Column 09/25/2023: Prudence, Wisdom, and the Contemporary Crisis in Catholic Ethics

Prudence, Wisdom, and the Contemporary Crisis in Catholic Ethics

I am going to attempt what I fully understand is both a very difficult and very presumptuous task: that is, to summarize what I see as a centrally important concept to ancient philosophical and Catholic ethical theories, and to indicate why lack of proper understanding of this concept wreaks havoc with attempts to understand and apply these concepts in the modern world. This is quite an obnoxious thing to do; if you are annoyed by it, please pray for me. If you like it, pray for me anyway. 

In contemporary Catholic ethical discourses and debates, especially on a popular level, but increasingly also in academic and even clerical circles, there are two terms that are thrown around more than any others. These terms, in fact, are thrown around with such frequency that one would think that there were more or less no other issues in Catholic ethics at all; and what is perhaps oddest of all, they are thrown around by both sides of virtually all contemporary Catholic ethical debates, and in highly similar terms.

In watching these debates unfold, I have grown more and more and more certain that, put simply, these terms are being used all wrong--not just trivially or technically wrong, but in ways that, frankly, I can find no parallel in the tradition prior to the 20th century, and which taken together threaten the very edifice of Catholic ethics. This is a strong claim; but it is strong precisely because these terms refer, however increasingly remotely, to base assumptions of Catholic and ancient philosophical ethics without which the whole edifice of Catholic ethics simply makes no sense, and simply cannot be lived out or applied.

I refer, of course, to the two terms intrinsically wrong and prudential. 

The Development and Degeneration of Doctrine

Even apart from the question of belief, the Catholic Church is a historical object that cannot help but be fascinating to historians, and intellectual historians in particular. This is because it is, perhaps, the most long-lasting, deliberate, and conscious attempt to preserve, further, and maintain a complex, far-reaching, consistent body of thought within the general chaos of human history. Intellectual history is, by and large, mostly a matter of chronicling change and discontinuity, changes in epoch and era and Empire, and the way ideas emerge out of, respond to, react against the particularities of human culture and society and politics. Yet here, in the midst of this, is a highly organized and practically effective institution attempting to maintain a single body of thought, and succeeding, at the very least, to some significant degree.

Still, if one studies this history at any detail, one realizes the essential, enormous, unavoidable difficulties with such a project. Put simply, ideas, whatever we may believe about their fundamental nature, are held in human minds, communicated in human words, put in effect in human societies and governments. And all these things are, by the very nature, partial and imperfect and ambiguous; and all of them change, constantly and inevitably and in (nearly) every respect. 

This is for a very simple reason: because whatever books are written, whatever rules are established, whatever institutions are founded, it is only ever people who act, who know, who make institutions function and abide by their rules, who receive ideas and live them out. And human beings die, very quickly in the grand scheme of things; and when they do, all that can remain of what they knew, what they acted for, what they abided by and served and lived out, is what they succeeded in communicating to others. And whatever these others received from those before them, they received also and inevitably many other things, from new situations, events, circumstances, people, and even from themselves.

Most of the major doctrinal crises of the Church, of which there have been many, came about in a very similar way. They were not in essence the result of people self-consciously trying to revolutionize or alter the Church's body of ideas or doctrine or ritual. They were, rather, the result of the fact that the words and rituals and practices used to embody the Church's ideas had over time changed their meaning, or at least become sufficiently ambiguous, sufficiently unclear and diluted and challenged by new structures and that they could no longer in and of themselves suffice to clearly communicate the Church's content and/or respond to contemporary challenges and hence settle conflicts within the Church. 

The most interesting thing, contrary to most public understanding, about the Arian Controversy (about which I have written a forthcoming academic book) is how much the two sides shared in terms of authorities, ideas, even terminology: both believed in a Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, both shared a common set of metaphysical and Biblical terms for describing their nature and relationships, both participated in a largely common set of rituals and practices and ecclesiastical structures dedicated to worshiping and proclaiming that Trinity. Yet these shared terms did not settle conflict, but rather increased it, since they were interpreted in ways that were, in base intellectual terms, totally contrary and irreconcilable. 

