“The Unity of the Ultimate End and the Unity of Morality” (Marie Albert Janvier, O.P.)
Translation Introduction
The present translation continues the occasional series posted to To Be a Thomist recovering the multi-year cycle of Lenten conferences delivered by Marie Albert Janvier, O.P., at Notre-Dame de Paris, which gradually worked through the treatises of the Summa theologiae’s Secunda pars. This second conference in the 1903 Lenten cycle on beatitude takes up the unity of the ultimate end and, consequently, the unity of morality, both for man in his individuality and considered as the whole of mankind.1
Summary
Summary of the first conference.—The various elements and faculties making up man.—Life in all its various forms: Material, sensible, intellectual, volitional, individual, familial, and social.
The division of mankind into races, peoples, families, and individuals: the man of the past, of the present, and of the future.
From this, two problems arise: (1) Does each man have one or several ultimate ends, imposing upon him one or several moralities?—(2) Do all men have the same ultimate end, and are they governed by the same morality?
I
1. The analytic method employed by our contemporaries.—The advantages and successes of this method, particularly in the sciences and even in philosophy.—The exaggerations of this procedure, which have pulverized being.—When these excesses are then transferred to the study of man, they have caused great difficulties by dividing elements that are, in fact, united.—The necessity of proclaiming the unity of the human being and the unity of morality.
2. a) Each of us is a unified being: unity of personality; unity of nature and substance; unity of organism. These various unities are proclaimed by the existence of each one of us: St. Paul, Jesus Christ. b) If man is one, he has only one ultimate end, for the fullness of being and of life demanded by the ultimate end entails the fullness of unity.—Jesus’s own beautiful words.—It is impossible for us to have two ultimate ends.—Proofs from experience: when we have set up our ultimate end in some object, we order our whole life toward it.
3. The unity of morality is the consequence of the unity of the ultimate end. a) Good and evil, virtue and vice, the nobility of functions and vocations, of societies and authorities, and so forth, are all taken from the ultimate end. b) This doctrine combats a modern error, namely the error of claiming that our consciences are [irreconcilably] multiple and our duties mutually hostile to each other.—There is no real conflict among duties, rights, authorities, or societies. c) The one thing necessary.
II
1. Accidental differences among men.—The substantial unity of all men. The proof from the naturalists. a) The unity of the races of men today, manifested by the essential identity of their physical, intellectual, moral, and religious characteristics. b) The unity of present-day man and the man of the past.—Proofs from monuments of the past, which furnish us precise and numerous data, and from the history of languages, migrations, and the formation and variations in our species. c) The unity of mankind is definitive and fixed forever.—The naturalists’ argument drawn from the law of the mixing and crossing of races.—The philosophical proof. a) No being consents to change its essence. b) Man remains what he is: neither god nor beast. c) Therefore, we are all brothers.
2. We are brothers. Therefore, we all have the same end.—The differences that remain among men amid this unity.
3. The unity of morality for all. a) The tendency of peoples and sects to establish diverse moralities for the different castes.—Greeks, Romans, Jews, heretics, the simple and the initiated.—Schools of science and philosophy: Darwin, Nietzsche. b) Jesus Christ never accepted such a wisdom.—He proclaimed the brotherhood of men, their vocation to the same destiny, and their equality before the law. c) The conduct of the Church, the Apostles, and the Popes. d) The unity of the morality in the present, the past, and the future.
The prayer of Jesus Christ.—The contemporary need to sing in supplication the hymn of unity.—The cruel divisions of our societies.—The vanity of agreements and accords that choose not to rest upon knowledge of the true ultimate end.—The next conference will be devoted to the search for this true end.
The Unity of the Ultimate End and the Unity of Morality
Your Excellencies (Augustin-Victor Deramecourt, Bishop of Soissons, and Phillppe Meunier, Bishop of Évreux),
Gentlemen,
The wise man and the believer both find themselves confronted by an incontestable fact: the ultimate end is real and does indeed exist. By it alone can we explain physical and moral movements all around us; by it alone can we explain the attraction of the good and the birth and immortality of that throbbing desire for happiness that each of us bears within his breast.
However, man is a composite made up of many and sundry pieces that are quite various in appearance. He is a body, and he is a soul. In his body are the roots of the vegetative life he shares with living plants and the sense life he shares with the animals. Each of these has its own faculties, of growth and reproduction, of knowledge and passion. And from the spiritual heights of his soul emerge the intellect and the will. And onto each of these powers there will be grafts: hosts of functions and vocations, some pertaining to his material or sense life, others to intellectual or volitional life, some pertaining to the individual, others to the world of the family or society. What are we to make of this great multiplicity of elements? Do they constitute a host of personalities, beings, activities, and appetites within each of us, radically distinct and independent of one another, each with its particular goal to attain and, consequently, with a host of different rules of conduct to follow, each disconnected from the others? Such is the first point to which the order of truths brings us.
And mankind is divided into races, these races into various peoples, these peoples into families, and these families into individuals. And there is more: not only is our species multiplied over the face of the earth, perpetually modifying itself amid a thousand influences, but beyond this, we can think of the man of the past, the man of the present, and there will be the man of the future. Do they all have the same ultimate end? Or, rather, is each of these men—at first glance so different from his neighbor, so dissimilar to his ancestor, so unlike his descendants—faced with a special destiny in harmony with his own unique nature and makeup, meaning that he would be subject to a morality founded on a supreme goal that belongs only to him? This is the second doubt that we shall attempt to resolve.
