“Decent,
morally serious men and women, and Christians above all, must resist
normalization of the abnormal with all their resources,” îndeamnă R. V. Young
într-un eseu publicat recent în Touchstone
Magazine (“Of Bicycles, Sex, & Natural Law, Touchstone Magazine, May/June, 2015, http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=28-03-038-f
). Un eseu
pe care ortodocşii români de astăzi care citesc şi altceva în afară de Visul
Maicii Domnului nu au cum să-l citească, captivaţi cum sunt de eseurile
intelectualilor creştini ocupaţi cu anormalizarea normalului de la catedra Dilemei Vechi la amvonul Ziarului Lumina, şi ale căror
prelegeri/predici sunt ulterior multiplicate şi difuzate de nenumăraţii
asistenţi şi studenţi devotaţi. Nu-i de mirare aşadar că normalizarea
anormalului s-a aşternut peste noi pe nesimţite, denunţarea ei devenind practic
ininteligibilă.
David Bentley Hart este un autor introdus în
România de Mihail Neamţu, mai întâi în paginile revistei Idei în Dialog, apoi prin studiul introductiv la cartea lui Hart,
Frumuseţea infinitului. Estetica adevărului
creştin (Polirom, 2013, traducere de Vlad (Nectarie) Daraban, studiu
introductiv deVlad (Nectarie) Daraban şi Mihail Neamţu, http://www.polirom.ro/catalog/carte/frumusetea-infinitului-estetica-adevarului-cresti-5209/).
O carte în care autorul “incearca o regasire a intelesului crestin clasic al
frumosului si sublimului si a relatiei lor cu fiinta.”
La vremea apariţiei cărţii sale în România, Hart tocmai
lucra la justificarea desprinderii gândirii (creştine) de legea morală; gândirea
şi comportamentul uman ar găsi ordine mai degrabă în domeniul frumuseţii decât în
cel al naturii. Concret, o suită pentru violoncel ne-ar putea ajuta să
descoperim binele mai degrabă decât propria inimă. Şi, în orice caz, chiar dacă
am rata binele, tot ar rămâne ceva – am rămâne cultivaţi şi, cum bine
subliniază R. V. Young, „interesanţi”.
Să fii interesant compensează cumva limitarea pe
care ţi-o aduce statutul de fiinţă creată: unul îşi face un tatuaj, altul îl citează
pe Pleşu. Te simţi puţin nesigur, te ia o uşoară ameţeală, iată euforia
rezervată oamenilor interesanţi. Mă întreb dacă nu cumva, în momentul scrierii
acestor rânduri, cineva tocmai îşi tatuează un citat din Pleşu. Sau din Lavric. Sau
din Neamţu. Sau din Baconschi. Sau din Patapievici. Sau din oricare alt intelectual interesat
să ne vadă pe toţi interesanţi.
Declinul legii morale nu este determinat, aşa cum
vrea David Bentley Hart, de o „înţelegere inadecvată a realităţilor vieţii
omeneşti”, ci este, după cum se poate vedea din eseul lui Young, „rezultatul
răzvrătirii elitei culturale contemporane împotriva statutului omului de fiinţă
creată.” David Bentley Hart face parte din tabăra celor care „urăsc logosul”,
refuză realitatea şi se ocupă cu „demontarea temeliilor morale” (intertitluri
din studiul lui R. V. Young); care susţin, împreună cu filozoful (şi regizorul) Woody Allen, celebrat cu
ceva timp în urmă de teologul Teodor Baconschi în paginile Dilemei, dreptul fiecărui om de a face orice voieşte şi de a fi
orice voieşte.
Iată în continuare un fragment lămuritor din eseul
menţionat:
„A
neo-conservative shrug of the shoulders about so frivolous a worry as
"just another step in the decline of the West" is hardly surprising.
More troubling is the view of the Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley
Hart, eminent foe of the "new atheists" and the scientism generally
regnant among our cultural elite. Writing in First Things in March
2013, he maintained that contemporary invocations of natural law as a
rhetorical strategy in moral discourse must inevitably fail, because "in
an age that has been shaped by a mechanistic understanding of the physical
world, a neo-Darwinian view of life, and a voluntarist understanding of the
self, nature's 'laws' must appear to be anything but moral." Besides, even
if one can perceive an order and purpose in nature, modern men and women will
be swayed by the eighteenth-century skepticism of David Hume, who argued that
an "ought" cannot logically be derived from an "is."
