Edward Feser

My review of Guy Mansini’s excellent new book The Development of Dogma: A Systematic Account appears in the May 2024 issue of First Things.

This week the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) published the Declaration Dignitas Infinita, on the topic of human dignity.  I am as weary as anyone of the circumstance that it has now become common for new documents issued by the Vatican to be met with fault-finding.  But if the faults really are there, then we oughtn’t to blame the messenger.  And this latest document exhibits two serious problems: one with its basic premise, and the other with some of the conclusions it draws from it.

Capital punishment

To begin with the latter, I hasten to add that most of the conclusions are unobjectionable.  They are simply reiterations of longstanding Catholic teaching on abortion, euthanasia, our obligations to the poor and to migrants, and so on.  The document is especially helpful and courageous in strongly condemning surrogacy and gender theory, which will win it no praise from the progressives the pope is often accused of being too ready to placate. 

There are other passages that are more problematic but perhaps best interpreted as imprecise rather than novel.  For example, it is stated that “it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’”  That might seem to mark the beginnings of a reversal of traditional teaching that has been reiterated as recently as the current Catechism.  However, Dignitas Infinita also “reaffirm[s] the inalienable right to self-defense and the responsibility to protect those whose lives are threatened,” which are themes that recent statements of just war doctrine have already emphasized.

The one undeniably gravely problematic conclusion Dignitas Infinita draws from its key premise concerns the death penalty.  Pope Francis already came extremely close to declaring capital punishment intrinsically immoral when he changed the Catechism in 2018, so that it now says that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”  But that left open the possibility that what was meant is that it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person unless certain circumstances hold, such as the practical impossibility of protecting others from the offender without executing him (even if this reading is a bit strained).  The new DDF document goes further and flatly declares that “the death penalty… violates the inalienable dignity of every person, regardless of the circumstances” (emphasis added). 

This simply cannot be reconciled with scripture and the consistent teaching of all popes who have spoken on the matter prior to Pope Francis.  That includes Pope St. John Paul II, despite his well-known opposition to capital punishment.  In Evangelium Vitae, even John Paul taught only:

Punishment… ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.  Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.

And the original version of the Catechism promulgated by John Paul II stated:

The traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of the legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty. (2266)

In short, John Paul II (like scripture and like every previous pope who spoke on the matter) held that some circumstances can justify capital punishment, whereas Pope Francis now teaches that no circumstances can ever justify capital punishment.  That is a direct contradiction.  Now, Joseph Bessette and I, in our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, have shown that the legitimacy in principle of the death penalty has in fact been taught infallibly by scripture and the tradition of the Church.  I’ve also made the case for this claim on other occasions, such as in this article.  Hence, if Pope Francis is indeed teaching that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong, it is clear that it is he who is in the wrong, rather than scripture and previous popes. 

If defenders of Pope Francis deny this, then they are logically committed to holding that those previous popes erred.  Either way, some pope or other has erred, so that it will make no sense for defenders of Pope Francis to pretend that they are simply upholding papal magisterial authority.  To defend Pope Francis is to reject the teaching of the previous popes; to defend those previous popes is to reject the teaching of Pope Francis.  There is no way to defend all of them at once. 

This is in no way inconsistent with the doctrine of papal infallibility, because that doctrine concerns ex cathedra definitions, and nothing Pope Francis has said amounts to such a definition (as Cardinal Fernández, Prefect of the DDF, has explicitly acknowledged).  But it refutes those who claim that all papal teaching on faith and morals is infallible, and those who hold that, even if not all such teaching is infallible, no pope has actually taught error.  For that reason alone, Dignitas Infinita is a document of historic significance, albeit not for the reasons Pope Francis or Cardinal Fernández would have intended.

Dignity and the death penalty

The other problem with the document, I have said, concerns the premise with which it begins.  That premise is referred to in its title, and it is stated in its opening lines as follows:

Every human person possesses an infinite dignity, inalienably grounded in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter.  This principle, which is fully recognizable even by reason alone, underlies the primacy of the human person and the protection of human rights… [Thus] the Church… always insist[s] on “the primacy of the human person and the defense of his or her dignity beyond every circumstance.”