I
Analysis and dissection have been the particular genius of our age. Think of the depths to which our experts—physicists and chemists, novelists and philosophers, critics, exegetes, historians, and politicians—have all probed being, the passions, human thought, affirmations, words, facts, and society! How great at times has been the skill exercised in their work: distinguishing what, up to their day, had been mixed together like a confused mass of data! Concentrating their gaze upon a single point, how piercing have their eyes become, how unexpected their discoveries, how precious their revelations! There have been such fruits from this systematic investigation, pushed to its limit, revising so many points of detail: so many conclusions have been set aright, so many sciences have marched onward with sure footing and have progressed with such precision, and so many beings—or so many aspects of being—heretofore unknown, have come to light, each in its proper place. Through such patience and labor, our men of science, with incredible precision, have counted so many successes: they have shown us the distant formation of the worlds; they have reconstructed cities that had fallen into ruin; before our very eyes, they have, as it were, reanimated the dust of ancient and vanished peoples; they have evoked the spectacle of their wars, their games, and their ceremonies; they have reconstituted them with their various features, temperaments, and bearing; and, above all, from the mysteries and treasures of being, they have let loose energies so rich and so marvelously tamed and utilized that they have, we might say, transfigured the face of the earth. This procedure has brought about modern progress in all that is truly best, most powerful, and most incontestable in it. Oh! In this temple, where every light is loved as a spark come forth from the bosom of Him whom we adore, let us not fear to glorify these rugged and often so modest pioneers of true civilization.
Likewise under the blows of this experimental labor, man has also brought to ruin all those metaphysical systems that placed their foundations far outside of all reality and ended in reveries. To the degree that this wholly experiential form of verification disengages itself from gratuitous hypotheses and hasty generalizations, all the more will it help the philosopher clear away the terrain of vain systems and theories built amid the clouds.
This dual outcome can only make us rejoice. However, when analysis is practiced to excess—and it has been so practiced—it is bound to fall, and has in fact fallen, into grave errors. By force of this desire to isolate the elements of things in order to see them better, our contemporaries have often pulverized being into crumbs, cutting apart its living nerves and disaggregating its unity.
And by transferring this method to the study of man, its excesses have caused troubles whose full reach no one today could measure. Not only have the principles, faculties, and functions within us been distinguished. They have been separated so starkly that no account whatsoever is taken concerning the root that serves to unite them. They have been treated as though they are beings that are mutually independent, each having the right to develop along its own line, and we have seen the man, the scientist, the citizen, and the leader pursue goals opposed to the goals sought by the father, the husband, the believer, the Christian, and the private person, as though each had his own conscience and his own maxims for life, wholly unrelated to the conscience or maxims of the others.
It is time, Gentlemen,2 to react against this division and to proclaim that within us there is truly a unity of being and action—and this entails the unity of the ultimate end and the unity of morality.
First of all, we are not cut up into two—or, even more, into ten—beings. Within each of us there is but one being, whose elements, however varied they may appear, are subject to an orderly interrelationship in such a way as to make a single whole, a single substance, a single principle of operation, for none of them is complete by itself, none of them can live outside of the whole. Separate the body from the spirit, detach a limb, tear out an eye, and immediately they die. Even the human soul itself, though capable of subsisting and acting by itself without the body, is nonetheless truncated in some way if it does not remain within the whole of which it is the noblest part—but still only a part.
Therefore, man is one in his personality, to which we attribute all the acts that issue from one and the same individual. Who is it that thinks? It is I! And who wills? It is I too! I am the one who wakes, and I am the one who goes to sleep. I am the one who lives, and it is I who die.
Man is one in his nature and in his substance. The elements that constitute me are not colonies of cells, heaps of tissues, freely going along their ways, side by side. On the contrary, science and philosophy present them to us as being linked together, disposed with an order, and penetrated “in their inmost depths” by “one single and same reality,” which communicates itself to all and to each of them, such that all of them “participate in its nature, exist by its existence,” and share in its indivisible unity.3
Man is one in his organism. And whether we analyze it at its base or at its summit, it appears as having a kind of absolute solidarity. The cells continue, one after another, without interruption and give birth to the tissues; the tissues develop into organs that are subordinated to one another by their various natures and functions; the organs compose a series of systems subject to a hierarchical harmonization; and the whole moves in the service and under the influence of that higher apparatus or, let us say, under the sway of that one great mainspring: the will. From vegetative and sense life to intellectual life—at first sight, the distance seems untraversable, and unity seems to founder. Far from it! Unity affirms itself, and with all the advances of science, it is verified more and more. As soon as the will sets itself in motion in order to act, “it determines, not only in the organic part… but even into the depths of our chemical structure, the strangest transformations and alterations.”4 And, reciprocally, the various developments within our lower energies have their own repercussions all the way up to the summit of intellectual and voluntary activity.5
We have all experienced this. On the one hand, the slightest physical discomfort hampers the freedom of our thoughts and of our willing; bodily suffering tears at our soul; its weight holds the élan of our being in hand. On the other hand, the interior mourning of the soul weighs down the flesh and withers its beauty, and sadness of heart breaks our strength. Haven’t we even read the words of St. Paul complaining that this unity chained his spirit to a heavy and corrupted matter, and did not He who is the Man par excellence, Jesus whom we adore, cry out in anguish that His body was succumbing beneath the burden of the sorrow that martyred His soul? But, conversely—and who does not know this too?—well-being and health quicken the sap of our intellect and will; the soul’s strength and its joy communicate themselves to our whole exterior being and manifest themselves in our face’s color, in the light of our eyes, and even through every pore.
What a magnificent edifice man is! How admirable is the chain, link by link, fastening together all the materials that constitute him. And how solidly bound are the humblest elements to the most sublime!
Therefore, we must speak about him as though he were a single being, acting through his whole organism as through a single organ, and through all his acts as through a single act.6
But then, if he is one, he has but one ultimate end; he can have but one.
Why? Because, Gentlemen, as we have said, the object of our happiness must answer to our nature. Our nature is real, and reality must fill its beatitude. Our nature is one, and unity must be an attribute of its beatitude.
