That Ubiquitous Law

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I, the Lord your God, teach you what is for your good, and lead you on the way you should go. If you would hearken to my commandments, your prosperity would flow like a river, and your vindication like the waves of the sea.

While the ancient Greeks and Romans were using right reason to discover the existence of God and the natural law, the ancient Israelites were learning the natural law through Divine Revelation. Through Moses, God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments, which is the natural law expressed explicitly. God is good: He provides for all His children.

P.S. The English word "ubiquitous" comes from the Latin word, "ubique" [oo-bee-kway], which means everywhere. When in the Mass, you hear the Latin phrase, "semper et ubique," it means, "always and everywhere." Then there are the Marines, who have the motto, "Semper fidelis," which means, "always faithful."

G. K. C. on Divine Providence

Dear Blogger,

As promised, here is the quote from Chesterton:

After that, all men knew in their hearts that she [the Roman Republic] had been representative of mankind, even when she was rejected of men. And there fell on her the shadow from a shining and yet invisible light and the burden of things to be. It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic Wars if, in after ages, divine things descended at least upon human things and not inhuman. Europe evolved into its own vices with its own impotence, as will be suggested on another page; but the worst into which it evolved was not like what it had escaped. Can any man in his senses compare the great wooden doll, whom the children expected to eat a little bit of the dinner, with the great idol who would have been expected to eat the children? That is the measure of how far the world went astray, compared with how far it might have gone astray.

-Gilbert Keith Chesteron, The Everlasting Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1953) 154.

God bless,


Little Brother

"Only One Is Good"

Dear Little Brother:
Can pagans ever be good? Should we love them too even though they don't acknowledge the one true God or the Church that our Lord founded? -a blogger

Dear Blogger:
God wants us to love everyone--that includes pagans. The meaning of "love" is to desire the salvation of your neighbor and to pray for this intention. Furthermore, there are "good pagans" and "bad pagans"; we need pray for both. Looking at history, we find examples of both: The pagans of the ancient Roman Republic (not to be confused with the Roman Empire) used what wits they had to come to the conclusion that a Supreme Being exists, and that there is a natural law that any human being can discover using his reason, that is, his God-given intellect. This natural law is based on the Eternal Law, which is based on the nature of God himself and how God made the universe to work. If we lived our lives according to the way the God of Love made the universe and according to our nature as human beings, this human nature being part of God's universe--of his Eternal Law or Eternal Plan, then the world would be the way God created it to be. Of course, it will be even better than we can ever imagine, thanks to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, King and Lord of All History.
Now, let's get back to the distinction we were making, and please excuse "the digression." The Roman Republic provides us with an example of "good pagans". Often, they are called, "the noble pagans of antiquity". An example of a bad pagan society would be ancient Carthage. Rome fought against Carthage in the Punic Wars. ("Wars"--plural in number-- because there were three of them and they took place over a long period of time.) The Carthaginians worshipped Moloch, a demonic god who required child sacrifice. So, one religion is as good as another, right? Wrong! This "religion" clearly was not good. As already implied, it was demonic. The Carthaginians were literally throwing babies (most likely their own) into the fires of Moloch. That's how they "fed" him. Interestingly, the Carthaginians were the descendants of Phoenicians who moved to Northern Africa and founded the New City, more commonly know as "Carthage." Guess which famous woman in history was a Phoenician queen. You're right! It's the infamous Jezebel. In an intermarriage that made an alliance between Phoenicia and the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Queen Jezebel married King Abab. Jezebel pressured the weak King Ahab into setting up Baals for the Israelites to worship. You know what this meant. The northern kingdom of God's Chosen People were worshipping idols and committing child-sacrifice along with the pagans. How horrible! How utterly unthinkable. Jeremiah was right when he said, "The Temple! The Temple! ..." Dont' think you are doing fine and God is pleased with you and your Temple if you worship false gods and do child sacrifice! Because of that, your glorious Temple doesn't amount to "a hill of beans" to put it in "the vernacular".
Thus, Ahab and Jezebel began the first outright religious persecution of God's Chosen People since they came into existence. These are the same monarchs who were the contemporaries of that great and fiery prophet, Elijah (or Elias). And the great Elijah, fighting for the religious rights of God's people and fighting literally for the dear children, overcame the priests of Baal! God is pro-life! Indeed, when Hiel offered his two sons to the Baals by burying them in the foundations of Jericho, Jeremiah tells us that this is something that God never dreamed of. When a person reads this, with an inner voice of the soul, he can just hear God weeping!
In his classic book, The Everlasting Man, Gilbert Keith Chesterton shows the world the difference between "the noble pagans" and "the bad pagans". (Perhaps we could also call them the pagans of antiquity versus the pagans of iniquity.) Chesterton asks how anyone can possibly compare the little pagan wooden dolls whom the children would invite to eat some of their dinner with the pagan god, Moloch, who would have had the children for dinner; yes, Moloch would have eaten the children! The Romans, with natural reason and natural law, did their level best to be the people they were created to be and achieve their final end, union with God, whether they could say this in so many words or not. The Carthaginians simply didn't develop natural virtue and decided to be bad. Probably, the worship of Moloch was more "convenient" for them.
Blogger, I'm here at the library and don't have my copy of The Everlasting Man right here on my person, so please excuse me. In my next e-letter, I will send you the entire quote of Chesterton on this matter. So for now, as said a noble Roman general returning from the Punic Wars: Carthago delenda est!
-Little Brother

Reason and Revelation

Here is an excellent and easy-to-understand explanation of the natural law by Anne Carroll, author of Christ the King: Lord of History.

