Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John T. Noonan, Jr., is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, California. He is a historian of ideas, distinguished lecturer, and author of thirteen books.

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A Church That Can and Cannot Change

University of Notre Dame Press

Chapter One

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The inventor of the idea that Christian doctrine develops is John Henry Newman. Ignoring the boast of Bossuet that doctrine is unchanging, escaping the thin theorizing that would restrict development to a movement from the implicit to the explicit, Newman pointed to transformations of doctrine as tangible and as organic, as many-sided and complex and real, as the passage from childhood to adulthood. An Anglican arguing his way into the Catholic Church, Newman saw that the anomalies and novelties of his new spiritual home were the marks of vigor, of maturity, of being alive. What Newman noticed and defended were changes in the ways that piety was expressed, in the rules guiding the governance of the Church, in the understanding of the nature of Christ. What he spent no time in either enumerating or explaining were changes in the rules of moral conduct.

On October 26, 1863, Thomas William Allies, a lecturer on history at Oxford University and a convert to the Catholic Church, sent Newman the draft of a lecture in which he pronounced slavery to be intrinsically evil. He wanted his friend's opinion. Newman replied cautiously: "I do not materially differ from you, though I do still startle at some of the sentences of your Lecture." The source of his startle was St. Paul. Newman wrote:

That which is intrinsically and per se evil, we cannot give way to for an hour. That which is only accidentally evil, we can meet according to what is expedient, giving different rules, according to the particular case. St. Paul would have got rid of despotism if he could. He could not, he left the desirable object to the slow working of Christian principles. So he would have got rid of slavery, if he could. He did not, because he could not, but had it been intrinsically evil, had it been in se a sin, it must have been said to Philemon, liberate all your slaves at once.

Succinctly raising his central difficulty, Newman elaborated with examples of other institutions that he saw to be bad but not to be intrinsically evil. Any army and any government offered occasions of sin and provided temptations to sin and were instruments of sin. Neither an army nor a government was to be condemned as intrinsically evil. "Which did most harm to the soul the Jewish slavedom or the Jewish army?" Slavery, he surprisingly added, was not even as bad as polygamy.

Newman then appears to let his imagination wander from the slaveowner to the slave, declaring: "I had rather have been a slave in the Holy Land, than a courtier of Xerxes or a solider of Zingis Khan." This fantasy is not a digression. In putting himself in the place of a slave, Newman is following a classic pattern. He supposes his soul to be unaffected by the body's servile state. Imagined in this way, slavery does not destroy or even impair the essential self. Newman's vision of slavery is the antithesis of an account of slavery that sees it as an assault upon the person. The dualism implicit in this view is a prime reason why slavery was so long seen as acceptable.

Newman ends as he began: "left to myself, I might be disposed to speak as strongly as you do, but that the tone of the inspired writers held me back." The possibility that what was intrinsic was subject to development was not expressed. Imperatively, the intrinsic froze his moral judgment. Convinced that slavery was evil, he was constrained to affirm that it was not always and everywhere evil. Else, how could Paul have accepted it? That question, so fairly expressed by Newman, could not be exorcised but it could, for a long time, be ignored as the Catholic Church entered the modern world.

In 1993, Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, published a small treatise on the fundamentals of moral theology, the encyclical Veritatis splendor, "Truth's Splendor." In it the pope emphasized and elaborated the notion of the intrinsically evil, very much along the lines indicated by Newman in his refusal to find slavery to be intrinsically evil. As John Paul II expressed it:

Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which by their nature are "incapable of being ordered to God," because they radically contradict the good of the person created in His image. These are the acts which by the moral tradition of the Church have been termed intrinsically evil: they are such always and per se, apart from the person's reason for acting and apart from other circumstances.

A little later in the encyclical, the pope declared: "the norms which prohibit such acts oblige always and forever, that is, they oblige without any exception." Emphatically, he repeated: "the universality and immutability of the moral norms make manifest, and at the same time serve, the absolute personal dignity-that is, the inviolability-of the human being, on whose face shines the splendor of God." Universal, immutable, per se, everywhere and always, the intrinsic governed the empire of actions.

Formulating the same idea another way, the pope spoke of "the negative commandments"-the commandments "expressed in negative form in the Old and New Testaments," such as "You shall not commit adultery." These commandments he declared to be indistinguishable from "the negative commandments of the natural law." These commandments set the standard that was minimal. They ruled out any reason for actions that "never, under any conditions, can be held to be a response congruent with the dignity of the person."

The attraction of the intrinsic to a moralist is that, beyond its apparent self-evidence, the intrinsic removes contingency. The act that is intrinsically of a particular character is so regardless of circumstances and motive. Judgment of the act can be certain and unchanging. With this intellectual satisfaction the act of lending was once pronounced to be intrinsically gratuitous and marriage was described as intrinsically indissoluble, and John Paul II discovered slavery to be intrinsically evil.

John Paul II and John Henry Newman agreed that the intrinsically evil could never be done without sin. But Newman thought that to hold a human being in slavery was not intrinsically evil. For John Paul II, slavery was a prime example of what could never be lawfully committed, of what was indeed an instance of intrinsic evil. Their agreement on the nature of the intrinsically evil and their disagreement on slavery generates questions. Is it possible that what is intrinsically evil in one era is not so in another? How then can the intrinsically evil be universal, immutable, always and forever? Or, if the pope was right on slavery, was Newman wrong? Between Newman and John Paul II, there was a change in the theological judgment on slavery. How account for it?

Where the development of moral doctrine is concerned, the development on the subject of slavery is the prime case. At issue is not the mitigation of slavery for Hebrews that the Hebrew Bible called for, nor the fairness supposed to mark the Christian master's treatment of slaves, nor the doubts as to particular titles to slave ownership developed by Christian casuists, but the intrinsic character of a relationship in which one person bought, sold, mortgaged, and transferred another person without regard to that person's will or...