Why do we demand unity in the elements that make up our felicity? Because the desire for felicity is the passion to possess a full life—a life so full that we could not wish for anything more, a life so sure and so unchangeable that it is sheltered from every surprise and from every menace, so secure that our soul feels no fear whatsoever that it might lose it. But such full life is inseparable from unity. Thus, Jesus Christ, having become incarnate in order to save us—that is to say, to beatify us—said: “I have come that they may have life, and the abundance of life” (Jn. 10:10). Then, addressing His Father, He added: “Father…, may they be one, as we are one…, that their unity might be complete” (John 17:21–23). In this way, our Lord establishes a connection, or even an identity, between the fullness of life and the fullness of unity. And let us understand His words aright. He is not only speaking about a movement of all men toward one and the same good. First and foremost, what He is speaking about is perfection of each man in the possession of his unique and total good.
And why, Gentlemen, is there such solidarity between the full life and unity? Because a multitude of disparate elements, not bound together in unity, cannot be reconciled with the plenitude of life that we desire. Each of them, complete in itself, though insufficient in relation to us, can be separated from the others and, thus, we would find ourselves exposed to losing it. The fear of this danger is incompatible with beatitude.
Moreover, it is impossible for us to have two ultimate ends, for a being, however great we may suppose it to be, can have but one limit, just as a country can have but one border, and just as a movement—even one as long and complicated as life itself—can have but one terminus.
If the good that the will attains fully satisfies its desire, how could the will seek anything else, and what use would a second object serve? And if we are not totally satisfied by possessing it, then we have not touched our ultimate end, since, essentially, the ultimate end leaves nothing outside of itself for us to covet.
And thus, Gentlemen, the object of our beatitude must be complete enough to fill all our needs and must be unified enough to correspond to the bond that binds together all the elements of our nature and thus makes us into a single being and a single substance.
This law of unity so dominates our life that, even amid our gravest errors, we still find that we are governed by it.
Indeed, at every instant we deceive ourselves, through ignorance or under the sway of our passions, concerning the supreme end of our existence, and we place our soul’s hope in riches, pleasure, knowledge, or power. But, as soon as our wayward reason has proposed to itself one of these goods as the ultimate ideal to be attained, immediately our whole being and all our activity march forth toward it. We maintain and multiply our bodily powers in order to be more able to conquer it; then, we spend these forces amid the great efforts that carry us on toward it. Our eyes, our ears, all our senses serve us in discovering the objects apt to aid us in our enterprise. The resources of our imagination and our memory, the penetrating insight of our intellect, the vigor of will, the glory of our name, the brilliance of a grand career, the influences of family, of friendship, and of worldly relations, political parties, religious ideas—in a word, everything that is within us and everything that we can grasp hold of outside of us—is turned to profit in order to arrive at the supreme goal that we have conceived and pursue, even if this supreme goal is the most ephemeral and most miserable of goods. And if, one by one, we allow ourselves to be enchanted by all sorts of objects, to the point of allowing them to hold absolute authority over our life, it is only by dispossessing one that we pass the scepter to the next. Here, we resemble the capricious multitude that changes its leader at every instant. But, like it, we have only one vote and only one crown, and, in the words of Our Lord, we can serve only one master.
To what, then, does this sovereign dominion over us belong? By right, it belongs to the being or object that, by its perfection, is great enough to set all our activity in motion and to satisfy all the demands of our desire. Sound reason must discover its name. But we can no more change or multiply it than we can substantially change or multiply our very nature, personality, organism, or activity.
Consequently, for each one of us there is only one ultimate end, the supreme goal of our whole being and of all our movements—of our vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual life—in a word, the supreme goal of the whole man. Yet, amid our wayfaring labors here-below we only fulfill functions that are partial, developing this or that organ, this or that faculty, this or that activity. Therefore, the supreme good of man is, at one and the same time, the sovereign perfection of the father and the husband, of the scientist and the believer, of the physician and the magistrate, of the citizen and the Christian, of the king and the subject.
You see, now, Gentlemen: from this unity of our being and our end there flows, for each one of us, the absolute unity of morality.
Good and evil are determined by whether our objects, acts, and functions are in harmony or discord with the ultimate end. The particular goals that we set before ourselves in our trade or career are holy or wicked depending on how they relate to the ultimate end. The duty imposed upon us by our vocations derives its value and solidity from the connection between the result that it pursues and the ultimate end. The hierarchy of goods and evils, of virtues and vices, of functions and vocations, the subordination of societies and authorities, their degree of nobility or of perversity—all these are established and put in their rank in view of how these different forces are more or less able to make us conquer—or, alas, lead us to miss—our ultimate end.
This doctrine, Gentlemen, combats one of the most menacing theories of our time: the theory claiming that our consciences are [irreconcilably] multiple and our duties mutually hostile to each other. Ultimately, the conscience of the private man—like the conscience of the head of a family or of the man of politics—depends on the same supreme end, which must dominate all man’s forms of life and of activity. Therefore, we are not permitted to conduct our lives by one set of principles in the privacy of our heart and within the walls of our home and, then, by another, opposite set in our public career; nor may we follow one law in religion and the opposite law in art, literature, and worldly existence. All our movements, from the lowest up to the most sublime, have their value only if they are freely attached to the supreme and unique perfection—and, as St. Paul says, whether we eat, or drink, or whatsoever else we do, we must do all things in view of the same end (Col. 3:17).
We hear endless talk, Gentlemen, concerning the supposed conflict between rights and duties, between authorities and societies. At every instant, men claim that the obligations of the father are opposed to the obligations of the husband, and that the laws of the head of the family are thwarted by the laws of the citizen. This supposed conflict is only apparent. There is a real order in the goods that tempt us and in the duties that fall to us, and this order is rightly arrayed, in its entirety, through the way these goods variously relate to our one, ultimate end.