It is a simple, recurring, and at times amusing fact that the chief actors of the two sides were, again and again, not simply angered, but quite honestly surprised when they heard how other bishops and clerics had come to interpret their shared heritage. Eusebius of Caesarea, one of the most brilliant and well-informed and well-connected scholars of his day, seems to have been quite honestly flabbergasted to learn that Alexander confessed the eternity of the Son; and Alexander was equally flabbergasted to discover that Eusebius and his allies denied that eternity. Both men had imbibed from their episcopal and theological forebears an almost totally shared set of Biblical texts, liturgical practices, and theological language, not at all simple or "primitive" but highly complex and philosophically-elaborated and dogmatically-defined by more than a century of scholarship, debates, and councils--but somehow, for all that, they had imbibed totally contrary ideas of the fundamental nature of God. For Eusebius, the Holy Trinity was a helpful liturgical grouping of the absolutely transcendent One, a cosmic Demiurge, and a sort of angelic viceroy; for Alexander, it was the very essence of the inner life of God. This was not a small difference; and yet it could not be settled by any shared concepts and terms. Times had changed, philosophy and metaphysics had grown sharper, bishops and theologians and philosophers alike had died, and passed on only partially what was in their minds. The result was inevitable conflict.

I believe, in principle, in the development of doctrine, its growth in detail and solidity and clarity and implications over time; yet even if I did not, the mere maintenance of doctrine would inevitably require an indefinite train of new words, new doctrinal formulas, new liturgical forms, new expositions. 

Most things in the world work in precisely the opposite respect: forms, structures, words, rituals are maintained as empty shells even as every idea that animated them is completely lost. Chesterton referred to this phenonemon, in a memorable turn of phrase, as the equivalent in the intellectual and historical world of a fossil in the scientific world: that is, an entity that has maintained its external shape, but which has had its internal substance totally consumed and replaced by a quite different one. 

The world around us today is full to the bursting with such fossils, covering every field from religion to politics to philosophy to science. And indeed, there are practical advantages to being a fossil, or belonging to one--since one is thus enabled to appeal to nostalgia and use and exploit old networks and formulas and symbols and raw institutional power while being perfectly unfettered to follow every fashion and appeal to every new idea at the same time. From the Hinduism of Modi's BJB to the Conservatism of Trump to the patriotic-Imperial Progressivism of mainstream American elites, nearly all the most powerful things in the world are fossils.

The Church is, or tries to be, something different; a living organism that continues through the ages, growing like an organism while remaining, like an organism, fundamentally the same. It is not despite but because of this that it inevitably and necessarily changes in externals. 

After all, a dinosaur begins as an embryo, an entity with no shape or organ in common with the adult dinosaur; and even as an adult, it constantly goes through processes of digestion and replacement, changing its energy and its cells and its habits and features. A fossil dinosaur, in contrast, never changes at all. It has, in at least this respect, the gift of perfect, total continuity; and yet, it no longer has a single substantial feature in common with the living dinosaur. Despite many pleasing fantasies, a fossil Tyrannosaurus at the museum will not try to eat you, for the simple reason that it no longer needs to digest any foreign substance in order to maintain its existence. A living dinosaur shows a much more profound interest in the new and the novel and foreign, though admittedly this interest is largely self-interested, aimed at continuing and furthering its own limited existence, and not at expanding itself by incorporating your best features, altering itself to please you, or even entering into a constructive dialog in order to meet you, so to speak, in the middle. Instead, you meet its middle, and nothing of you remains. 

Of course, the externals of a T Rex, while not essential in themselves, play an important role in communicating its essential T-Rex-ness to friends and victims alike, so that it would be foolish to change them merely for the sake of change. Then, too, not every element of a T Rex is merely external and changeable; to exist as itself, it cannot change constantly or totally or in every respect,  nor can it practically do without certain fixed, essential organs and operations. To attempt to improve upon a living T Rex by haphazardly lopping off its limbs and removing its internal organs, all the while gleefully declaring that you are preserving its essentials, would be a rather foolish (not to say dangerous) operation. A T Rex is not merely an ideal or a principle or a universal form existing in the heavens; it is a living organism, which to live must operate through and in particular, temporal, historical elements.

Still, in dealing with the process of fossilization, it is profoundly deceptive to look merely at the shape of a fossil and note its perfect, unchanging continuity with what came before; and profoundly unhelpful to focus merely on jealously guarding and preserving the fossil's shape no matter what. If we wish to bring a fossil T Rex to life again, this often necessitates rather extreme changes, including also the addition and digestion of a great deal of totally new material helpfully provided by the guests of the museum. Such a resurrection would be far more unsettling than a revolution. 

Contemporary Western Ethics

To undo or counteract the effects of fossilization, one must know what foreign substance has been introduced or is being introduced, in place of its substance, into the external shape of the entity. To understand the crisis in contemporary Catholic ethics, one must understand the foreign substance that has taken the place, or at least has striven and is striving to take the place, of Catholic ethics. 