The most striking part of this passage – indeed, I would say the most shocking part of it – is the assertion that human dignity is infinite.  I will come back to that.  But first note the other aspects of its teaching.  The Declaration implies that this dignity follows from human nature itself, rather than from grace.  That is implied by its being fully knowable by reason alone (as opposed to special divine revelation).  It is ontological rather than acquired in nature, reflecting what a human being is rather than what he or she does.  For this reason, it cannot be lost no matter what one does, in “every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter.”  And again, the dignity human beings are said in this way to possess is also claimed to be infinite in nature.

It is no surprise, then, that the Declaration should later go on to say what it does about the death penalty.  According to Pope Francis’s revision of the Catechism, the death penalty is “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”  But Dignitas Infinita says this dignity exists in “every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter.”  That implies that it is retained no matter what evil the person has committed, and no matter how dangerous he is to others.  Thus, if we must “always insist on… the primacy of the human person and the defense of his or her dignity beyond every circumstance,” it would follow that the death penalty would be impermissible in every circumstance.

This alone entails that there is something wrong with the Declaration’s premises.  For it is, again, the infallible teaching of scripture and all previous popes that the death penalty can under some circumstances be justifiable.  Hence, if the Declaration’s teaching on human dignity implies otherwise, it is that teaching that is flawed, not scripture and not two millennia of consistent papal teaching.

There is also the problem that, in defense of its conception of human dignity, the Declaration appeals to scriptural passages from, among other places, Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Romans.  But all four of these books contain explicit endorsements of capital punishment!  (See By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed for detailed discussion.)  Hence, their conception of human dignity is clearly not the same as that of the Declaration.  Perhaps the defender of the Declaration will suggest that these scriptural texts erred on the specific topic of capital punishment.  One problem with that is that the Church holds that scripture cannot teach error on a matter of faith or morals.  So, this attempt to get around the difficulty would be heterodox.  But another problem is that this move would undermine the Declaration’s own use of these scriptural texts.  For if Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Romans are wrong about something as serious the death penalty, why should we believe they are right about anything else, such as human dignity?

At this point the defender of the Declaration might suggest that we are misunderstanding these scriptural passages if we think they support capital punishment.  One problem with this suggestion is that it is asinine on its face.  Jewish and Christian theologians alike have for millennia consistently understood the Old Testament to sanction capital punishment, and the Church has always understood both the Old Testament passages and Romans to sanction it.  To pretend that it is only now that we finally understand them accurately defies common sense (and rests on utterly implausible arguments, as Bessette and I show in our book).  But it also contradicts what the Church has said about its own understanding of scripture.  The Church claims that on matters of scriptural interpretation, no one is free to contradict the unanimous opinion of the Fathers or the consistent understanding of the Church over millennia.  And the Fathers and consistent tradition of the Church hold that scripture teaches that the death penalty can under some circumstances be licit.  (See the book for more about this subject too.)

Infinite dignity?

But even putting all of that aside, attributing “infinite dignity” to human beings is highly problematic.  If we are speaking strictly, it is obvious that only God can be said to have infinite dignity.  Dignitas conveys “worth,” “worthiness,” “merit,” “excellence,” “honor.”  Try replacing “dignity” with these words in the phrase “infinite dignity,” and ask whether the result can be applied to human beings.  Do human beings have “infinite merit,” “infinite excellence,” “infinite worthiness”?  The very idea seems blasphemous.  Only God can have any of these things.

Or consider the attributes that impart special dignity to people, such as authority, goodness, or wisdom, where the more perfectly they manifest these attributes, the greater is their dignity.  Can human beings be said to possess “infinite authority,” “infinite goodness,” or “infinite wisdom”?  Obviously not, and obviously it is only God to whom these things can be attributed.  So, how could human beings have infinite dignity?