I am not saying that it is always easy to see and decide how to fit together all these pieces of a single moral organism. It is like a complicated machine that has been taken apart and that now must be rebuilt: only an experienced man will manage to refashion the edifice and put each piece back into its place and into its role.
So too in this immense mechanism. But here the work of harmonizing is all the more difficult, for the springs, being more sensitive and more living, erode and warp at the slightest provocation. But the conflicts that do arise come from human idiocy, clumsiness, and perversity. They are not in the things themselves, no more than the normal functioning of a healthy organism keeps each organ within its own sphere performing its own role without entering into mutual conflict against one another.
Therefore, Gentlemen, we must establish accord among the different offices and different duties of our moral life. How shall we arrive at this? By subordinating them to one another, each according to the degree that it must be exercised as part of the conquest of our supreme good. Thus, we will establish both concord among the elements that make up our being and unity in the great host of deeds whose most important role is to move toward the ultimate goal of our existence, our beatitude.
One day, “as Jesus was on the way with His disciples, He entered into a village, and a woman named Martha received Him into her house. She had a sister named Mary, who, seated at the Lord’s feet, listened to His word. Martha, busy with the various cares of the household, came up and said: ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me alone to serve? Tell her, therefore, to help me.’ The Lord answered her: ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things. One thing alone is necessary. Mary has chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her’” (Lk. 10:38–42).
What is this “one thing necessary”? The ultimate end. All our thoughts, all our intentions, and all our acts must return to this capital point. Behold, this is the means for arriving at that nobility that gives us such good reason to be proud, and rightly so: the moral unity of life.
II
The peoples scattered over the surface of the earth appear to us under appearances and features so diverse, with manners and outlooks so particular—so untraversable indeed seems the distance from the savage to the civilized man, from the ideas and passions of the one to the ideas and passions of the other—that many have believed in the absolute difference of the human races and, in consequence, in the irreducibility of the moral laws that govern them. The man of the past—Greek, Roman, or Barbarian—seems so far from contemporary man, and we are so ignorant regarding how exalted or degenerate the man of the future will be, that it seems difficult to assign to the one and to the other the same immutable goal and to govern them by the same eternal justice.
And yet, Gentlemen, men have been, are, and forever will belong to the same species. They have the same requirements for their substantial perfection, and, in their higher life, they are governed by the authority of the same sovereign good.7 Anthropology, at all its levels, proves this conclusion, and every day it grows in its certitude and firmness.
Indeed, naturalists also increasingly affirm that the races that exist today all manifest essential common traits that reveal the same being.
Whatever be the shade of complexion and of skin, the proportion of stature or of limbs, of skull and of brain, despite the accidental variations of the skeletal, nervous, vascular, and respiratory systems, and however different certain details may appear amid the phenomena of gestation and of puberty, or in the duration of life—nonetheless these physical characteristics are, at bottom, identical and betray a perfect specific resemblance.
Language, writing, the social instinct, civilization, the industries of peace or of war; the idea of good and of evil, of the right of others and of property; respect for human life; the sentiments of modesty, honor, and generosity; the adoration of a superior being, worship—all these are encountered in all the human tribes and reveal in them the same faculties of intelligence, morality, and religion.
Therefore, contemporary man is everywhere essentially the same. Is he also the same as the man of the past?
Yes, Gentlemen. Concerning the primitive races, “we often have information more abundant and more precise than we have concerning many that are alive today. The caves that they inhabited, those where they buried their dead, and the alluvia formed by the rivers that rolled along their corpses have preserved numerous bones for us.”8 Admirable work of science has discovered the monuments of those distant ages, and, without in any way forcing the importance of the facts there discovered, it has been able to maintain that man already possessed not only his contemporary physical bearing, but that he was endowed with intelligence and had moral, religious, and even artistic ideas. In a word, looking back through these ages, we see that through all the tempests of nature, under the pressure of the elements and roiling of the centuries, and after all the causes in the cosmos have produced their effects upon us, we nonetheless have remained, we still remain, in our organism, in the constitution of our body and our soul, substantially what we were on that first day when we appeared on this globe.
Analogous works, concerned in particular with the history of languages, the migrations of the peoples over land and sea, and with the formation of the variations within our species, permit us to trace back to a single cradle, and to a single primitive couple, the origin of all men.
The unity of mankind—despite all the thousand accidental variations that we observe—can be reconciled with all this diversity; it is, in a word, absolute. Furthermore, science proves that this unity is definitive and fixed forever, because experience sees realized in man a law that entails the unshakable stability of the species—namely, that, far from being sterile, the crossings and the mingling of the races only activate their reproduction and assure the perpetuity of their fecundity.
Philosophy completes this demonstration and sets it in full evidence. It shows that no being abandons itself to the point of willing to change its own essence, even in exchange for a higher essence.9 Yes, man, consequently, ambitious above all to keep his identity, will cling to his nature with tenacity and, despite all that opposes him, despite every violence that befalls him, will never consent to cease being himself. The horror that we have of death, and the desperation with which our will clings to our body, prove in a striking manner the truth of this teaching.
Neither god nor beast: however high he may be borne aloft by his vision or through his heroism, however low he may fall in his coarseness or through his perversity, man cannot change his species, and his nature establishes him eternally between pure matter and the pure spirits, partaking of both yet forever distinct from them.
Now you see, Gentlemen: white or black, dwarfs or giants, Greeks or barbarians, saints or wretches, we are brothers—not in virtue of inscriptions engraved in the marble of monuments, not by the mere logic of the learned, not by the decrees of parliaments, but by the blood which, passing through millions of veins, comes to us from a single source. We are brothers by our soul, which none of us has the power to alter or change, a soul which one and the same heavenly Father has created in each of us. We are brothers from one end of space and time to the other, without any one of us ever being able to depart from this immortal family: humanity.