In this, it is very important to realize that, as with doctrine, the vast majority of this change is not being carried out by self-conscious innovators or actors, but merely by the ambient force of external structures, beliefs, networks, concepts, and conflicts. As has frequently happened in the history of the Church, even self-conscious innovators may be to some degree helping preserve its inner continuity; and self-conscious conservators may be engaged merely in preserving the form, while replacing the content and substance wholesale with something else. Most of us, most of the time, are somewhere in the middle, doing our extremely imperfect best to digest the content of the Faith in the madness of contemporary life and in so doing both preserving and altering what we find.

Contemporary Western ethics, as it is actually lived out in institutions and ways of life, is based loosely and indirectly on Enlightenment ideas and historical Protestantism, but much more pervasively and directly on the actual systems and conflicts of the 20th century, the age of mass conscription and mass ideology and mass media and mass economic exploitation and the World Wars. To run institutions on such unimaginable scales, and with the intrinsically external purposes of producing indefinite, infinite amounts of products or profit or death, a strange mixture of extreme force and compliance on the one hand, and extreme contingency and laxity on the other, is necessary. 

Hence the bizarre, historically singular structure of American contemporary ethics, as it is actually understood by Americans, which consists of the following principles:

(1) Morality consists essentially of an indefinite body of rules regulating, in principle, any aspect of human behavior to any degree, for any purpose whatsoever, from moral goodness to health to safety to efficiency to order to economic growth to technological power to the interests of any particular group. These rules are by their very nature quasi-universal, imposed on absolutely everyone without exception, regardless of purpose. Regardless of their origins or purposes, though, it is these rules, and these rules alone, that define and constitute what is "good" and "moral." 

(2) These rules are limited and governed and determined by no intrinsic principle, but solely by practical and external concerns. Because they are extrinsic rules based on no rational principle shared in by those subject to them, they intrinsically cannot be communicated or participated in by said subjects, but only imposed on them by some form of extrinsic force. Yet because the rules possess a basically infinite and indefinite reach and furthermore are constantly changing, no amount of force is practically capable of actually fully and pervasively imposing them. Hence, such systems operate always imperfectly and generally on the basis of what is called "efficiency," striving always to expend the least amount of energy and effort to keep the system going. 

(3) This system creates by its very nature a dual relationship between rule-creators and enforcers on the one hand, and rule-subjects on the other. In practice, the former group cannot be made sufficiently large or powerful to actually impose the rules they create on the latter group without undoing the system as a whole. This is in part for the reasons discussed above, and in part because the rule-creators and rule-enforcers are, by a necessary paradox, always to some degree exempt from the rules they create and impose, at times only because of the practical necessities of imposing irrationally indefinite rules, at times as more of a distinct privilege aimed at attracting people to otherwise difficult and burdensome positions. In such systems, though, most people function at various times as both rule-enforcers and rule-subjects, but always in an antagonistic, competitive way that allows for no real rational reconciliation between the two positions. As rule-enforcer, I am harsh and demanding; as rule-subject, I am deceptive and transgressive. These poses are incorporated into personal and social relationships, in such a way that a constant, competitive jockeying for moral position and power becomes constitutive of political and social life as such. 

(4) No rational principle other than practical governs the relationship between transgression and punishment. Thanks to the intrinsically indefinite and irrational nature of the moral rules and the intrinsically insufficient nature of the enforcement mechanisms, the rules are never in fact successfully enforced. Hence the immense importance of what is called "deterrence"--that is, making a spectacle or example out of the rare people who have been actually caught transgressing, who do not possess a privileged exemption from the rules, and/or who can be in fact caught and punished most "efficiently." 

(5) All of the above creates a constant desire on the part of the governed to transgress these rules. This arises largely because, as already stated, the rules bear no relationship with the desires and goals and rational principles possessed by the governed, are imposed on them by extrinsic force, and hence can only be related to in an antagonistic way by their actual internal beliefs and goals and desires. This in turn creates a desire to transgress, not just for accidental or particular purposes, but for a general, transgressive sense of fun and danger and freedom. This desire also arises because, as per the above, most transgressions are not in fact punished, but might be very harshly. This creates a "gambler's mindset" where transgressing is appealing because any given transgression will most likely will not have any negative effect at all, but each one could lead by chance to devastating negative consequences.

(6) For all of the above reasons, everyone in such systems is in fact indefinitely guilty, and hence liable to indefinite punishment. The fundamental difference in such a system is not between the guilty and the innocent, but rather between the guilty punished and the guilty not-punished. 