Aquinas makes several relevant remarks.  He tells us that “the equality of distributive justice consists in allotting various things to various persons in proportion to their personal dignity” (Summa Theologiae II-II.63.1).  Naturally, that implies that some people have more dignity than others.  So, how could all human beings have infinite dignity (which would imply that none has more than any other)?  He also says that “by sinning man departs from the order of reason, and consequently falls away from the dignity of his manhood” (Summa Theologiae II-II.64.2).  But if a person can lose his dignity, how can all people have infinite dignity?

Some will say that what Aquinas is talking about in such passages is only acquired dignity rather than ontological dignity – that is to say, dignity that reflects what we do or some special status we contingently come to have (which can change), rather than dignity that reflects what we are by nature.  But that will not work as an interpretation of other things Aquinas says.  For instance, he notes that “the dignity of the divine nature excels every other dignity” (Summa Theologiae I.29.3).  Obviously, he is talking about God’s ontological dignity here.  And naturally, God has infinite dignity if anything does.  So if his ontological dignity excels ours, how could we possibly have infinite ontological dignity? 

Aquinas also writes:

Now it is more dignified for a thing to exist in something more dignified than itself than to exist in its own right.  And so by this very fact the human nature is more dignified in Christ than in us, since in us it has its own personhood in the sense that it exists in its own right, whereas in Christ it exists in the person of the Word.  (Summa Theologiae III.2.2, Freddoso translation)

Now, if the dignity of human nature is increased by virtue of its being united to Christ in the Incarnation, how could it already be infinite by nature?  Then there is the fact that Aquinas explicitly denies that human dignity is infinite:

But no mere man has the infinite dignity required to satisfy justly an offence against God. Therefore there had to be a man of infinite dignity who would undergo the penalty for all so as to satisfy fully for the sins of the whole world.  Therefore the only-begotten Word of God, true God and Son of God, assumed a human nature and willed to suffer death in it so as to purify the whole human race indebted by sin.  (De Rationibis Fidei, Chapter 7)

To be sure, Aquinas also allows that there is a sense in which some things other than God can have infinite dignity, when he writes:

From the fact that (a) Christ’s human nature is united to God, and that (b) created happiness is the enjoyment of God, and that (c) the Blessed Virgin is the mother of God, it follows that they have a certain infinite dignity that stems from the infinite goodness which is God. (Summa Theologiae I.25.6, Freddoso translation)

But note that the infinite dignity in question derives from a certain special relation to God’s infinite dignity – involving the Incarnation, the beatific vision, and Mary’s divine motherhood respectively – and not from human nature as such.

Relevant too are Aquinas’s remarks on the topic of infinity.  He says that “besides God nothing can be infinite,” for “it is against the nature of a made thing to be absolutely infinite” so that “He cannot make anything to be absolutely infinite” (Summa Theologiae I.7.2).  How, then, could human beings by nature have infinite dignity?

Some might respond by saying that Aquinas is not infallible, but that would miss the point.  For it is not just that Aquinas’s theology has tremendous authority within Catholicism (though it does have that, and that is hardly unimportant here).  It is that he is making points from Catholic teaching itself about the nature of dignity, the nature of human beings, and the nature of God that make it highly problematic to speak of human beings as having “infinite dignity.”  It is no good just to say that he is wrong.  The defender of the Declaration owes us an argument showing that he is wrong, or showing that talk of “infinite dignity” can be reconciled with what he says.

Possible defenses?