It is a great satisfaction for believers to hear science and philosophy confirm, by arguments so strong and so precise, the data of Revelation, and to hear them proclaim, after centuries of efforts and of research, what the Bible recounts on its first page: we were begotten of the same father and carried in the same womb.
We are brothers; therefore, we have the same end, for unity of nature entails unity of beatitude.
Now, note well, Gentlemen, I’m not saying that all men have the same idea of felicity, nor that all know the name of the being who hides His treasure within man’s bosom. Nor am I claiming that those who know of this felicity will all conquer it, nor that those who succeed in such conquest will possess it and enjoy it in the same degree. Some will be forever ignorant of the secret of their destiny; others, voluntarily and almost with flippant hearts, will miss the mark of their happiness, just as, here below, through their own faults, men fall into penury or lose their health. In the perfection of the eternal fortune, there will be differences analogous to the differences of intelligence, virtue, or grace that exist upon earth. But I do say this: just as man’s being requires certain essential elements—a body and a soul—so too, in order to be a happy man, a fully happy man, certain indispensable conditions of perfection and joy are required. And thus, I am making this claim too: the individual of our race, whatever his century or milieu, he will have in substance the same bodily and spiritual structure, the same organism, and the same activities, and therefore, he will have the same fundamental requirements regarding the object of his beatitude. And, consequently, I am claiming that there is only one ultimate end for the whole of humanity, and that, brothers in the cradle, brothers in soul, brothers in blood, and brothers in death, we also are brothers to the very end and in felicity.
All of us have the same ultimate end. All of us are governed by the same morality.
Note well, Gentlemen, that peoples, powers, and philosophical or religious sects have always had a tendency to divide men into lower castes and higher castes, assigning the most diverse rules of conduct to each.
In Greece and Rome, so wise though they were, there were citizens furnished with rights and privileges and clothed with moral dignity, and alongside these great citizens was an infinite host of slaves, deprived of personhood and treated like cattle merely higher in quality and more useful in service. The Jews themselves, though enlightened by a more divine light, closed their temples to the nations, veiled the Holy of Holies, and awaited a Messiah who would open to the tribes of Israel alone the way of glory, irrevocably barring the doors to the mass of humanity. Heretics—from the gnostics down to the freemasons—allow those who are “spiritual” and “initiated” to partake in laws and liberties unshared by their little workmen and simple adherents. Yes, in popular assemblies, their demagogues ferociously preach a kind of mathematical and impossible leveling of all individuals, but in their academic discourses and parliamentary tribunes, they teach that the multitude must be led by myths and superior minds by the truth, refusing to grant men the essential equality that comes from identity of nature.
Compare this to some of our own contemporary schools of science and of philosophy. The more things change, the more they are the same. Darwin, by the principle of selection, authorizes nature to cast out of her framework the puny and ill-formed individual. Nietzsche, and so many others with him, condemn the slave-crowd to the yoke of religion, piety, and prayer, while emancipating the Free Man from every restraint and from every obligation.
Never did Jesus Christ accept such “wisdom”—a wisdom fashioned from pride and injustice. From the very first day, He broke with the narrowness of the Jewish ideas.
Christ, Gentlemen, is the one who restored to men the sentiment of fraternity, even to the point of casting the rich man into the arms of the wretched, even to the point of prostrating the patrician at the feet of the slave. He too is the one who promulgated with efficacy the truth that all men have the same destiny. It was Christ who called together, to the one hearth of the perfect life, to the joy of the same banquet, the sons of the dawn and the sons of the setting sun, the laborers of the first hour and those coming to their work at the last, the vagabonds and the desperate. Finally, Christ it was who first dared to reestablish the radical equality of all men before the law, teaching to the ignorant, to the poor, and to the “little ones” the same precepts and paths that He had manifested to the princes of the priests, to the elders of the nation, to the doctors of the Temple, and to the scribes and pharisees of the Synagogue. Never has the Church departed from the example of her master. Sovereignly respectful of hierarchies and of individual or social differences, nonetheless she has maintained that all men, without distinction, depend upon the same goal and the same duty.
Eloquent indeed is the conduct of our Apostles to the Romans and the Greeks, sons of an overrefined civilization. They preach one and the same eternal life and one and the same Gospel as what they preach to the savages, to men who are, one would say, rough sketches of human beings. Heroically do our Pontiffs—despite being, at times, so disarmed—maintain before Theodosius, before Henry VIII, and before Louis XIV the intransigence of the law that they have also imposed upon the humble, repeating courageous words which alone suffice to clothe them in immortal glory: non possumus.
No, they cannot make duty bind one yet leave the other in his liberty, for they cannot prevent human nature from being essentially the same in all the sons of our race, nor the ultimate end from being the same for all—nor, by a necessary consequence, all men from being governed by one and the same morality.
Thus, one morality has authority over all. The good and the virtue that it teaches are everywhere good and virtue; evil and the vice that it brands are evil and vice in the learned and in the ignorant, in the civilized and uncivilized, in kings and in their subjects. The conscience that it forms is the norm of all consciences, and the justice that it establishes is justice in Paris as it also is in Berlin; it reigns on both slopes of the Alps or the Pyrenees.
It is the morality of the past, for it is not the result of successive evolutions. It was not invented by sages, nor religions, nor parliaments, nor even by councils. It sprang forth—if I may put it that way—from things themselves. It emerged with man himself, from the hands of God.
It is the morality of the future, for it is just as fixed as is nature transformed by grace. Heaven and earth will pass away; yet it will not pass away. The movement of ideas and peoples, the attacks, outrages, denials, and blasphemies of societies against it—none of this will erase one jot or tittle from it. True progress—for individuals and for generations—is not found in mounting higher than this morality. No, it is found in knowing it better, in extending further the range of its precepts and of its counsels, and in embracing them with greater ardor. From one end of space and time to the other, whoever is proclaimed holy by it will be saved, and whoever is reproved by it will be damned, for it is the only way that leads man to the Sovereign Good.