(7) Hence, per all the above, moral conflicts within such a society are in most cases not really discourses about ethics in any rational or consistent fashion. They are rather competitive conflicts in which people fight for the power(s) to create rules, enforce them, be exempt from them, transgress them, not be punished for their transgressions, and/or impose punishment on others, and to avoid being subject to rules, caught, and/or punished. Winning this game makes one good and moral; losing it makes one bad and immoral.

The above account is for purposes of comparison, and hence is both sketchy and admittedly extreme. Older, more basic, and more rational ideas of morality are certainly present in modern people to varying degrees, and give them whatever rational purchase they have. Certainly, I would not argue that this system is in fact believed in consciously and fully by any particular modern person--yet I believe it defines the structure of modern life regardless. The above account is also somewhat American-centric; it nonetheless, I believe, defines practically all characteristically "modern" (that is, Imperial, mass-media, mass-production, mass-military) systems, and so can be found in varying degrees in all "modern" societies. And in every point, this idea of morality and ethics is directly contrary to that found in the Catholic tradition.

The Crisis in Catholic Ethics

We can now begin to see a few of the reasons why Catholic ethics have become intrinsically "problematic" in the contemporary world. Put simply, the Catholic Church has rules, but these rules are, in most cases, very poorly-constructed to make for good rules according to the above system. They are, depending on the particular rule and how one construes it, generally some confusing combination of too broad, too specific, too unchanging, too flexible, too trivially easy, too difficult, and/or simply far too few and far-between to actually do the things that modern systems require rules to do. Then too, even more basically, modern Church cannot really enforce these rules in the way that is necessary for such systems to work, which is to say harshly and punitively and selectively.

As argued above, contemporary ethics of itself generates a strong desire to transgress any set of rules, and provides no intrinsic reason for the individual to follow any rule other than force and/or the sense of moral dominance and freedom and power produced by being a rule-creator or rule-enforcer and/or transgressing but avoiding punishment and/or seeing one's enemies punished. Catholicism, though, in the present day has little or no force at its disposal except over children and/or the few people employed by it. Then, too, as an old-fashioned hierarchical system, Catholicism gives the typical non-clerical individual little ability to be a rule-creator or rule-enforcer except to an incredibly limited degree. 

For the typical individual trained in contemporary ethics, then, the rational way to approach Catholicism is to adhere to it only to the degree that one is either directly subject to its structures, through parents or schools, and/or is able to follow its rules perfectly or at least pretend to, and so exercise limited and indirect forms of moral dominance over others as a subordinate rule-enforcer. As soon as one is either no longer subject to Catholic force, or else cannot perfectly follow the Catholic rules or at least pretend to do so, the obvious thing to do is simply to leave Catholicism. This is of course especially true when and where one's adherence to Catholicism puts one out of favor with any of the much more potent and powerful rules-regimes of the contemporary secular world. 

Hence, the characteristic "structure" of the modern Church in the West, especially in America. Parents and schools create, from their own interpretation of Catholic sources, their own structures and expansions of the purported Catholic rules, and enforce them on the only people they have practical power over, which is to say children; these children then grow up and reject all the rules they associate, however vaguely, with Catholicism, and embrace more secular and contemporary rules-discourses; eventually, some number of them return and voluntarily embrace what they see as the Catholic rules, or rather more extreme versions of them, and carry on the cycle. 

Hence also the characteristic structure of modern ethical debates within the Church. On the one hand, you have Catholics who may or may not in fact consistently follow the most basic principles of canon law or Catholic morality, but who are constantly engaged in an open-ended process of creating and/or discovering new and ever more burdensome and more extreme rules on liturgy, morality, etc, and attempting to impose or enforce them on others, with or without the help of the hierarchy. On the other hand, you have Catholics who feel free to simply ignore every Catholic rule that is not directly enforced on them, and whose more or less self-conscious goal is to relax or eliminate all the rules of Catholicism, or at least those rules which people find burdensome or fail to follow most often. 

Properly understood, both of these responses represent obvious reactions to the hegemony of contemporary ethics. On the one hand, progressives see themselves understandably as both realists--acknowledging that rules that cannot be enforced in the modern hegemonic force-based way are more or less dead letters--and advocates of mercy--making Catholicism stand clearly apart from modern force-based regimes by not enforcing its rules at all--while their opponents at least as reasonably see them as simply aiming at the more or less total elimination of Catholicism as a practical source of moral guidance in favor of the total hegemony of the force-based regimes of modernity. On the other side, the advocates of vastly increasing the number and nature of Catholic-based "rules" and enforcing them more harshly and totally on everyone see themselves as attempting to preserve and further Catholic ethics, but can be just as often accused of aiming at the simple assimilation of Catholic ethics to modern ethics and/or at engaging in precisely the kind of self-interested struggle for moral dominance characteristic of such systems.

