By DEACON JAMES TONER
One version of a famous fable is this: A scorpion asked a frog for transportation across a river. The frog, thinking that the scorpion would not sting because that would result in their both dying, finally agreed. About halfway across the river, though, the scorpion did sting the frog. As they both began to sink below the surface, the frog plaintively asked the scorpion, “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both drown.” Replied the scorpion: “Because it is my nature to do so.”
Our Lord, of course, understood human nature (cf. John 2:24-25), knowing our propensity for evil (Matt. 15:19, Mark 7:21, James 4:1), which is also an important theme in the testimony of St. Paul (see Romans 7:14-24, Gal. 5:19). These verses build upon an Old Testament teaching about our nature: “Who can understand the human heart? There is nothing else so deceitful; it is too sick to be healed” (Jer. 17:9).
We know that the sacraments offer us the medicine which, in fact, can arrest or cure the spiritual disease afflicting us. This medicine takes the form of interior repentance, including “the desire and resolution to change one’s life, with hope in God’s mercy and trust in the help of his grace” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1431). A sacrament is thus a kind of Tolkien eucatastrophe, offering us — if we will but embrace it — the gracious path to salvation rather than the wretched road to perdition.
Pace the universalists, however, who hold that everyone will be saved, the Church has counseled the salvific need for daily conversion (Luke 13:22-30, Phil. 2:12), knowing our weaknesses and the power of the world, the flesh, and the Devil.
As the Catechism teaches: “Ignorance of the fact that man has a wounded nature inclined to evil gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education, politics, social action, and morals” (n. 407; see also n. 387). Deny or forsake that critical insight into our human nature, and we destine ourselves to the kind of wild-eyed confusion which marks despotic ideology.
Here is the first lesson of wise politics: Do not concentrate power in the hands of anyone. In a certain sense, the writing of St. Paul is the progenitor of the doctrine of separation of powers, upon which the American Constitution is founded, and in which is grounded Madison’s famous observation that government is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature” (Federalist, n. 51).
It was, after all, the Catholic Lord Acton (1834-1902) who astutely observed: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Would the scorpion of human nature sting the body politic, endangering the very safety and security of the Republic? Would leaders, of whatever party or persuasion, be so enamored of power, in its many forms, that they would consciously corrupt enduring public principle to suit fleeting private purpose?
Are we sinners? Because the answer to that critical question is a long, loud, and lamentable “yes,” we grievously err when the trust we must give to God is invested, instead, in human laws and institutions.
In understanding the degradations of human nature, one begins to grasp the nature and purpose of good institutions and of good law. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) had it right, after all: We should change enduring institutions rarely and then only incrementally. Jefferson, too, knew that truth: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes” (Declaration of Independence).
Never expect too much, too soon, too easily. Never expect to redeem our fallen human nature by government programs or by faith in self-anointed champions of the people (Mark 7:9, Col. 2:8). That way lies chaos.
St. Thomas Aquinas taught that law is “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.”
Institutions and laws are metaphysical axioms, meaning that they emerge from conviction about human origin, purpose, and destiny. When we understand the limits of our wisdom and the perils of our pride, we create engines of government which resolutely and reasonably remain on the tracks laid by generations of prophets, priests, philosophers, and — yes — discerning politicians (to whom, long after their deaths, we refer as “statesmen”).
They developed a certain political conscience which tells us that man is both beauty and beast, capable of both the angelic and of the diabolical, able to build both cathedrals and concentration camps.
Good civic law, therefore, aims always at advancing man’s reason and retarding his passion. Those who make that good law must be intellectually marinated in the learning which attends, and is derived from, the recognition that, as Chesterton once put it, when you take away the supernatural you are left with the unnatural. If the first man-made political structure was the Tower of Babel, then the first public opinion poll (as Bishop Sheen once said) was the crowd’s choice of Barabbas (Matt. 27:17, 21).
When I first taught politics at Notre Dame, I adorned my syllabus with an insight from Professor Waldemar Gurian (1902-1954), who also had taught at Notre Dame: “In all temporal things something supratemporal appears. [Understanding that will save us] from the dangerous twin evils of our time — cynicism and perfectionism.”
Forget whose we are (1 Cor. 6:19); forget that we are subject to Judgment; forget our eternal destiny — and we are left with unnatural institutions and laws founded upon the greatest lie: “You will be like God” (Gen. 3:5). All we have to do to become omnipotent, the great liar tells us, is to sell our souls and to substitute the self or the state for what is truly sacred (see CCC, n. 398). That is the longstanding liberal lullaby, inducing pernicious moral and political coma.
In God we trust; in humans, or scorpions, we do not.
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