Jesus Christ—to whom we must always return when we wish to shed a more living light on our questions and make our sentiments mount higher—Jesus Christ was on the threshold of His death. On the eve of His last day, His heart—already trembling with the first apprehensions of the agony—poured forth in His lengthy, moving prayer to the Father. Amid it He declared: “Father, may they be one—as Thou art in me and I in Thee, may they also be one in us. May they be one, as we are one, that they may be perfectly one in their movement toward unity (cf. John 17:22–23).”
Ah! Gentlemen, more than ever, do we not live in a day when we should repeat this hymn of unity on knees bent in supplication?
Nothing is more needed in our days than is unity. Division kills our societies after having tortured them. Never, perhaps, have divergences so profound brought about such acute sufferings. Born in the domain of ideas, opposition passes over into sentiments; from sentiments, it bursts forth into acts; and too often, when we meet one another face-to-face, the collisions are full of pain. We spend half of our life hating one another, fighting one another, and cursing one another. Certainly, it would be naïve to hope that absolute peace will ever reign on earth. Hosts of problems will always lead men—quite legitimately, moreover—to have their own opinion and own solutions. But a relative peace is, in point of fact, possible and, if I may so express myself, there exists a common fund of concord and unity, without which social life is intolerable. The moral question forms part of this precious fund. On a certain number of points that concern conduct, we must reach agreement if we do not wish to fall into that anarchy of wills which paves the way for every great catastrophe. The capital point is that of the ultimate end. Accord in this matter bears within it the seed of moral unity and peace. However, such accord would not be solid, nor would this peace be durable, if they were not founded on the true ultimate end of man, known by all and accepted by all. Therefore, this end is what we must seek out. Its name and sublimity are what we must learn, for only by conquering it can men achieve their beatitude. And only when all march toward this conquest will harmony be established among souls—I mean the moral unity and the peace that make for the prosperity, power, and happiness of nations.
This great search this will be the object of our next conference.
Principal Authors Consulted
St. Thomas.—ST I-II, q. 1, a. 5–8; q. 10, a. 1, ad 3.—In Ethic., lect. 9.—In I Tim., lect. 2, in the middle.—De veritate, q. 26, art. 11.—De spiritualibus creaturis, art. 3.
Albert the Great.—III Ethic., bk. 1, tract. 3, chs. 111 and 112.
Cajetan.—Commentary on ST I-II, q. 1, a. 5 and 6.
John of St. Thomas.—Ibid., q. 1, arts. 5–6.
Gonet.—Manuale, vol. 3, tract. 1, ch. 1, pp. 2–3.
Salmanticenses.—Vol. 5, disp. 4 and 5.
Cicero.—De finibus, bk. 4, chs. 7 and 13.
Goudin.—Ethica, q. 1, art. 1, p. 2.
Mercier.—Psychologie, p. 62.
Fr. Coconnier.—L’Âme humaine.
Lorenzelli.—Psychologia generalis, lect. 6.
Bossuet.—Traité des causes.
De Quatrefages.—L’Espèce humaine.—Histoire générale des races humaines.
Renan.—Souvenirs d’enfance.—Questions contemporaines.—L’Avenir religieux des sociétés.
The present text is drawn from Marie Albert Janvier, Conférences de Notre-Dame de Paris: Exposition de la morale catholique (Paris: Lethielleux, 1903), 51–78 and 329–336. As for the first conference, the notes that Janvier gathered in the volume’s appendix have been incorporated here as footnotes. The present translation was sketched by digital tools (AI) but then edited closely, with a view to contemporary oral form, though without detracting from the original rhetoric or formal content.↩︎
This frenzy for dissection is criticized by the very men who have most contributed to keeping it alive. Monsieur Renan, that famous demolisher, said that “we distance ourselves from nature by dint of probing her” (Souvenirs d’enfance, preface, p. 9). He accused the Revolution, the offspring of individualism, for having “disaggregated everything, broken all the corporate bodies, dismantled society” (Questions contemporaines: L’Avenir religieux des sociétés, p. 352). He criticized “this code of laws… wherein every collective and perpetual work is forbidden, wherein moral unities, which are the true unities, are dissolved at every death” (ibid., preface, p. 3).↩︎
Fr. Coconnier, L’Âme humaine, p. 268.↩︎
Fr. Coconnier, L’Âme humaine, p. 263.↩︎
Mercier, Psychologie, p. 62.↩︎
This unity of substance and organism is admirably explained by both the ancients and the moderns—the former basing their philosophical reasonings on sensible experience, the latter drawing authority from the marvelous discoveries of present-day physiology. St. Thomas (De verit., q. 26, art. 10) explains the manifestations of unity in man as follows:
According to the order of nature, on account of how the soul’s powers are bound together in one essence, and the soul and body in the one existence of the composite, the higher powers, the lower ones, and even the body itself flow into one another with whatever superabounds in any one of them. Hence it is that, upon the soul’s apprehension, the body is changed as regards heat and cold, sometimes even to the point of health and sickness, and even unto death; for it happens that a man incurs death through joy, sadness, or love. Hence, too, from the very glory of the soul there will be an overflow into the glorified body; and, conversely, a transformation of the body likewise redounds upon the soul, for the soul joined to the body imitates its complexion, as regards derangement or docility of mind. Similarly, from the higher powers there is an overflow into the lower ones: when the movement of the will is intense, passion follows in the sensual appetite, and by intense contemplation the animal powers are drawn back or hindered from their acts. And, conversely, from the lower powers there is a reverberation upon the higher ones, as when, from the vehemence of passions existing in the sense appetite, reason is darkened so that it judges to be good, simply speaking, something that this man is affectively disposed toward with such strength of passion.