Thus understood, we can also see why and how the terms "prudential" and "intrinsically evil" have become key to many modern (re)constructions of Catholic ethics. In common usage, a "prudential" moral issue or command or policy is one that can be ignored and disregarded without consequence. An "intrinsically evil" act, on the other hand is an act that is really against the rules, which is to say, has to be treated as a moral infraction and punished harshly. Common debates, then, increasingly center around whether everything in Catholic ethics is merely prudential, whether intrinsically evil acts even exist, and/or over which moral lapses fit into which category. If one group can get its own moral lapses treated as "prudential," and its enemies' moral lapses treated as "intrinsically evil," then victory can be had--at least within the narrow, subcultural space of modern Western Catholicism. 

Intrinsic Goodness

I have expended a great deal more space on contemporary secular ethics here than I originally intended. Nonetheless, this is helpful in itself for understanding the genuine concepts of prudence and of intrinsic and circumstantial evil within Catholicism, at least by way of contrast. For the disagreement between modern systems and Catholic systems is not merely based on historical circumstances, but on more basic anthropological and even metaphysical disagreements.

Contemporary ethics is ultimately based on the assumption of a universe in which what is most real are intrinsically unrelated atoms, material particles or human individuals, and hence in which all higher-level identities and rules and ideas and principles are ultimately created by fiat and imposed through force by human wills on a fundamentally indifferent or hostile reality.

Catholic ethics, on the other hand, is ultimately centered on the metaphysical concept of the good. The good is, in the most basic sense, that which is intrinsically and properly and naturally desirable and desired by human beings. Hence, the good is not something extrinsic or foreign imposed on human beings, but rather is intrinsic to and formative of the nature and ends and hence desires of human beings as such. The good in this sense is never merely arbitrary, but always both rationally comprehensible and metaphysically real.

This much certainly helps to explain why Catholic ethical regimes, while they may and indeed always do involve both rules and the enforcement of rules, can never be treated fundamentally as a set of rules imposed on people by force regardless of and contrary to their natural inclinations. 

Even understanding this much drastically contradicts the most basic conceptions of ethics in contemporary life, and to a large extent, if properly and consistently applied, bring an end to the ethical conflicts typical of contemporary life. After all, to simply have a single set of objective, agreed-upon unchanging rules against which one can measure individuals and their actions naturally prevents the division of people into rule-creators and rule-followers, all-or-nothing evaluations of moral status, status-based moral exemptions, inconsistently harsh punitive regimes, and the accompanying struggles for ethical dominance. To agree upon the intrinsic nature of the good to human beings, likewise, is to limit rules and their enforcement not just practically or extrinsically, but rationally and intrinsically, requiring rules to be justified precisely by the objective good they aim at and at the same time disallowing certain degrees and types of force in ensuring compliance with those rules, though of course not coercion in the most general sense. 

This set of principles does not, however, in itself suffice to explain the importance of prudence or wisdom to Catholic ethics. Indeed, there are many people in modern America, including Catholics, who have grasped the idea of the objectivity and intrinsic nature of the good--but for whom the concept of prudence is more or less meaningless. Given merely that the good exists, given that it is intrinsic to human desire and act as such, there is in itself no reason why this objective or absolute good and/or its fulfillment could not be comprehended totally in a set of rules and guidelines to be followed by everyone all the time. To follow these rules would thus be to be good, and to possess the good; to fail to follow them would be to fall short. The task of ethics would still be merely to discover the rules, follow them, and get others to follow them. 

Prudentialist Metaphysics

To understand prudence properly, I think, requires an even deeper dive into the world of metaphysics. The concept of metaphysical goodness comprehended by Catholicism, based on ancient philosophy, is not only objective or intrinsic, but hierarchical, transcendent, and universalist. 

The base, governing assumption of Catholic ethics is that the ethical good, what is desired or desirable, is ultimately identical with the metaphysical good, which is to say, the ultimate foundation and end for the existence and operation of, not just individual human beings, but the cosmos as a whole. The cosmos itself is structured in such a way as to bring unity out of multiplicity through a hierarchy of being. What is true of metaphysics is true also and necessarily of ethics, where the good is always and everywhere what unifies and therefore transcends multiplicity; the greater the good, the more it necessarily operates on a higher and more universal level and in a more actual and definite way. This good is thus identified with being and reality and at the same time with rationality, rational comprehensibility, and definite actuality. 

Put most simply, for this ethical system, whatever is most good in the ethical sense is also what is most universal, most rational, most actual, most definite, most comprehensible, and most real.