One suggestion some have made on Twitter is that further remarks Aquinas makes about infinity can resolve the conflict.  For in the passage just quoted, he also writes:

Things other than God can be relatively infinite, but not absolutely infinite.  For with regard to infinite as applied to matter, it is manifest that everything actually existing possesses a form; and thus its matter is determined by form.  But because matter, considered as existing under some substantial form, remains in potentiality to many accidental forms, which is absolutely finite can be relatively infinite; as, for example, wood is finite according to its own form, but still it is relatively infinite, inasmuch as it is in potentiality to an infinite number of shapes.  But if we speak of the infinite in reference to form, it is manifest that those things, the forms of which are in matter, are absolutely finite, and in no way infinite.  If, however, any created forms are not received into matter, but are self-subsisting, as some think is the case with angels, these will be relatively infinite, inasmuch as such kinds of forms are not terminated, nor contracted by any matter.  But because a created form thus subsisting has being, and yet is not its own being, it follows that its being is received and contracted to a determinate nature.  Hence it cannot be absolutely infinite. (Summa Theologiae I.7.2)

What Aquinas is saying here is that there is a sense in which matter is relatively infinite, and a sense in which an angel is relatively infinite.  The sense in which matter is relatively infinite is that it can at least in principle take on, successively, one form after another ad infinitum.  The sense in which an angel is relatively infinite is that it is not limited by matter. 

But there are several problems with the suggestion that this passage can help us to make sense of the notion that human beings have “infinite dignity.”  First, Aquinas explicitly says that things “the forms of which are in matter, are absolutely finite, and in no way infinite.”  For example, while the matter that makes up a particular tree is relatively infinite insofar as it can take on different forms ad infinitum (the form of a desk, the form of a chair, and so on) the tree itself qua having the form of a tree is in no way infinite.  Now, a human being is, like a tree, a composite of form and matter.  Hence, Aquinas’s remarks here would imply that, even if the matter that makes up the body is relatively infinite insofar as it can successively take on different forms ad infinitum, the human being himself is not in any way infinite.  Obviously, then, this would tell against taking human nature to be even relatively infinite in its dignity.

Furthermore, it’s not clear how the specific examples Aquinas gives are supposed to be relevant to the question at hand in the first place.  The sense in which he says matter is relatively infinite is, again, that it can take on different forms successively ad infinitum – first one form, then a second, then a third, and so on.  But of course, at any particular point in time, matter does not have an infinite number of forms.  So, how would this provide a model for human beings having “infinite dignity”?  Is the idea that they have only finite dignity at any particular point in time, but will keep having it at later points in time without end?  Surely that is not what is meant by “infinite dignity.”  It would entail that even something with the least dignity possible at any particular point in time would have “infinite dignity” as long as it simply persisted with that minimal dignity forever!

Nor does the angel example help.  Again, the sense in which angels are relatively infinite, Aquinas says, is that they are not limited by matter.  But human beings are limited by matter.  So, this is no help in explaining how we could be even relatively infinite in dignity.

Another, sillier suggestion some have made on Twitter is that we can make sense of human beings having “infinite dignity” in light of set theory, which tells us that some infinities can be larger than others.  The idea seems to be that while God has infinite dignity, we too can intelligibly be said to have it, so long as God’s dignity has to do with a larger infinity than ours.

The problem with this is that the “infinity” that is attributed to God and to his dignity (and to human dignity, for that matter) has nothing to do with the infinities studied by set theory.  Set theory is about collections of objects (such as numbers), which might be infinite in size.  But when we say that God is infinite, we’re not talking about a collection any kind.  We’re not saying, for example, that God’s infinite power has something to do with him possessing an infinite collection of powers.  What is meant is merely that he has causal power to do or to make whatever is intrinsically possible.  And his infinite dignity too has nothing to do with any sort of collection (such as an infinitely large collection of units of dignity, whatever that would mean).  Set theory is simply irrelevant.

Another defense that has been suggested is to appeal to Pope St. John Paul II’s having once used the phrase “infinite dignity” in an Angelus address in 1980.  Indeed, the Declaration itself makes note of this.  But there are several problems here.  First, John Paul II’s remark was merely a passing comment made in the course a little-known informal address of little magisterial weight that was devoted to another topic.  It was not a carefully worded formal theological treatment of the nature of human dignity, specifically.  Nor did John Paul put any special emphasis on the phrase or draw momentous conclusions from it, the way the new Declaration does.  For example, he never concluded that, since human dignity is “infinite,” the death penalty must be ruled out under every circumstance.  On the contrary, despite his strong personal opposition to the death penalty, he always acknowledged that there could be circumstances where it was permissible, and that that was the Church’s traditional teaching.  There is no reason whatsoever to take the Angelus address reference to be anything more than a loosely worded off-the-cuff remark.  Moreover, even if it were more than that, that would not make the problems I’ve been setting out here magically disappear.