… But in philosophy, Rome did mark one important accomplishment: the development of an understanding of the natural law.
The natural law means that there are certain moral principles which men logically determine by studying life, human nature and reality. Some of these principles are the evil of murder, of theft, of perjury. The Hebrews, of course, prohibited these things because of the Ten Commandments, which they had received as a direct revelation from God. But the Roman philosophers reasoned with their minds to many of the same conclusions and then taught these conclusions to the people. They were the first people, therefore, to develop on their own a code of natural law morality. They used this as a basis for their law code, which was one of the fairest and most just systems in the world because it was based on principles believed to be unchanging, rather than on what any individual judge thought about the case. This means that the poor as well as the rich could expect justice under Roman law.

Our God is awesome! He gives each of us an intellect and a heart with which to discover the truth about ourselves (our nature as human beings), the world, and how we should want to live in order to be truly happy. At the same time, he tells us explicitly how to do this as He gives us the Ten Commandments. These Commandments are actually the natural law written on the stone tablets of Moses and which God writes on the heart of each human person. Wow! One would think this more than enough to assure that we “get the message.” However, God’s love is always greater than we could possibly imagine. He goes even further by sending His Love “in the flesh”, the Son of God Incarnate, to redeem us from the Evil One and to show us in person how to live in order to be truly happy—forever!

The Law Written on Your Heart

"This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they will be my people." (Jeremiah 31:33) Happy Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus!

The Natural Law is in Our Hearts

Don't give up; good things still happen! God really does "cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly."

"Seventy years ago it was against the law to dispense birth control devices or medicines. Planned Parenthood set up shop in the Chase Clinic here in Waterbury to dispense contraceptives. The Priests of the City of Waterbury had a meeting and drafted a letter to be read at all the Masses in the City the next day. As it happened, the District Attorney for the City of Waterbury attended the 10:00 Mass in Saint Margaret’s Church. The next day he met with his staff and by the end of the week, the Birth Control Clinic in Waterbury and 11 others around the State were closed." -From the Rector's column of the bulletin of The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception on Sunday, June 7, A.D. 2009

It was only seventy years ago and society was still morally good enough -- at least in one part of the world -- to follow Jesus, and the civil laws were still based on the natural law. Caesar and the Pope working together; miracles can happen!

Father Thomas Euteneuer will be present at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Waterbury during the weekend of June 19-21, to help commemorate this event. Furthermore, June 19 is the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, and June 20 the Solemnity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever!

Sacred Scripture lives for all time!

The natural law is written not only on the heart of man, but also in the Sacred Scriptures. The natural law can be known by any human person; however, in it's secondary precepts it is known "only by a few and with a great admixture of error" (St. Thomas Aquinas). But why is this so? The Catechism of the Catholic Church answers this question bluntly and directly: "Because of sin the natural law is not always perceived nor is it recognized by everyone with equal clarity and immediacy." For this reason, says St. Augustine, God, "wrote on the tablets of the law what men did not read in their hearts." How awesome our Father is! He always provides for his weak and struggling children. We fail to read what God put into our very nature as human beings, so God writes "a book" -- indeed a veritable library! -- for us. What God told the Hebrews many years ago is valid for the post-modern man of today; indeed it's valid for all time.

I answered, concealed in the storm cloud,
at the waters of Meriba I tested you.
Listen, my people, to my warning,
O Israel, if only you would heed!

Let there be no foreign god among you,
no worship of an alien god.
I am the Lord you God,
who brought you from the land of Egypt.
Open you mouth wide and I will fill it.

But my people did not heed my voice
and Israel would not obey,
so I left them in their stubbornness of heart
to follow their own designs.

O that my people would heed me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!
At once I would subdue their foes,
turn my hand against their enemies.

The Lord's enemies would cringe at their feet
and their subjection would last forever.
But Israel I would feed with finest wheat
and fill them with honey from the rock.

Let there be no foreign god among you, no worship of an alien god. Again and again in history, after a period of repentance and reform, Israel would lapse into foreign worship; they would adopt the ways and modes of worship of the nations. Yet many of the nations worshiped gods who demanded child-sacrifice. Thus Israel herself at times practiced the abominations of child sacrifice and adultery. These are well-documented historical facts, which we will demonstrate in a future posting on this blog. Whenever the First Commandment is broken in public on a large scale, the Sixth and Fifth Commandments follow. It's not my opinion--it's history.