This idea, however interesting in itself, poses immediate problems for any system of ethics comprehending human life as it actually is. Put simply, if the universal is intrinsically what is real and good and definite and actual and rational and comprehensible, then the particular is, at least relatively and to some degree, what is unreal and less than fully good and indefinite and potential and irrational and less than fully comprehensible. The only fully good and proper and comprehensible ethical act would be to simply will God; every act short of that is necessarily less than fully rational, and hence less than fully good.

Of course, to say that it is less than fully good is not to say that it is evil--Catholic ethics are not Manichean ethics. The cosmos is good, and participates in God's goodness, as does every particular entity in it. Indeed, the cosmos participates in God's goodness, as Thomas would have it, precisely through its hierarchical unification of indefinite multiplicity through partial, limited goodness and partial, limited actuality.

Still, in falling short of God, every particular human act participates to some unavoidable degree in multiplicity and all that comes with it--indefiniteness, unreality, potentiality, irrationality, nonbeing. What distinguishes a morally good act from a morally bad act, then, is whether this act in fact succeeds in aiming at and participating in the overall unifying good of the human being and the cosmos, or whether it fails at this goal. To evaluate whether this is true or false for a particular human act, however, requires knowing not just the good in its abstract, universal nature, but precisely how this particular human act and intention and circumstance in fact relates to the universal good. 

Prudentialist Ethics

It is out of this basic metaphysical nexus that the idea of prudence emerges. Put simply, prudence is the virtue by which a human person is enabled to practically and consistently connect the world of the particular and the potential to the moral and ethical and cosmic good, to practically and consistently will the good in its unifying and transcendent nature through particular human acts in particular human circumstances. 

Because the universe of particulars is by its nature indefinitely multiple, this practical, prudential good cannot in and of itself be comprehended by any limited, definite list of ethical rules. Or rather, it can be and is comprehended in systems of laws and goods, but only and intrinsically by way of higher and therefore more good and more real levels of being. Catholic philosophers can and have discussed the good in its essential nature in such a way as to contain everything in fact desired by and desirable to human beings and human action--but only in a higher, transcendent way. Catholic ethicists can and have produced lists of virtues and vices, sins and good moral acts--but only at higher, more unifying levels of action and thought. Since the actual rational comprehensibility and hence goodness and hence being of human acts in fact comes from such higher levels, the rational nature of such acts is, in a sense, comprehended by them more fully than by the acts themselves. Still, such accounts cannot simply take the place of actual human acts.

In the abstract, this system could lead to a somewhat Manichean ethics, where most of what a human being did simply does not matter at all, since it belongs to the domain of indefinite plurality at an infinite remove from real, abstract justice or goodness. Catholicism, however, like ancient Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, is defined by the belief (the faith and hope, practically) that it is in fact possible for human beings, through ordinary, particular acts, to consistently will the universal and transcendent good. 

This belief may be justified by the more or less shared philosophical idea that particular human beings, through their possession of reason, are intrinsically and by nature ordered towards and therefore capable of actually grasping the good in its universal totality; by a more or less Aristotelian belief that even in the confusing world of particulars there are in fact natural, rational substances connected immediately with being in the fullest sense; and by a directly Christian belief that human beings are persons directly created and loved by God and called to a transcendent union with him. For all of these reasons and more, Catholicism is fully committed to the claim that every human act, based on whatever human end or goal, can in fact be properly and correctly related to the good in its fullest sense. 

To do this, however, requires not just a limited, definite set of rules, but a practical virtue possessed by actual persons and capable, in principle, of operating on and being applied to all of the indefinite, multiple circumstances and acts of human life. 

Prudence in this sense is intrinsic to law and rule as such, and in fact the only possible rational grounding for any particular rule or set of rules. Every rule or law, while operating above the level of the individual human act, applies to a limited set of particular acts and circumstances and therefore falls short of full universality and full rational comprehensibility. The making of laws and rules is thus intrinsically and necessarily an operation of prudence, grasping universal goods and principles and applying them to particular circumstances.

At the same time, whatever rules or laws are crafted, at whatever degree of depth or detail, necessarily and always operate at a more general level than actual individual human acts. It is thus not merely the creating of laws and rules, but even the obeying or complying with laws and rules that requires the exercise of the virtue of prudence. In a very real sense, the person trying to create a rule and the person trying to follow it are engaged in precisely the same kind of act, grounded in the same virtue.

Prudence and Authority

Thus understood, we can see precisely what is wrong with many contemporary construals and debates within Catholic ethics. To say that an act or category or question or rule is "prudential" in the contemporary sense is usually to utter either an inane platitude or an outright lie. Every moral question and rule and principle is prudential in the sense of deriving from prudence and needing to be applied by it. 

