt to do in this paper. It is the fruit of reflections on the nature of moral cognition that I have been undertaking since the days of studying for my philosophical licentiate. For years, I was very taken by the insistence of Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon on the role of connaturality in our knowledge of the natural law. And as I learned more about the Thomist account of the role of affect in prudence and mystical experience, this seemed to confirm Maritain’s account. Yet, consideration of the moral psychology presented within later Thomism—especially the role of synderesis and, perhaps in the supernatural order faith-synderesis—I found that those who question Maritain’s account for seeming a bit too anti-intellectual might have at least reason to be concerned. But, that being said, I’ve never felt that many critiques of Maritain took seriously enough the entire account of later Thomistic moral psychology that Maritain himself presupposed, even if he perhaps departed from that account (if only nolens volens). What I propose to do here is reconstruct that account, with the intention of trying to perhaps articulate what experienced reality Maritain had rightly espied, even if his account of connatural knowledge (or knowledge by way of inclination) of the natural law calls for some clarifications.

If one could place Maritain’s account of moral reasoning under a heading that captures its inspiration, it is the intrinsic plurality of formal objects which exist among our many ways of knowing. The person who reads the entire corpus of Maritain’s works cannot fail to see this golden thread throughout them, giving them a kind of thematic unity amid a vast plurality of genres and subjects. In so many of his works, the reader is faced with an alert and profound grasping of the fact that human intelligence is marked by a rich diversity of formal objects which cannot be reduced to each other throughout our knowledge, whether speculative or practical, natural or supernatural. For Gilson, Maritain (for whom Gilson seems to have retained a personal affection) chose the path of epistemology over metaphysics: “The philosophical party he founded was le parti de l’intelligence, it was not yet the ‘party of being.’ Hence, too, his absence of scruples in parting company with Thomas Aquinas when he believes he is improving the doctrine” (Gilson-Maritain Correspondence, p.275n1) Peut-être… But, I would rather think that Maritain, “here following St. Thomas, develops [across his works] a metaphysics of knowledge, attentive to sounding out the depths of the life of the mind” (Viola, “La connaissance de la loi naturelle dans la pensée de Jacques Maritain,” 205) Therefore, it is here, within the perspective of this rich pluriformity of cognitional being, that we must begin if we are to understand Maritain’s assertion that our knowledge of the natural law is supposedly a knowledge “by way of connaturality.”

Let us begin, at the beginning, indeed with a text from early in the Summa theologiae, among the standard texts cited by Maritain in this connection. It links questions of moral cognition closely to the theory of connaturality that also served as the motivating factor for Maritain’s insistence upon the role of affect in cognition, namely the developed account of the gifts of the Holy Spirit presented by John of St. Thomas, who in the relevant sections of his Cursus theologicus develops the Thomist account concerning the role played by charity in the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, especially the gift of wisdom (with charity there playing an important role in the specification of knowledge). However, without those baroque precisions, let us consider the classic text from the opening of the Prima Pars of the Summa theologiae (ST I, q. 1, a. 6, ad 3):

Since judgment pertains to wisdom, the twofold manner of judging brings forth a twofold wisdom. On the one hand, one may judge by mode of inclination, as the man having a virtuous habitus rightly judges, by means of his very inclination toward the matter in question, regarding that which pertains to that virtue. Hence, as we read in the Nicomachean Ethics (bk. 10), the virtuous man is the measure and rule of human acts. In another way, by mode of cognition, as when a man instructed in moral science might be able to judge rightly concerning virtuous acts, even though he does not have the virtue [in question]. [Thus, one can distinguish between the Holy Spirit’s gift of wisdom and theological science as wisdom.]

In the example offered by Thomas here, we really are not faced with a contrast between non-knowledge and knowledge, but rather between two different modes of judging, one which is cognitional and the other inclinational. This is clear if we ask: what kind of judgment is rendered by the “inclinationally motivated” just man? It is a judgment belonging to one of the stages of moral reasoning, somewhere between the very first judgment that measures simple willing and the terminal judgment that precedes the prudential command. It is a judgment and therefore is a kind of knowledge, even if it proceeds per modum inclinationis not per modum cognitionis.