For their part, scientists—even materialist ones—describe this obvious interconnection of all the elements in man.
Moleschott, in his Kreislauf des Lebens, says:
[Thought] makes its influence felt profoundly in the material states of the body… As everyone knows, it is in the nerves that there occur the phenomena which most often produce the shortening of the muscular fibers and, consequently, movement. Moreover, the nerves are the organs of sensation in the body. The impressions that the external world makes upon our senses are conducted by the nerves to the spinal cord and to the brain in the form of sensation, taking that term in its broadest acceptation. These impressions come to consciousness in the brain. The excitations that strike the nerves at the periphery of the body are perceived only when the nerves have conducted them to the brain. Now, a discovery that we owe to Du Bois-Reymond shows that an electric current exists in all the nerves. This discovery, incontestably one of the greatest that our century has made in the domain of physiology, permits us to observe astonishing relations between thought and the material phenomena that take place within us” (cited by Fr. Coconnier, L’Âme humaine, p. 262).
Milne-Edwards has words no less precise for depicting the adaptation of the organs in animals and the unity of substance. This unity, observed in the lower beings, prepares us to encounter it in man. Here are Milne-Edwards’s words:
It is evident, for example, that in a mammal having a dental system arranged for cutting flesh and seizing living prey, the digestive tube must be suited to a carnivorous life-pattern and will differ from that of a herbivorous animal. However, this digestive apparatus would remain inactive if the animal were not organized in such a way as to be able to take possession of the prey upon which it must feed. Its movements must be rapid and powerful. Therefore, it must have a mechanical configuration of bodily members favorably disposed for locomotion, and muscles that are highly energetic. Now, the energy of muscular contractions presupposes active respiration. And this penetration of the air into the depths of the organism can be well established only by means of a rapid circulation of the nutritive fluids. This carnivorous life-pattern also requires, in the hunting animal, very perfect senses to guide it in the search for its prey, and instruments of prehension so that it may seize the prey once it has been reached. The disposition of the nervous system, the skeleton, the circulatory apparatus, and the respiratory organs must therefore be harmonized with the particular character of the digestive apparatus—or, rather, all these parts will be, in certain respects, in a mutual dependence whose necessity is evident (Milne-Edwards, Introduction à la zoologie générale, ch. 10, p. 62; cited by Mercier, Psychologie, p. 62).
The psychology of James Mill, of [John] Stuart Mill, of Bain, of Lewes, and of Herbert Spencer inclines to the same conclusion. “The single substance,” says Bain, “with two orders of properties, two faces—a unity with two faces—seems, rather, to satisfy all the requirements of the question” (Cardinal González, Histoire de la philosophie, vol. 4, p. 303).
This does not mean that all today agree regarding such unity. “In the theory of evolution proposed by Haeckel, the human being, man, far from being one living substance or essence, one person, one individual, must be conceived as a kind of hive of cells that play the role of bees. We would need to believe, on the word of the author of the Anthropogénie, that our body is not a perfect unity, as man was pleased to believe in the naïveté of his first ideas, but rather, is a very complex social community, a colony, a kind of state composed of several living unities, of several cells independent of one another” (Ibid., p. 351. See Mercier, Psychologie, p. 61: “The Unity of Living Substance”).
This affirmation does not hold up against the metaphysical and scientific proofs to which we have appealed.↩︎
Such is the principle upon which we base the second part of our conference.
Everyone knows that our affirmation is contested, in a more or less radical manner, by the partisans of evolutionism and transformism.
First of all, we can find the idea of transformism, in all its degrees, in the most remote ages of human thought. Heraclitus, for example, and Empedocles certainly advocated doctrines analogous to Darwin’s. And it is the exposition of their system (Aristotle, Phys. II, ch. 8) that Darwin mistakenly took to be Aristotle’s own opinion, whereas in reality the Philosopher rejects and refutes this ancient evolutionism.
The theory of transformism was even applied to man by the ancients, as these words of St. Thomas testify (ST I, q. 118, art. 2, ad 2): “And therefore others say that that same soul which at first was merely vegetative is afterwards, by the action of the power that is in the semen, brought to the point that this very same soul becomes intellective—not, indeed, by the active power of the semen, but by the power of a higher agent, namely, of God enlightening it from without.”
See Aristotle: De anima bk. 1, ch. 4, and bk. 3, chs. 5 and 7; Metaphysics bk. 7, ch. 10; Generation of Animals, bk. 2, ch. 4.
As one can see, in the words of Cardinal Zigliara (Propædeutica, bk. 1, ch. 3), this system is nearly identical to Darwin’s.
In eras closer to our own, Darwin himself cited among his precursors: Lamarck, 1801–1815; Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1795; Rev. W. Herbert, 1822; Grant, 1826; Patrick Matthew, 1831; Rafinesque, 1836; Haldeman, 1843; the anonymous author of the Vestiges of Creation, 1844; d’Omalius d’Halloy, 1831–1849; Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1850; Freke, 1851; Herbert Spencer, 1852–1858; Naudin, 1852; Keyserling, 1853; Schaaffhausen, 1853; Baden-Powell, 1855.
To this enumeration M. de Quatrefages adds four Frenchmen: de Maillet, Buffon, Robinet, and Bory de Saint-Vincent (Charles Darwin et ses précurseurs français). But never had evolutionism enjoyed the fortune that it has in our own days. The Darwinist movement has been considerable throughout the entire world and has invaded all the branches of human knowledge.
Two schools have arisen, the one radical and the other mitigated. The first, led by Haeckel, has had as its principal disciples Burmeister, Jäger, Mme Royer, and Cotta.