Prudence, though, is precisely that virtue whose entire goal and raison d'etre is to correctly and rationally apply the universal principle to the indefinite particular. Hence, a "prudential" question is in every instance a question about which there is in fact a definitely correct answer for any given circumstance. It is perfectly possible that this answer cannot be determined or prescribed in advance at a more general level for each and every possible circumstance--it is perfectly possible that this answer might legitimately differ for different circumstances--it is even possible that in a particular circumstance there might be more than one correct answer that can be chosen as a pure exercise of human creativity and freedom. But this is in principle true of every moral principle and every moral good. To correctly determine such answers and make definite choices based on them is the whole task of prudence, and indeed of human life.

We can thus also see how utterly perverse many modern discussions of prudence in relation to Papal and ecclesial authority have grown. Popes and bishops are frequently criticized for straying into "prudential" realms in which they lack authority or knowledge and should yield to experts--as though ecclesial authority operated purely on a universal divine level and all exercise of prudence belonged to laymen. 

To make such an argument, however, is to intrinsically nullify all idea of actual Papal or ecclesial authority, or rather give it over wholesale to lay experts. All authority, and all authoritative acts, are necessarily and intrinsically prudential, based on prudence and aimed at it. 

The Pope's (or bishop's, or priest's) job is not to merely will or utter God in the abstract, in his fullness, as he is in himself, but precisely to apply the good to and communicate it in the actual particular circumstances of human history and society and the Church as it is, crafting through the virtue of prudence particular acts of legislation and command and teaching for the particular needs of time and place and individual nation or culture or person. It is this which is the entire justification of the actual existence of ecclesial authority and hierarchy, and its entire function in this world. 

Hence, ecclesial authority is not just accidentally or sometimes, but intrinsically and always an exercise of prudence. Even ex cathedra statements are in this sense merely prudential, an exercise of practical reasoning on the part of pontiffs deciding to respond this particular doctrinal challenge at this particular time by stating the truth of the Church's doctrine in these particular words. 

Furthermore, the good of divinity is the highest and most unifying level of reality, the highest and most unifying ethical good; hence, every proper ethical act of prudence in whatever domain, is, in a sense, aimed at connecting God with particular human acts. To deny that the Pope has the authority to govern or make judgments or legislation in any particular area of human life or reality, politics or economics or ethics or sex or war or peace, allegedly "disconnected from" the Pope's proper expertise in theology and religion, is in practice to deny that the Pope has authority from God at all. In practice, then, to deny that Papal authority extends to prudential matters is to simply deny Papal authority wholesale.

On the other hand, modern construals of Papal authority are often based ultimately on the system discussed above, in which laws and rules have no intrinsic limits or rational goals at all. By limiting the scope of Papal authority to the clearly theological, many anti-ultramontanists both progressive and conservative clearly hope to prevent a Papal or ecclesial tyranny by limiting the power of Papal whim and preserving room for other, lesser authorities, and human freedom in general, to operate. 

This, though, is to again misunderstand the nature of Catholic ethics, where prudence is always the governing principle at every level. Even ex cathedra statements on pure theological doctrine must be applied prudentially by lesser authorities and individual people, through acts of adherence and understanding and communication and profession. What is true for statements about God in himself is also necessarily true for Papal legislation for ethics and ritual and practical questions of human life, which must be applied prudentially at many lower levels by many lower authorities and individuals.

What it looks like for a subject to be prudent in applying a law is in practice complex, but generally allows for far more basic freedom than is comprehended in most modern rules-based systems. To strive to comprehend and make ones' own the spirit and goal of legislation, to apply it not literally, but faithfully according to the mens and interpretation and overarching purposes of the legislator and the true, objective good at which the legislation aims, does not give unlimited license to disregard a law or dispense from its provisions or replace it with what one would have done in the legislator's place. It does, however, give the applier a great deal of practical leeway, based on his own position and accompanyingly more exact knowledge of his own more particular circumstances, in applying that law. And this does involve at times the ability to lawfully dispense from or go beyond or even against the letter of the law in order to achieve the law's intrinsic purposes, its objective aiming at the good.

What is true of modern abuses of the concept of the "prudential" is true, mutatis mutandis, of modern abuses of the idea of "intrinsically evil" acts. The concept of intrinsic evil, as it is used in the recent Papal Magisterium, is not as a mere intensifier for bad things that are really bad. In fact, many of the most obvious instances of intrinsic evil in human acts (such as trivial instances of lying) are not themselves grave sins at all. To declare that there is such a thing as intrinsically evil acts is not, then, as it seems to be often interpreted by many modern Catholics, to declare that there exists somewhere acts that are purely evil and in no way participate in or aim at the good, which can only be treated with absolute disgust and absolute rejection and harsh punishment by Catholics. 