However, to understand this aright from the Thomist perspective presupposed by Maritain, we must begin with what is most essential: the division of human cognition among its various domains of objects. The objects of human knowledge can fall into one of four domains: the purely speculative (e.g., natural philosophy, metaphysics), the reflectively-logically speculative (or “rational”), the practico-moral, or the practico-artistic. To see the difference between these domains first consider several purely speculative notions: act, potency, subject, privation, unity, being, truth, duration, form, and matter. By contrast, consider several moral notions which are relatively proximate to human action, namely various virtues: justice, piety, courage, truthfulness, friendliness. It will never be the case that the specifying moral object of one of my moral actions will be act, duration, form, or even truth or goodness in their metaphysical scope (i.e., articulated in accord with the imperfect abstraction belonging to analogy). But, if I live a moral life, it will indeed be the case that justice, piety, courage and so forth will play the role of being the form of my will (as objects or secondary species of acts). In other words, these virtues are the sorts of formalities that my (practical) intellect can command of my will as the formal structuring of the will’s own agency.

In the background of this point is another, very important one: not every kind of knowing is conceptual. That is, not all knowing is directed, at least in its ultimate terminus, toward the articulation of a concept (or, more exactly, an “internal word”) as the means in which knowledge is attained. Such expression of an internal word is the mark of speculative knowledge. This claim launches us into waters of controversy in contemporary Thomism, for some Thomists today hold that the later Thomist account of philosophical psychology and the “expressed species” or internal word is philosophically useless. But, for Maritain (following a line of Thomist development that goes back into the 14^th century), a proper and complete account of speculative cognition requires us to take seriously those texts in which he speaks of the “internal word” expressed by the intellect in order to present to the knower the object known therein. According to this account, the process of human knowledge does not stop at the illumination and abstraction of the phantasms formed by the internal senses, at the reception of the “intelligible species.” Rather, the human intellect, being “formed” in first act by the species impressa intellecta must “form itself” within this newly emerged state of union with the other; it must conceive the now-actually knowable reality so that it might be actually known. This internal word will express either a definition or a statement. Thus, speculative knowledge terminates in an object, known in a “concept,” and for that reason, we can say that speculative knowledge is, in a very important and unique way, conceptual.

Now, speculative knowledge is at the root of all other knowledge, for if we are to navigate reality, we must express reality cognitionally as an object of knowledge. Whatever might hold for knowledge that is moral, artistic, or “logico-rational,” some awareness of reality is presupposed, for one cannot direct the acts of an unknown agent or study the reasoning process of a non-existent cognizer. In this sense, it remains forever true to say that the speculative intellect becomes practical by way of extension. Moral, artistic, and logical knowledge is “second” to purely speculative knowledge.

However, such “extension” does not imply that each such domain of knowledge is homogeneously the same as the others, that for example, the formality of practico-moral knowledge—even in its most abstract of notions—is unqualifiedly speculative in its formal character. Practical knowledge differs from speculative knowledge precisely in view of the ultimate terminus of the practico-moral act of cognition. To speculatively know is to be—objectively-intentionally—the other as other. To practically know is, in its full practicality, to perform the moral deed or, in the case of art, to fashion the work of art. In other words, at least in its most practical acts, cognitio practicalis ordinativa est.

How does the speculative “become” practical? Obviously, there are various accounts of this matter, which lays at the heart of many debates regarding the natural law. This transition from the speculative to the practical is—mutatis mutandis—the scholastic version of the “is” / “ought” issue. Another way to put the question is: how does the habit of synderesis come to elicit an act of judgment, in dependence upon speculative knowledge? Even if only very vaguely grasped, the first principles of moral agency—and concerning the ends of the moral virtues—must in some way be operative in our action if the latter is to be human.

