The Second Tablet Project

assurance which transcends what human reason can find out on its own—no human being dares to face the law straight-on.

Yet we can’t quite wipe the law from our intellects. It is woven into the deep structure of our minds, as experts on linguistics say the threads of language are. Unable to make it go away, we use every means we can devise to pretend that we are really being good. Evasions and rationalizations spread through our intellects like the mycelium of a fungus in its host. That is why the ancient world was brutal, as we of all people should understand. Not even the greatest of the pagans could admit what was wrong with infanticide, although they knew that the child was of our kind. Neither can we admit what is wrong with abortion and a host of other evils.

It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the possibility of forgiveness. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender control. Without this possibility it would be harder still: How could we ever face how wrong we had been about anything? How could we bear to change our minds? The history of ethics would be a history of digging in against plain truths. Consider how many centuries it took natural law thinkers even in the Christian tradition to work out the implications of the brotherhood of master and slave. At least they did eventually. Outside of the biblical orbit, no one ever did—not spontaneously.

It may seem that the possibility of forgiveness matters only on the assumption that there is, in fact, a God—that without the lawgiver, there would be no law, and therefore nothing to be forgiven. The actual state of affairs is more dreadful, for the Furies of conscience do not wait upon our assumptions. One who admits the Furies but denies the God who appointed them—who supposes that there can be a law without a lawgiver—must suppose that forgiveness is both necessary and impossible. That which is not personal cannot forgive; morality—by itself—has a heart of rock. And so although grace would be unthinkable, the ache for it would keen on, like a cry in a deserted street.

The second difference it makes to acknowledge biblical revelation has to do with providence . Self-interest is not the only thing that tempts us to commit injustice. One of the strongest motives to do wrong is to make everything go right, for sometimes justice requires allowing bad things to happen to other people. If we forbid hanging innocent men, the mob may break out in a riot. If we forbid bombing noncombatants, the war may be prolonged. If we forbid giving perjured testimony, the murderer may go unpunished. Surely it isn’t right, we reason, that there are riots, longer wars, and murderers free in the streets. Let us do evil for the sake of good. It doesn’t seem just to do justice.

Christian faith undercuts the urge to fix everything on our own through conviction of the final helplessness of man and confidence in the providence of God—through certainty that only God can set everything to rights and faith that in the end, He will. Man can merely ameliorate, not cure; but there will be a Judgment, and there will be a hand that wipes every tear from the eyes of those who mourn.

The final helplessness of man to fix himself may seem fatuously obvious after a century that killed hundreds of millions of people, all with the idea of improving human life. If it is a fatuity, however, it is an unbearable fatuity, one that we persistently refuse to accept. I commented earlier on the idea that one may play God if no one is God already. What we have in view here is the conviction that one must play God if the Creator is not Judge and Healer too. Immanuel Kant thought that morality would be undermined without a belief in divine judgment, but Kant did not say the half of it. The wrongs of the world would not merely dismay the desire to do right. They would taunt, torture, and drive men to a despair that could be relieved only by committing yet greater wrongs, on the principle that if God does not save us then we must save ourselves.

There may be some few who could resist this terrible conclusion. I have not met them. It is no accident that not even the Stoics, who invented the very term “natural law,” ever rose to the idea of principles which hold without exception, principles which may not be violated even to prevent violations. The problem was not that they failed to find these principles written upon their hearts, but that they could not bring themselves to attend closely to the inscription. It would have been too awful to believe that the goodness of the ends did not justify the wickedness of the means, because how else could the ends be achieved? The same people who said Fiat justitia ruat caelum, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” also said Salus populi suprema lex, “The safety of the people is the supreme law”—and as they understood these mottoes, the second unraveled the first. Have the Germans begun another uprising? Then raze their villages, rape their virgins, and show them what the Pax Romana means. All for justice, all for order, all for peace.