In fact, I would argue the distinction has almost precisely the opposite goal. To say that there exist intrinsically evil acts is to say that the system of Catholic ethics is one where all acts do in fact to some genuine degree participate in and aim at the good, where goodness and rationality do not just relate to human acts externally and extrinsically, but internally and intrinsically, where the very being and reality and comprehensibility of every human act is ultimately constituted precisely by the good at which this act objectively aims at and participates in. It is precisely for this reason that to decide whether a particular act is good or bad, we do not just need to ask about the particular, conscious goals of the human person imposing meaning by force on meaningless matter, or the surrounding circumstances that shaped or determined his will. We must ask, rather, what the intrinsic, inner relationship of this act itself was with the good, whether the act was objectively adapted and corresponded to its end. In other words, we must ask, not merely whether the act was well-intentioned or well-occasioned, but whether it was prudent; whether it actually succeeded in uniting the particular with the true and universal good. 

There is in fact a sense in which all evil acts are merely "circumstantially" evil, in that their evil comes from their failing to properly and prudentially achieve the good they aim at. In another, rather deeper sense, though, all evil acts are "intrinsically" evil, in that the good they aim at is not merely accidental or external, but intrinsic to their existence as acts, and hence that their failure to properly relate to that good is equally intrinsic.

In any case, when we relatively distinguish an act which is made evil by intentions and circumstances from an act that is made evil by the nature of the act itself, in both cases we are fundamentally treating the act as one that depends on and is fulfilled by the connection between that particular act and the universal good, and therefore by means of the virtue of prudence. 

Conclusion: The Ethical Catholic Life

Having set out (however poorly and/or incomprehensibly) all of the above, we can, hopefully, begin to see how the ethical life as lived by a Catholic should differ from that lived by a person formed by contemporary ethics. 

A Catholic is fundamentally neither a rule-creator, a rule-enforcer, or a rule-subject; he is, rather, first and foremost a man of prudence engaged in the lengthy, difficult process of gradually assimilating his actual life to the transcendent moral goods aimed at and contained in in ecclesial teaching and legislation. Such external ecclesial rules are for him neither impossible burdens productive of despair or a desire to transgress nor the benchmarks of his own success productive of complacency nor the means by which he attempts to subject and dominate his neighbor; they are, rather, the starting point and means for his own reflection on the moral good and his own efforts to apply it comprehensively to his own life. 

In this process of reflection and assimilation, he evaluates himself and others against objective ethical laws and principles and goals charitably but honestly, without pride or rancor. His and others' failure to measure up to such laws and the transcendent good they embody is for him never a sign of the failure of the law, but a straightforward and unexceptional part of the process of growth in virtue; and his success in complying with such laws is not the end of his moral growth, but merely its beginning, since the transcendent good he seeks goes far beyond their letter. In both circumstances, he feels and knows his own status as a sinner, and his own profound and constant need of mercy. 

Such a person does not require a Papal or ecclesial ruling on each and every feature of life; but nor is he alarmed by ecclesial teachings or laws when they impose limits or goals on him or make prudential judgments for him or impose prudential rules on him. He does not attempt to comprehensively understand all the circumstances and goals of the Faith in order to reject or second-guess the Pope's prudential decisions; but rather accepts such acts and applies them prudently to his own circumstances, reflecting on their ends and bases and not merely on their letter. He recognizes that, however extensive ecclesial acts may be, they will ultimately not comprehend every circumstance he encounters, and will always fall far short of the actual transcendent good he aims at. 

In doing all of the above, however, he will, perhaps most importantly of all, never rely on himself, not even on his own developed virtue of prudence. Rather, through prayer and the Sacramental life he will seek repeatedly and habitually the higher, supernatural gift of which earthly prudence is a reflection: the divine Wisdom loved by God and sought by Solomon.

By this divine gift, the human person is enabled to always and everywhere make the correct choice for the circumstances, according to the will of God, even when the ability to make that choice goes beyond his own knowledge and understanding and virtue and strength. As Edith Stein said, there is nothing the good Catholic should value more, or pray more with more fervor, than such wisdom. It is, ultimately, only through such wisdom that he will be enabled to understand rightly even the content of the Church's teaching and legislation, the transcendent good at which he and the Church aims at, and so live as a Catholic. 

This, for him and for us all, is the highest goal of life.