The second has subdivided into two classes. The one, “without pronouncing openly on the system taken as a whole,” says Cardinal González, applies one or another Darwinist hypothesis to particular sciences. It numbers in its ranks Bückle [Buckle] in his Histoire de la civilisation d’Angleterre; Draper in his Histoire du développement intellectuel de l’Europe; and Bagehot, author of the Lois scientifiques du développement des nations dans leurs rapports avec les principes de la sélection naturelle et de l’hérédité. In anthropology, Lyell, Lubbock, and Tylor, and in philology, Schleicher, Curtius, Steinthal, and Geiger, have adopted certain Darwinist ideas.
The other class practices a sort of eclecticism, accepting Darwinism in zoology while modifying it in more or less considerable ways. Wagner, Nägeli, Wigand, Kölliker, and Strauss attempt the reconciliation of Darwinism with pantheism. Wallace, Mivart, Braun, and Baer attempt to show the agreement between “Darwinism and their politico-religious ideas.” Vischer and Heller apply these same principles to religion and to theological studies. Finally, the psychological school—e.g., James Mill, Stuart Mill, Bain, Lewes, and Herbert Spencer—has followed both Comte and Darwin. Herbert Spencer, perhaps the most original and the most prolific of England’s writers in these recent years, has set the law of evolution in relation to the questions of being and of knowledge, of the organic and the inorganic world, of history, government, society, industry, art, and commerce.
From the perspective of dogma, Darwinism is not in contradiction with Catholicism so long as one does not apply it to the human soul.
From the philosophical perspective, Darwinism seems unacceptable in its conclusions as in its principles. Here is what Cicero already said: “Every nature wills to be the preserver of itself, so that it may be safe and may be preserved in its own kind” (De finibus, bk. 4, ch. 8). “For every nature is loving of itself. For what nature is there that would ever desert itself, or any part of itself, or any disposition or power of such a part, or the motion or state of any of these? And what nature has forgotten its own original constitution? Assuredly there is none that does not retain its own force from first to last” (ibid., ch. 13). [Trans. note: see, however, the work of Gardeil on this, partly presented on To Be a Thomist. Other contemporary Thomists continue to discuss this topic. See Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco (ed.), Creation through Evolution: New Perspectives from Thomistic Philosophy and Theology (The Catholic University of America Press: 2026).]
St. Thomas expressed the same idea in these words: “In all things, there is a natural desire to preserve that thing’s own being, which would not be preserved if the thing were transmuted into another nature. Hence, no thing that is in a lower degree of nature can desire the degree of a higher nature, just as an ass does not desire to be a horse; for if it were transferred into the degree of a higher nature, it would no longer be itself” (ST I, q. 63, art. 3).
The alleged axioms of natural selection and the struggle for existence in no way lead to the changing of species. [Trans. note: See the Gardeil mentioned above.]
The experiments to which the most learned of the transformists have devoted themselves, and which may be useful in other respects, likewise do not conclude to the truth of this doctrine. Thus, Monsieur de Quatrefages: “It is my hope that what we have said will suffice to make clear why I could not accept even the most seductive of these theories. In various degrees, they accord with certain general facts and account for a certain number of phenomena. But all of them, without exception, attain this result only by the aid of hypotheses in flagrant contradiction with other general facts every bit as fundamental as those which they explain” (L’Espèce humaine, 8th ed., p. 74). Whatever may be the case with Darwinism in general, we cannot—whether in the eyes of theology, or of philosophy, or of science—accept its application to the human soul.
Faith teaches that God created the soul directly and that all men come from a single couple, in whom they have all sinned.
In philosophy, Darwinism in no way explains how the human soul, from being vegetative or sensate, became intellectual.
But in the eyes of science, the theory is equally condemned.
In physiology, when two species are different, crossings between individuals of these two different species either are sterile, or else “fecundity is diminished almost constantly, and most often in a very considerable proportion.” This is the phenomenon of hybridization (Quatrefages, ibid., p. 50).
If, on the contrary, such crossing takes place between individuals of the same species, between very different individuals or between different races, fecundity is ordinarily increased. This is the phenomenon of miscegenation or crossbreeding].
Now, “everywhere and in everything, crossing between human groups shows the phenomena of crossbreeding and never those of hybridization. Therefore, these human groups, however different they may be or may appear to us, are only the races of one single and same species and not distinct species. Therefore, there exists only one human species” (Quatrefages, ibid., p. 64).
This argument is general, and it proves the unity of the human species in the past, in the present, and in the future.
M. de Quatrefages and his school have studied the different human races alive throughout the world today. And they have found not only that these races become fruitful when they are crossed with each other but, moreover, that they all have the same external, anatomical, physiological, pathological, intellectual, moral, and religious characteristics. Secondly, in studying the races that we can find in fossil traces, they have observed that the men of the past resembled the man of the present absolutely. To whatever primitive era these fossil men may have belonged, everywhere the documents they have left to us and the bones that have been recovered denote in them the same physical and psychological characteristics. See Quatrefages, Histoire générale des races humaines.
Finally, this illustrious scientist concludes, in the aforementioned works, that man has had but one primitive center of appearance upon the earth. The study of languages and of migrations leads him to this solution and confirms once more that we come from a single couple.
It seems clear that, in a definitive manner, science accords with faith and teaches the unity of the human species.
Just as we are finishing writing this note, the Revue des Deux Mondes has published an article by M. Dastre in which the latter expounds the theory of a Dutch scientist, M. Hugo de Vries. It is well known that the ideas of transformism by sudden change were regarded as definitively abandoned. Now, “the master idea of H. de Vries is the sudden mutation of living forms.” In reading M. Dastre’s interesting note (Revue des Deux Mondes, July 1, 1903), one will come to appreciate the uncertainty that reigns among the transformists themselves, even in what regards the lower species.↩︎
M. de Quatrefages, L’Unité des races humaines, bk. 8.↩︎
[Trans. note: On this question, however, see the indications concerning evolution, written already in the late 1800s, by Ambroise Gardeil, posted on To Be a Thomist.]↩︎