Normally, one tends to speak of synderesis as though it pertains only to the very first principle of practical reasoning: the good is to be done and evil avoided. However, as Thomas Aquinas remarks in a variety of texts, it is the habitus by which we declare knowledge concerning the ends of the moral virtues, at least the most general moral virtues. Thus, our knowledge of justice as a moral virtue is attained by the mediation of this inborn but developmental capacity for moral insight. Likewise, to choose another example in this same line, someone like John of St. Thomas proposes that we also grasp through synderesis the end of the virtue of religion: something like acts are to be performed in order to recognize our creaturely dependence on God or God must be worshiped. This is a rather surprising claim, at least if one accepts the idea that synderesis is a habitus by which we grasp truth in a non-inferential manner (so long as we sufficiently understand the subject and predicate of the truth claim in question). Is not God something we can only know by way of objectively inferential reasoning? In other words, does not such a supposed first-order principle involve knowledge, which is not… first?

The Thomist tradition was not unaware of this conundrum. Here, I will allow John of St. Thomas to speak for himself (Cursus theologicus, In ST I, q. 2, disp. 3, a. 1):

In moral-practical knowledge [in practicis], the principle, “God must be worshipped,” is self-evident [per se nota]. However, it is not contradictory to say that practical principles would presuppose something that is speculatively known through discursive reasoning, given that practical knowledge arises from speculative knowledge, for the speculative intellect becomes practical by extension. Thus, following speculation, even discursive speculation, practical principles can arise which are not as much concerned with the truth of the thing [as in purely speculative knowledge] as with fittingness in relation to an end. Whence, it does not follow that if “God must be worshiped” is a practical principle, “God” would be presupposed as being known prior to all discourse, whether practical or speculative. Rather, it suffices that it be prior to all practical discourse though following upon some speculative discourse, especially if that precept is understood as being concerned with God known in a particular and distinct manner.

In other words, there is a kind of change of formality that begins anew when we enter the domain of the practico-moral, the knowledge of which does not follow from speculative knowledge as an illative conclusion. Whatever the speculative means for knowing about God—whether inferentially reasoned to or known by faith and communicated to the level of reason—the grasping of a moral truth by means of synderesis represents the beginning of a new kind of reasoning, one that is ordered not to expressed knowledge but to a command that can, in its greatest degree of practicality, inform the will.

Because we have arrived at a critical juncture, let us summarize the points made thus far from this line of Thomist consideration: 1˚ By synderesis we can know the first principles of practical reason, not only the completely general principles, but also the ends of certain virtues. Though known by synderesis, these principles pre-suppose some kind of prior speculative knowledge about reality and, especially, the human person. However, 3˚ the essentially moral knowledge had by synderesis represents a new order of cognition, which does not follow as an illative conclusion from the speculative order. And, therefore, 4˚even when this knowledge is not wholly practical (as is imperium that directs the will), it is in some way ordered toward moral practicality. For this reason, a number of later scholastics came to refer to such knowledge as “speculatively practical,” an expression which was somewhat variable in scope depending on the author in question. The most important term, though, is “practical” because these are truths that are ultimately destined to measure human acts.

There is, however, a final point that must be noted: 5˚ precisely as known by way of synderesis, such truths are not yet philosophical in nature. They are truths that fall within the commonsense apprehension had by human beings. This situation is somewhat like that of intellectus in the speculative order, whereby the first truths of reality are grasped non-discursively and immediately. The various discursive disciplines (whether scientific or sapiential) will then enable the knower to deepen his or her apprehension of such truths and their consequences. Nonetheless, insofar as it seems to be a solidly founded maxim to say that powers, habits, and acts are specified by formal objects (quo and quod) this means that the formal perspective (ratio formalis obiecti ut obiectum) of synderesis differs specifically from that of moral science, just as that of intellectus differs from that of natural philosophy or metaphysics.

At the level of knowledge that can be had by synderesis, the human agent faces a kind of “objectification option.” On the one hand, synderesis knowledge, together with other human experience, can remain within the domain of pure cognition, being concerned with the coordinating of principles and conclusions in view of essences, properties, proper effects, etc. That is, it can remain scientific in mode and thereby become moral philosophy (or “moral science”): cognitio per modum cognitionis. Or, on the other hand, it can become personalized, being considered from the perspective of the agent’s own situation and activity. That is, it can begin a kind of descent toward practical agency, a descent which, as we will see, is variously marked by cognition per modum inclinationis.

