the encouraging radiance of the eternal law
that’s my favorite line from the most recent paper birthed
on the voluntary dimensions of wickedness (just figured out how to upload documents). the irony is not lost on me that i can write so clearly, well, at least in my own mind, on the will’s right and just ordering to the good, and yet still struggle hourly with according my own therewith. but one must start somewhere, hope springs eternal, and grace abounds etc. in all the battles with procrastination, sometimes forget how fun it is to write, though i’m very aware that it’s the kind of writing that equals glazed eyes for most potential readers who are not similiarly obsessed…
anyway, for those who might be, excerpt from the intro:
“No one is voluntarily wicked nor involuntarily happy.†This saying is brought into Aristotle’s discussion of man as a responsible agent to illustrate once again how common opinions are often found to be admixtures of truth, and falsity. Having established that all men by nature desire happiness and thus what is good, it is easily recognized why there is greater difficulty in seeing a “falling away†from this goal as having any communion with the voluntary. But upon closer consideration, the retreat to unhappiness through wickedness, as with the opposite pilgrimage to happiness through virtue, is not found in a “fall†in the way that an apple falls to the earth from the high boughs which held it loft, that is, by an involuntary compliance with an uncompromising, all determining law such as gravity. Rather, as Aristotle goes to great lengths to show through breaking the moral deliberative process down in its various stages, it is one of cumulative wandering, with each individual choice of man unconstrained (as to its moral or immoral dimension) by any alien force, save by that which may have been determined as a result of his own preceding choices. For man is the source and begetter of his actions as a father is of his children.
This “problem of evil†and the reflections aimed at, if not “solving†it, at least providing some intelligible account for its parasitic thriving, did not begin, nor end, with Aristotle. In both Aristotle and Augustine we find that in order to approach some account of the privative darkness of voluntary wickedness (what Augustine by faith recognizes to be ultimately an irresolvable dimension of “the mystery of iniquityâ€), it is necessary to illuminate the power of man’s faculty of will in respect to its proper actions and end, for a defect can only be rightly recognized and understood in terms of that normative and beneficial mode that it is a privative departure from. While in both authors there is a presentation of categories through which the two divergent paths, and the agents proceeding upon them, are given a certain intelligibility, and while the distinct locus of the individual will is pointed to as the departure point for wretchedness or blessedness, because that locus abides within the soul of each man, determined by each and every agent in entirely unique circumstances, the individual choice against what is good ultimately remains shrouded in that “mystery of iniquity,†defying the foolishness of such a choice with its abounding throughout the earth. Nonetheless, a careful examination can be of benefit in the approach to a deeper understanding of what is held by faith, in service of overcoming the obstacles banished by the will’s reception of, and cooperation with grace, accepting her abundant invitation to triumphantly build upon nature and carry it beyond all present limitations.
In Book I of Liberum Arbitrium, St. Augustine, having been asked to give an account of the source of evil, in addressing first what evildoing is, guides a dialectical discourse involving what is necessary for virtue, namely a free will, an account which then illuminates (as far as possible) what takes place in man’s failure to achieve that excellence of virtue which is proper to his imaged dignity. For if failure was not an option, so to speak, man’s response to God’s purposes would be relegated to the realm of the apple’s “response†to gravity’s law constrained “invitation†to draw near to the center of the earth. In order for man to truly become what his Creator has designed him to be, through pedagogic stages of servant, to adopted child, to friend and ultimately loving spouse, wedding himself to the Beloved through an utterly free vow of love, he must have a real say, a real though participatory power of his own to so assent towards unity. And if a real power – designed to be guided by reason and ratified by the judgment and choice of each individual, then a real risk of privation; though unlike merely physical privations as found in material being, as the rational being is of a higher order than nutritive or sensitive beings who are not so defined by that designated perfection, so there is a higher degree of participation required for attaining to the supernatural end to which man is ordained, and thus a more grave consequence to refusing to so participate according to his design.