Thomas Aquinas and (Our) Moral Debate

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2008 by Jordan, Mark D

Any didactic piece of writing faces the challenge of justifying its existence. It must say or show, in one register or another, that it offers something worth learning. The challenge is particularly acute for didactic writing that wants to intervene in a repetitive debate. When every bit of evidence has been used and over-used, when all the argumentative combinations have been rehearsed, when fixed parties have already recruited the undecided-what room remains for teaching?

From the start, Richard Norris is diffident about his purpose in the sadly incomplete "Some Notes on the Current Debate Regarding Homosexuality." He means to offer help in "clarifying the issues" of that repetitive debate (A.1.3). He writes about it or into it "simply as a Christian (who happens to be a historian)" (A.1.4). Both his title and his form confirm this diffidence. These are after all only "Some Notes"-only notes, only some of those that might be jotted down. They are numbered in groups as if to indicate that they had been gathered tentatively from a scatter of fragments and that there might well be gaps. The text cautions its readers through its title and form: "You might use some of these fragments to gain a little clarity on our controversies."

I take this diffidence as sincere, but I also remember that any particular offer of didactic clarity diagnoses some particular obscurity. Writing up these teacherly notes, gathering them together, Norris must suppose that the "current debate regarding homosexuality and the place of homosexuals in the church" repeatedly fails to achieve clarity for specific questions. He must know something about the causes for our present confusion. I sometimes suspect that he is confident of knowing more. In many passages Norris rebukes the actual conduct of the debate and proposes to conduct it better.

Since Norris explicitly identifies himself as a historian, it is easy to suppose that his rebuke is historical: the debate repeats itself because the contending parties keep making a mistake about the past. On that supposition, Norris's purpose would reprise the project of Derrick Sherwin Bailey's Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition.1 Bailey wrote that pioneering book to block the inferences from "tradition" that abound in church arguments around homosexuality. Many of the inferences are scriptural. So Bailey narrates the origin and textual transmission of traditional misreadings of the story of Sodom. But other purported inferences concern the moral categories for describing same-sex acts. The combination of misreadings and conceptual mistakes renders the library of Christian texts unhelpful to contemporary debate. For Bailey, Christian tradition about homosexuality "can no longer be regarded as an adequate guide by the theologian, the legislator, the sociologist, and the magistrate."2

Though Norris identifies himself as a historian, I do not think that he shares either Bailey's conclusion or Baileys project. The purpose of the "Notes" is not principally historical. A comparison with Bailey suggests how far Norris writes here as something other than "a Christian (who happens to be a historian)." Norriss essay exposes various sorts of misunderstandings. Some of them are indeed about the uses of inherited texts. His remarks on invocations of the Christian scriptures, for example, show a historian's sensibility for the various conditions under which ancient texts were composed, reproduced, and received (B.4 and all of its sub-sections). But for the most part Norris is not concerned to provide a historically embedded reading of the moral arguments he clarifies, much less to narrate their transmission from past to present. He treats instead the forms of arguments extracted from inherited texts so far as they are present to us through debate. He clarifies the current debate by exposing its confusions and equivocations, its fallacies and sophisms. In contrast with Bailey, Norris proceeds in the manner of an "analytic" philosopher who assumes a continuity of reasoning that brings arguments from various historical epochs under the scrutiny of curiously timeless standards.

I do not know what literary model Norris had in mind, but an intricately numbered series of corrections to the logic of a current debate will remind many readers of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. In the Preface to that manifesto, Wittgenstein writes: "The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language."3 If Norris is not afflicted with Wittgenstein's hubris at having "dissolved" problems, he does share with Wittgenstein a confidence in the decisive effect of exposing logical misunderstandings. When he responds to church debate with logical clarification, Norris assumes that the central problem in the debates is (or ought to be) logical rather than historical, psychological, or "genealogical" (in Nietzsche's sense-or Foucault's). He assumes, in other words, that logical analysis is likely to be more helpful than detailed historical exegesis, well-crafted appeal to emotion, or the unmasking of historically concealed structures of power. I worry that the assumption is naive. I am also concerned that it concedes the authority of certain historical figures to those who abuse them for present purposes-and so abandons one possible cure for our self-absorption.