The Jurisprudence Of Benedict XVI Vs. That Of August Comte

By JUDE DOUGHERTY

In his address to the German Bundestag on September 22, 2011, Benedict delivered a lecture on the framing of law that is worth revisiting in this election year. Well, in any year. Speaking to that body of lawmakers, he asks, “How do we recognize what is right and may be given the force of law?” In our complex society, what is right and may be given the force of law is in no way self-evident.
Christianity, Benedict reminds his audience, has never proposed a revealed law to the state and to society, that is to say, a juridical order derived from Revelation. Instead it has pointed to nature’s order and used reason in determining the nature of law. The creation of just law, he says, presupposes not only an understanding of what is right but the will to do what is right. Benedict quotes St. Augustine’s dictum, “Without justice what is the state but a great band of robbers?”
In his view, for most matters that need to be regulated by law, the majority view of the electorate may well serve as a sufficient criterion. Yet it is evident that for the fundamental issues of law in which the dignity of man and humanity is at stake, the “majority principle” is not enough.
Everyone in a position of responsibility, while taking note of the popular will, must nevertheless independently seek out the criteria to be followed when framing laws. In times past, one could appeal to a divinely created natural law. But that is not possible given the present intellectual climate. “The idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to mention the term.”
Benedict then takes note of the is/ought issue, and the positivist doctrine that one can never derive an “ought” from an “is.” Positivism, in limiting knowledge to sense experience, deprives one of an acknowledgment of purpose in nature. Without assent to the existence of God, an appeal to nature’s order is not possible. Late 18th and early 19th-century empiricism transformed the Western mind by limiting reason to the empirically discernable, thus making impossible rational proof of the existence of God.
David Hume, as a result of his empirical analysis of causality, concluded that there is no evidence for the existence of God. Immanuel Kant concurred, and in his famous Critique set aside reason in order to make room for faith. By contrast, Benedict will affirm that the existence of God can be philosophically demonstrated, for reason is much more powerful than the positivist admits.
Some years before his address to the Bundestag, Benedict spoke to fellow academics at the University of Regensburg, where he was once a professor, and addressed this same issue.
Defending the intelligibility of nature and the intellect’s ability to uncover its order, he spoke of “the inner-rapprochement between biblical faith and Greek philosophical enquiry.”
“Christianity,” he reminded his listeners, “despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took its historically decisive character in Europe.” Its Greek indebtedness formed and became an integral part of the Christian faith. Those who call for the de-hellenization of Christian faith are, in effect, attacking Christianity itself. Benedict explains that de-hellenization first emerged in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the 16th century.
Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought that they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say, an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, to the Reformers, faith no longer appears as a living assent to the historical Word. The principle of sola Scriptura followed, faith in its pure primordial biblical form with no metaphysical gloss. When Kant signed on to this conception of faith, he carried this program forward “with a radicalism the Reformers could have never foreseen.”
Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who coined the word “positivism” and is known as the Father of Sociology, advanced a notion of science that limited knowledge to that attained by sense experience. Comte’s positivism, grounded as it was in the empiricism of his day, ruled out not only metaphysics but theoretical physics as well, and both for the same reason, the denial of the classical understanding of the principle of causality. According to Comte, physics errs, as does metaphysics, when it postulates unseen or abstract entities as causes.
Comte, of course, wrote years before theoretical physics came into its own with atomic and subatomic explanations of natural phenomena.
In limiting knowledge to the strictly empirical, the positivist maintains that anything that is not empirically verifiable or falsifiable does not belong in the realm of reason, strictly speaking.
“Hence ethics and religion,” Benedict notes, “must be assigned to the subjective field, and they remain extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the word.” He then continues:
“Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else — and that is broadly the case in our public mindset — the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is a dramatic situation that affects everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary. Indeed, an essential goal of this address is to issue an urgent invitation to launch one.”
Although events in the past century have undermined the philosophical foundations of positivism, the outlook is apt to survive any and all critiques for reasons that have little to do with scientific explanation. It is a willful position. Comte recognized that the social implications of the empiricist position led directly to a secular humanism which he codified in his “religion of humanity.”
His social philosophy may rest on a philosophy of science long outmoded, but as Benedict observed, his influence remains formidable in the social sciences and in the philosophy of law. In the final analysis we recognize that positivism is a sociopolitical movement, willfully embraced, with consequences a de-Christianized Europe is experiencing today.