Some have suggested that the Declaration’s remark about the death penalty does not in fact amount to saying that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong.  What it entails, they claim, is only that it is always intrinsically contrary to human dignity.  But that, they say, leaves it open that it may sometimes be permissible to do what is contrary to human dignity.

But there are two reasons why this cannot be right.  First, Dignitas Infinita does not say that what violates our dignity is unacceptable except when such-and-such conditions hold.  On the contrary, it says that the Church “always insist[s] on… the defense of [the human person’s] dignity beyond every circumstance.”  It says that man’s “infinite dignity” is “inviolable,” that it “prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter,” and that our respect for it must be “unconditional.”  It repeatedly emphasizes that “circumstances” are irrelevant to what a respect for dignity requires of us, and it does so precisely because it claims that our dignity is “infinite.”  Asserting that human dignity has such radical “no exceptions” implications is the whole point of the Declaration, the whole point of its making a big deal of the phrase “infinite dignity.”

Second, the Declaration makes a special point of lumping in the death penalty with evils such as “murder, genocide, abortion, [and] euthanasia.”  It says: “Here, one should also mention the death penalty, for this also violates the inalienable dignity of every person, regardless of the circumstances.”  Obviously, if the death penalty really does violate human dignity under every circumstance in just the way murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, etc. do, then it is no less absolutely ruled out than they are.  And obviously, the Declaration would not allow us to say that there are cases where murder, genocide, abortion, and euthanasia might be allowable despite their being affronts to human dignity.

Hyperbole?

The best defense that some have made of the Declaration is that the phrase “infinite dignity” is mere hyperbole.  But though this is the best defense, that does not make it a good defense.  First of all, magisterial documents should use terms with precision.  This is especially true of a document coming from the DDF, whose job is precisely to clarify matters of doctrine.  It is simply scandalous for a document intended to clarify a doctrinal matter – especially one that we are told has been in preparation for years – to deploy a key theological term in a loose and potentially highly misleading way (and, indeed, to put special emphasis on this loose meaning, even in the very title of the document!)

But second, the idea that the phrase is meant as mere hyperbole is simply not a natural reading of the Declaration.  For it is not just that special emphasis is put on the phrase itself.  It is also that special emphasis is put on the radical implications of the phrase.  We are told that it is precisely because human dignity is “infinite” that the moral conclusions asserted by the Declaration hold “beyond all circumstances,” “beyond every circumstance,” “in all circumstances,” “regardless of the circumstances,” and so on.  If you don’t take the “infinite” part seriously, then you lose the grounds for taking the “beyond all circumstances” parts seriously.  They go hand in hand.  Hence, the “hyperbole” reading simply undermines the whole point of the document.

That this extreme language of man’s “infinite dignity” has now led the pope to condemn the death penalty in an absolute way – and thereby to contradict scripture and all previous papal teaching on the subject – shows just how grave are the consequences of using theological language imprecisely.  And this may not be the end of it.  Asked at a press conference on the Declaration about the implications of man’s “infinite dignity” for the doctrine of Hell, Cardinal Fernández did not deny the doctrine.  But he also said: “’With all the limits that our freedom truly has, might it not be that Hell is empty?’ This is the question that Pope Francis sometimes asks.”  Asked about the Catechism’s teaching that homosexual desire is “intrinsically disordered,” the cardinal said: “It’s a very strong expression, and it needs to be explained a great deal.  Perhaps we could find an expression that is even clearer, to understand what we mean… But it is true that the expression could find other more suitable words.”  When churchmen put special emphasis on the idea that human dignity is infinite, then there is a wide range of traditional Catholic teaching that they are bound to be tempted to soften or find some way to work around.