Without confidence in providence, our vision of every Commandment goes askew. For example “Thou shalt not murder” seems to change before our eyes to “Thou shalt keep alive the greatest number possible”at the expense of others, if that is what it takes.” In the novel (and later movie) Sophie’s Choice, a Nazi guard at Auschwitz commands the young mother to choose which of her children will be sent to the ovens. If she cooperates in the crime, the one she selects will be burned; if she refuses, then both of them will be taken to their deaths. After a long, hanging moment, she pushes away her smallest child and cries out that he take her—not the other, not her favorite! Her choice is plainly evil; for the sake of a better result, she has united herself with the sin of the murderer. And in the end her favorite child dies too. But without faith in a God who hears the cries of the suffering, how could she choose otherwise? One day I was surprised to hear one of my seminar students argue that it would have been “selfish” for Sophie to refuse to mark one of her children for death. How so? His reply was that she should have been willing to “sacrifice herself”—by which he meant sacrifice her conscience. It took me some time to realize that although my agnostic student considered “I must promote life” to be a real moral duty, he viewed “I must not have complicity in murder” to be a merely personal scruple on the order of “I am not the sort of person who skips bathing.” He didn’t deny that conscience speaks differently, but for the sake of a “better” result, he thought, Sophie should have been willing to suffer the agonies of its accusations.

And if there is no God, why not? The motto “Do the right thing and let God take care of the consequences” makes sense only on the assurance that He will take care of the consequences. Without that assurance, doing the right thing means taking care of the consequences—or trying to. And so it is that unless there is providence, the urge to do good irresistibly consorts with evil; unless God is just, our judgments become unhinged.

The third difference biblical revelation makes to moral understanding concerns our ability to recognize our neighbors for what they are. To be a person is to be a proper subject of absolute regard—a “neighbor” in the sense of the Commandments—a being of the sort whom the Commandments are about. It is persons whom I am not to kill, persons whom I am to love as I love myself. But what is a person? If we accept the biblical revelation that man is the imago Dei, the image of God, then every human being is a person—a person by nature, a kind of thing different from any other kind, a being whose very existence is a kind of sacrament, a sign of God’s grace. Trying to understand the nature of man without recognizing him as the imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving of a lion.

The problem with rejecting this biblical revelation is not that one loses the dim, inbuilt sense of awe that clings to human life; we intuit the image of God even if we do not know what it is. The problem is that this inbuilt sense is not enough. We need an explanation of what it is that we are intuiting—of what we experience when we experience the sense of awe. Without this explanation, I may try to hold onto my knowledge of the evil of murdering my neighbor, but I will find it difficult to recognize my neighbor when I see him. It is not impossible; more or less adequate explanations can be constructed from materials accessible to natural reason. But that is the long way around, and most people weary long before they reach the end of it. By and large, the ones who do stay on the trail are the same ones who acknowledge the biblical revelation of the imago Dei.

In contemporary secular ethics, the ruling tendency is to concede that there are such things as persons, but to define them in terms of their functions or capacities—not by what they are, the image of God, but by what they can do. To give but a single well-known illustration, philosopher Mary Ann Warren defines “personhood” in terms of consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, the capacity to communicate about indefinitely many topics, and conceptual self-awareness. If you can do all those things, you’re a person; if you can’t, you’re not. The functional approach to personhood seems plausible at first, just because—at a certain stage of development, and barring misfortune—most persons do have these functions. But to think that they are their functions blows the core right out of the moral code.

Warren offers her definition to justify abortion. Obviously, unborn babies are not capable of reasoning, complex communication, and so on. If they cannot perform these functions, then by Warren’s definition they aren’t persons, and if they aren’t persons, they have no inherent right to life. But it cannot end with abortion. If unborn babies may be killed because they lack these functions, then a great many other individuals may also be killed for the same reasons—for example the asleep, unconscious, demented, addicted, and very young, not to mention sundry other cases, such as deaf-mutes who have not been taught sign language. In Warren’s language, none of these are persons; in biblical language, she refuses to recognize the imago Dei. She does claim to oppose infanticide—but only because any given infant is probably wanted by someone. She does not concede that the infant has an inherent claim to our regard, and if no one does happen to want it, then, she says, “its destruction is permissible.”

The cure for such blindness is not to tinker with the list of functions by which we define persons, but to stop confusing what persons are with what they can typically do. Functional definitions are appropriate for things which have no inherent nature, things whose identity is dependent on our own purposes and interests. Suppose I am building an automobile and I need to keep two moving parts from touching each other. I don’t need an object of a particular natural kind for that; anything which fills the space can be a spacer. Its very identity as a spacer is relative to how I want to use it, or to what function I value in it.