Today, led by the United States of America, there is acceptance of abortion by the majority of the cultures and by the legal systems. There is also a popular acceptance of contraception, whether is it admitted to or not. This is child sacrifice. Preborn babies, children at the very beginning of life, are sacrificed the the gods of money, convenience, and political correctness. The sanctity of the marriage bed, which used to be open to transmission of human life as per the natural law and the Sixth Commandment, is sacrificed to the god of overpopulation propaganda and the god of popular opinion. We are no different from the ancient Israelites and the nations of pagan antiquity that surrounded them.

O that my people would heed me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!
At once I would subdue their foes,
turn my hand against their enemies.

The Lord's enemies would cringe at their feet
and their subjection would last forever.
But Israel I would feed with finest wheat
and fill them with honey from the rock.

Will we be rewarded for respecting life and protecting our brothers, especially the most vulnerable? On the other hand, will we be overrun by our enemies, both temporal and eternal? Only you and I can answer this question. We do this by the way we live our lives.

Written in the Heart of Man

Sophocles' character Antigone speaks of "the unwritten laws of heaven" that no man can change or override. She is referring to the eternal law. Eternal law is God's plan for all creation "to run" with each being living according to it's nature. The natural law is simply eternal law in the heart of the human person. Since he has reason, a human being can know what is good and what is bad (evil). That's why it's called "natural law", because it's based on reason, which is the basis of human nature. No other visible creature on earth is able to reason. Thus, man's reason telling him to choose what is good and avoid what is evil has come to be called "the natural law." Indeed, this is the first principle of the natural law: Do good and avoid evil. "This first principle of natural law: 'Do good and avoid evil.' is known to anyone who has the use of reason at all." (Austin Fagothey, Right and Reason Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1959, p.179). "My dear Sam," every hobbit--I mean--every human being has at least some use of reason. That is what makes him human. From these principles, other basic principles immediately follow. They are so simple that everyone has them.

There are other common or general principles based on the first principle, following from it with immediate inference, or with mediate inference so simple and easy that no normal mature person can fail to make it. (Ibid., p. 179)

Austin Fagothey's book Right and Reason gives these examples:

"Preserve your own being."
"Care for your offspring."
"Adore God."
"Do not murder."
"Treat others with fairness."
"Be faithful to your friends." (page 179)

No human person wants to die or get sick. We naturally abhor such painful experiences. And who doesn't like a cute little baby! And when the baby is your own you definitely want him or her to continue to live; parents are willing to give their very lives for their children. Everyone feels a need to worship and if one doesn't find the true God, he makes up his own god or accepts the god of his peers--whichever one happens to be popular at the time. It's obvious that religion cannot be eradicated from the human race. Everyone wants to be treated fairly, and everyone--especially children--has a sense of fair play. Finally, no man can exist totally alone; everyone needs a friend. This is so deep in man. It is in all our great literature, our tales, our stories--from Day One.

Enkidu, whom I loved dearly,
who went with me through all hardships,
He has gone to the lot of mankind,
Day and night I have wept over him.
For burial I did not want to give him up, thinking:
"My friend will rise after all at my lamentations!"
From: Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet X (Old Babylonian version), lines 2-11, in Heidel, Gilgamesh Epic, p. 69.

Antigone

Why not? It was not Zeus who gave the order.
And Justice living with the dead below
has never given men a law like this.
Nor did I think your pronouncements were
so powerful that mere man could override
the unwritten and unfailing laws of heaven.
These live, not for today and yesterday
but for all time.*
What is found in man's heart will inevitably come out in his literature, in his tales, in his "oral tradition". Now, we must give some important background for the above passage, just in case there exists someone reading this blog who has not yet had the pleasure of reading (or watching) "Antigone."
Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, goes to bury her brother, who has died in mortal combat. The new ruler, Creon, makes a law that forbids Antigone from burying her poor brother, because he was Creon's rival claimant to the throne. Antigone does her family duty and buries her brother anyway, knowing full well that Creon will exact the death penalty against her. So, what does she think of Creon's decree? Sophocles gives Antigone's answer in the profound passage quoted above.
So why this passage to open a blog on natural law? Because, in a way that touches the human heart, it conveys profound truths about the natural law: Natural law is based on eternal law (God's design for the universe, especially for the human person), it is unchangeable and universal (for human persons of every place and every time), and it cannot be overridden by any positive law, whether civil or ecclesiastical.
With laws that fail to protect completely the human life in the womb and proposed laws that would obliterate all legal protection against abortion (F.O.C.A.) and the legalization of "gay marriage" in some states, the primacy of the natural law over human positive law would seem to be a very pertinent topic for our day and age. But that's the topic for a future posting by this author--or perhaps one of you bloggers out there would like to "write in" about that.
*(Sophocles, Oedipus the King and Antigone, Peter Arnot, trans., New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960, p.76)