Now, technically speaking, synderesis remains prior to this “objectification option”; that is, although speculatively practical, synderesis is neither discursive-scientific nor discursive-prudential. It is, though, a kind of knowledge that is conformed to reality: to moral reality, ultimately founded upon nature but not reducible to the speculative-natural. In this, it resembles the speculatively practical discursion of “moral science.” However, it is a knowledge that almost immediately elicits a judgment belonging to the second kind of objectification just mentioned. Why? Because knowledge of moral truths has a pressing relevance for our lives. They, as it were, almost immediately postulate the question: what do you think about that? Or better yet: how do you respond to that? In other words, when we consider moral notions related to virtue and vice, we almost spontaneously elicit an act of will either positively or negatively in relation to that notion. In scholastic jargon, we readily respond to moral truth by eliciting an act of “simple willing.” In other words, experientially speaking, synderesis-knowledge is quite often had under an important modification: as a judgment that rules simple willing. That is, in a very incipient and distant way—though having a character somewhat like the notion of “mere wish”—my own possible human action is considered, at least at a great distance: kindness is something that I appreciate as something to be done; injustice is something which should not be an act of my willing. But take care: the judgment involved here will perhaps be marked by a character that is less articulate than the examples that I just presented. This should not be surprising, for such knowledge does not aim primarily at articulation but, rather, to be the form of the will in an act of simple willing. And my appetitive reaction to this knowledge will play a very important role in my ultimate judgment of this truth.

Allow me to explain what I mean. Later Thomism, under the pressure exerted by especially the Scotists, came to clarify points (present in Thomas) regarding the ultimate practical judgment of prudence and the command of prudence. In short, the received position of the Thomist school, going back to at least Cajetan (though I suspect further), holds that the ultimate practical judgment and choice are mutually subject to each other through a reciprocal causality: the practical intellect declares and causes the action to be willed, exercising this causality in the line of formal causality and final causality; however, this very judgment of the practical intellect is itself caused by the will, in the line of efficient causality. In other words: this or that given final practical judgment is final precisely because the agent’s will is or is not virtuous. The same will be true of the command as well, as it—along with its annexed virtues of foresight, circumspection, and caution—directs the execution of the ultimate act. In other words, the causal principle of formal causality for the act (i.e., the practical intellect) will be dependent on the causal principle for efficacy (i.e., one’s will and, hence, one’s character), just as the causal principle for efficacy will be dependent upon the principle of formal causality. This is an important aspect of the act’s freedom of specification.

Now, as I have proposed elsewhere the possibility that we should consider such mutual causality in all of the various judgments elicited in moral reasoning, not only the final practical judgment and imperium. Thus, when one deliberates, it is very important that one have a rectified affect so as to deliberate appropriately, for the right length of time, about the right sorts of things, etc. In fact, this requires a special virtue, according to the Aristotelian lexicon of practical reason: the virtue of euboulia. Thus, too, there must certainly be some kind of mutual causation between practical intellect and the will in the order of deliberation prior to the ultimate practical judgment.

So why would this not, likewise, be the case in the order of intention, presupposed for the entire activity of prudence? In point of fact, this is quite clear in the case of the act of intention itself. Prior to prudential deliberation, there must be an act of will intending the end to be achieved through some series of means. And this act of will is itself directed and measured by an act of practical intellection. But, such a judgment of intention will never arise without at least some incipient willing of a virtuous end—and thus, judgment and willing have a mutual causal relationship here as well. To emphasize the point: though cognitional in its foundation (in relation to virtue), a judgment of intention is not primarily conceptual but, rather, ordinative. This fact marks the formal character of this knowledge belonging to judgment-intention. To judge that I must intend an end necessarily requires that I will that I make this judgment my intention.