Two
issues later, in the wake of a predictable torrent of dismay in the magazine's
"letters to the editor" section, Dr. Hart took up the issue again,
defending himself against misunderstandings (e.g., he is not himself a follower
of Hume) and against the "two-tier Thomism" of Edward Feser, and
insisting that natural law theorizing is an inadequate form of moral reasoning,
because there is no clear line between the natural and supernatural and hence
no way that philosophy, using natural reason, can "achieve definitive
moral demonstrations": "There is no single master discourse here, for
the good can be known, only by being seen, before and beyond all
words."
Now
I shan't enter into an argument about the intricacies of natural law and the
debates among natural law philosophers over whose version is preferable. I am
curious, however, about what might be an effective apologia for traditional
morality in view of the presumptive failure of natural-law reasoning to be
persuasive. Here is what Dr. Hart offers at the conclusion of his second
commentary on the subject:
Certain
fundamental moral truths . . . may necessarily remain
unintelligible to someone incapable of appreciating Bach's fifth Unaccompanied
Cello Suite. For some it may seem an outrageous notion that, rather than a collection
of purportedly incontrovertible proofs, the correct rhetoric of moral truth
consists in a richer but more unmasterable appeal to the full range of human
capacities and senses, physical and spiritual. I, however, see it as rather
glorious: a confirmation that our whole being, in all its dimensions, is a
single gracious vocation out of nonexistence to the station of created gods.
Let
us proceed on the surmise that Dr. Hart's grand peroration means that it is
incumbent upon upholders of traditional morality to be far more cultivated,
imaginative, and interesting.
First,
there is the is/ought problem: Does this problem, in fact, fatally undermine
the rudimentary grasp of natural law among men and women who would be
hard-pressed to identify an instrument as a cello if they heard one playing
"Turkey in the Straw"? C. S. Lewis did not think so. In The
Abolition of Man, he not only concedes but even urges the proposition that
an ought cannot be derived from an is. At least, not at
first. The basic moral norms, accepted by all men and women in virtually all
societies and civilizations must first be recognized and acknowledged
intuitively, or they will not be known at all. Natural law is not a means of proving
the basic principles of right and wrong, good and evil, but rather a way of
explaining what most of us, in fact, have already realized.
Precisely
in order to avoid the kind of hair-splitting about the nuances of natural law
in which Dr. Hart indulges, Lewis called the self-evident principles of natural
law the Tao—the "Way" in Asian teaching. "You must not
hold a pistol to the head of the Tao," Lewis writes. "Nor
must we postpone obedience to a precept until its credentials have been
examined." Similarly, you must not demand that upholders of the moral law
be perfect in their practice and winsomely engaging in their demeanor in order
to grant the traditional teaching credibility.
[...]
Aesthetic awareness is clearly no guarantee of moral clarity. Natural law
arguments, David Bentley Hart to the contrary notwithstanding, do not fail to
convince dissenters against traditional morality because the dissenters have
devised or encountered more effective arguments. They refuse to be convinced
because they are what Socrates in the Phaedo calls misologists—haters
of argument. Socrates' point is that we really cannot do without argument,
without logos—or in Hamlet's phrase, "discourse of reason."
We
should also remember that a hater of logos, or human reason, is
inevitably going to reject the term with a capital letter, Logos, the
Word of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. For our grasp of the
rudimentary precepts of natural law, before we have a theory about it, is
simply our awareness, in keeping with our individual capacity, of the moral
meaning inherent in our humanity.
[...] Natural law has not
failed because it is an inadequate understanding of the realities of human
life. Insofar as it has "failed," this is the result of rebellion
against the limited creaturely status of human beings on the part of the
contemporary cultural elite, provoked by many factors, including, no doubt, a
large dose of technological hubris. But there is no alternative to something
like natural law, because, whether formulated well or poorly, it is simply a
recognition of the reality of what men and women are and of their actual
situation in this world."
(R.
V. Young, “Of Bicycles, Sex, & Natural Law”, Touchstone Magazine, http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=28-03-038-f
).