By contrast, if I am a person then I am by nature a rights-bearer, by nature a proper subject of absolute regard—not because of what I can do, but because of what I am. Of course this presupposes that I have a nature, a “what-I-am,” which is distinct from the present condition or stage of development of what I am, distinct from my abilities in that condition or stage of development, and distinct from how this condition, stage of development, or set of abilities might happen to be valued by other people. In short, a person is by nature someone whom it is wrong to view merely as a means. If you regard me as a person only because I am able to exercise certain capacities that interest you, then you are saying that I am not a person. And so the functional definition of personhood does not even rise to the dignity of being wrong. It is incoherent.

Some modern people will bite the bullet and agree with me. They will try to rescue their position not by drawing back, but by pushing further still, becoming “post” modern. “Very well!” they might say. “Let us grant that persons in the merely functional sense are not persons in the moral sense. But in that case there are no moral persons, because the ‘human beings’ whom you call moral persons do not exist. There are no ‘natural kinds.’ There are no ‘natures.’ There is no ‘what-I-am.’ All value is relative because all meaning is relative; all meaning is relative because every definition is contrived to the convenience of the definer. The definition of the ‘human’ is no less contrived than any other.” They have a point. We saw earlier that without God, there is no reason to believe in any sort of pattern in things—“natures” included.

But they escape one incoherency only to fall into a greater one. The former incoherency concerned only how we think of persons. The new one concerns how we think of everything—how we think of reality, even how we think of thinking. A condition of being able to say anything meaningful at all is that not everything is a creature of our own regard for it. There must exist some things that are what they are despite us; their meanings provide the anchors for all other meanings. If all meaning were relative, then even the meanings of the terms in the proposition “All meaning is relative” would be relative. Therefore the proposition “All meaning is relative” destroys itself. It is nothing but an evasion of reality. That seems a high price to pay, even for the privilege of killing people.

A modernist who rejects the greater of these incoherencies is not yet in the clear; one does not have to believe that all meanings slip away to see the meaning of the person slip away. Though a modernist may keep up the pretense that he is still talking about what persons really are, his functionalist method allows him to know only what he wants them to be—and different modernists want them to be different things. One thinker has greater regard for sentience, another for cognition, another for self-awareness. One thinks the important thing is sociality, another the capacity to make plans. With each different criterion of personhood, a different set of beings is welcomed through the gates of others’ regard. This writer says that higher mammals are persons, but human babies not. That one says that human babies are persons, but Grandma not. The one over there says that some human babies are persons, but only if their mothers think they are.

Denial of the imago Dei is something new, and much more dangerous than a simple return to paganism. As Francis Schaeffer once remarked, the worst that could be said of the pagans was that they had not yet heard that man is made in the image of God. Although they naturally recognized the dignity of man and the justice that is due to him, their understanding of this intuition was deficient. By contrast, our thinkers have heard that man is made in the image of God, but deny it. This puts such a strain on the inbuilt structures of moral knowledge that justice flips upside down. Refusing to learn, they finally distort even what they already know.

What shall we say about the Second Tablet Project? Just that it cannot succeed. The Second Tablet depends on the First; whoever denies his duty to God will find, if he is logical, that he can no longer make sense of his duty to his neighbor. Conscience will certainly persist, reminding him of both, but it will seem to him an absurdity in a sea of absurdities. Though he may admit that he has a nature, he will be unable to say why he should keep it. Though he may admit that this nature is governed by certain laws, he will find that their oughtness creeps out the door and that even their prudence slips away. All this will be needless, for he does have the knowledge of God; he merely denies it. But denial only makes his crisis deeper, for lies metastasize, and the greatest lie metastasizes to the greatest degree.

Then should we say that the Two Tablets are enough if only we take them as a pair? More’s the pity, no: not even the pair of them is enough by the light of nature alone. Though natural knowledge is sufficient to illuminate our duty, duty by itself is despair. It cannot assure us of the possibility of forgiveness when we fall short; it cannot assure us of the certainty of providence in the face of evil; and it cannot explain to us the fallen dignity we bear as images of God. In want of the first assurance, we seek refuge from guilt by denying our sins. In want of the second assurance, we seek to make everything go right by doing wrong. In want of the explanation, we find it all too easy to pretend that we do not recognize our neighbors for what they are.

In these senses, moral knowledge is protected and illuminated by the knowledge of God, and the natural knowledge of God is protected and illuminated by the knowledge of His word. Faith and reason contain and depend on each other. May we be spared the illusion of an ethics that stands wholly by itself.

J. Budziszewski is Associate Professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. His newest book, The Beginning of Wisdom , will be released this fall by Spence Publishing.

Image by Wellcome Collection licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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