And prior to intention, the Aristotelians and the Thomists speak of “wish”—most often as though it were a mere velleity, although one can also here think of a general willing of the good, even if here and now I cannot do that good (or flee from that evil). For that reason, certain later Thomists refer to it also as an “inefficacious intention.” In fact, this is the primordial affective response that is necessary if one will ever form a virtuous intention. In other words, if I do not appreciate the good in a very general sense, even when I cannot perform this particular kind of act, I have good reason to wonder whether I will ever intend to do it myself. And therefore, such simple willing—which, to recall the earlier thread of our discussion, is perhaps the natural concomitant to our grasping of moral truths by way of synderesis—is deeply connected to the experience that we have concerning moral truths, prior to any scientific elaboration. Because of the natively practico-moral character of the truths declared by synderesis, we are naturally led to consider such truths not merely in the abstract but, rather, as possible goods calling for my potential response, at a kind of remote but real distance from human agency. This is described very well in a passage from Fr. Ambroise Gardeil:

Therefore, the fundamental moral education will consist in forming the heart—that is, the will, envisioned in its initial act of taking pleasure in the good and the true end of the being who possesses it. It will not be a question of instruction, properly speaking. The intellectual formation of the heart depends upon a simple maieutic. It consists in drawing the attention of the human being to the character of reason, which, in him, takes precedence over all the others and differentiates him from all that is inferior in him and around him to make him see that, things being so, the ends of his actions ought to be in harmony with this noble part of himself, which completes him and totalizes him as a man and penetrates his spirit with the exigencies of these ends. As regards the formation, properly speaking, of the “heart,” it consists in bringing about the natural reactions of the will in face of this evident goodness, to invite the will to consent to it. Such a consent has nothing of the character of being forced, nothing of the character of a violent action, for it is inscribed in the natural laws of a human will’s unfolding. Still, it is necessary to aid him, who for the first time has arrived at this (or who returns to it), to make this personal effort. In this sense, and within their limits, our secular educators have been right to say, “Before all else, be personal.” Yes, be personal—but not by making arise from you any innate thing whatsoever by a personalism of an arbitrary will; instead, be personal by letting loose your personal effort in the direction of the natural bent of your human will, which is, before all else, rational.

This double formation of the general conscience and of the heart does not require speculation. It demands simply that one looks truly upon oneself and that one loves what one has thus seen. In this way, St. Thomas’s conclusion is imposed: moral virtue cannot exist without understanding.

And this brings us—here at the end of things— to the title of this talk, ““Reorienting Discussions regarding ‘Knowledge of the Natural Law through Connaturality.’” Our knowledge of the natural law is a knowledge that is not, primarily, destined to articulation in moral philosophy—even though such articulation is possible and highly useful. It is a knowledge that is ordered to action, to measuring human agency, to being the formal cause of willing. For that reason, synderesis-knowledge (as well as other inferential moral knowledge) readily passes from the order of conceptual consideration (“moral science”) to that of measuring acts. And, in that case, the formal character of such knowledge is no longer purely cognitional. It is, in some way, marked by the fact that it is a knowledge directing actions. Its primary duty is such direction, even though one can also consider the rational content found within such judgments (and commands). Because such knowledge is not elicited in isolation from the dynamism of the will which it measures, this cognition will have some affective resonance within it—some mark of the inclination which has acted, in the order of efficient causality, to bring about such knowledge. And thus, it will seem like a kind of non-cognitional knowing when contrasted to purely speculative knowing, just as mystical experience seems like a kind of non-cognitional knowing from the perspective of explicitly articulable faith.

It is this sort of cognition—affectively directed but still having a formal-causal intellectual content—that I think Maritain perhaps wished to articulate, even if he remained somewhat confused, perhaps in part by a common source of such confusion: one cannot build an entire account of moral cognition (and, hence, natural law) without looking beyond the “natural law” itself. That is, one must delve into first principles whose foundations undergird the more-derivative notion of natural law (for the notion of law depends upon that of end and end upon that of good). But, within a broader metaphysics and philosophical psychology, taken for granted by the Thomist tradition presupposed by Maritain, one can account for the fact that our knowledge of the natural law is uniquely, so to speak, motivated by inclination—either the primordial inclination of the will toward those goods which are immediately and necessarily included in all acts, or the inclination of the virtuous person, rendered virtuous both by personal character and by custom. The current paper has not intended to provide a complete account of this claim, though the pieces for such an account are found in the footnotes. Nonetheless, in a spirit of filial piety to Maritain, to whom I owe the deepest fibers of my Thomist habitus, I hope that this presentation helps to reorient, in some small way, discussions regarding knowledge of the natural law through connaturality.