High-flown rhetoric about human dignity has, in any event, always been especially prone to abuse.  As Allan Bloom once wrote, “the very expression dignity of man, even when Pico della Mirandola coined it in the fifteenth century, had a blasphemous ring to it” (The Closing of the American Mind, p. 180).  Similarly, Jacques Barzun pointed out that “[Pico’s] word dignity can of course be interpreted as flouting the gospel’s call to humility and denying the reality of sin.  Humanism is accordingly charged with inverting the relation between man and God” (From Dawn to Decadence, p. 60).

Some historians would judge this unfair to Pico himself, but my point is not about him.  Rather, it is about how modern people in general, from the Renaissance onward, have gotten progressively more drunk on the idea of their own dignity – and, correspondingly, less and less cognizant of the fact that what is most grave about sin is not that it dishonors us, but that it dishonors God.  This, and not their own dignity, is what modern people most need reminding of.  Hence, while it is not wrong to speak of human dignity, one must be cautious and always put the accent on the divine dignity rather than on our dignity.  I submit that sticking a word like “infinite” in front of the latter accomplishes the reverse of this. 

And I submit that a sure sign that the rhetoric of human dignity has now gone too far is that it has led the highest authorities in the Church to contradict the teaching of the word of God itself (on the topic of the death penalty).  Such an error is possible when popes do not speak ex cathedra.  But it is extremely rare, and always gravely scandalous.

Liberalism is to the social order what AIDS is to the body.  By relegating the truths of natural law and divine revelation to the private sphere, it destroys the immune system of the body politic, opening the way to that body’s being ravaged by moral decay and ideological fanaticism.  I develop this theme in a new essay over at Postliberal Order.

This week, cartoonist Ed Piskor committed suicide in the wake of the relentless online pillorying and overnight destruction of his career that followed upon allegations of sexual misconduct, of which he insisted he was innocent. Piskor’s work was not really to my taste, but I often enjoyed the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel he co-hosted. I was always impressed by the manifest love, respect, and appreciation he showed for the great comic book artists of the past. These are attractive and admirable attitudes to take toward those from whom one has learned.

Piskor’s suicide note is heartbreaking, and includes this passage:

I have no friends in this life any longer. I’m a disappointment to everybody who liked me. I’m a pariah. News organizations at my door and hassling my elderly parents. It’s too much. Putting our addresses on tv and the internet. How could I ever go back to my small town where everyone knows me? Some good people reached out and tried to help me through this whole thing but I’m just not strong enough. The instinctual part of my brain knows that I’m no longer part of the tribe. I’m exiled and banished. I’m giving into my instincts and fighting them at the same time. Self preservation has lost out.

This episode vividly illustrates how diabolical is the moment through which we are currently living, when the lust to defame others and stir up a mob against them – always a temptation to which human beings are prone – has been massively exacerbated by social media. I don’t know if Piskor was indeed innocent, but neither do those who hounded him to the point where he lost hope. May God have mercy on his soul and on his family.

My essay “The Illusion of Artificial Intelligence” appears in the latest issue of the Word on Fire Institute’s journal Evangelization & Culture.

In a recent article at Catholic Answers titled “Hope for Judas?” Jimmy Akin tells us that though he used to find convincing the traditional view that Judas is damned, it now seems to him that “we don’t have conclusive proof that Judas is in hell, and there is still a ray of hope for him.”  But there is a difference between hope and wishful thinking.  And with all due respect for Akin, it seems to me that given the evidence, the view that Judas may have been saved crosses the line from the former to the latter.

Scriptural evidence

The reason it has traditionally been held that Judas is in hell is that this seems to be the clear teaching of several scriptural passages, including the words of Christ himself.  In Matthew 26:24, Jesus says of Judas: “Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed!  It would have been better for that man if he had not been born” (RSV translation).  (Mark 14:21 records the same remark.)  It is extremely difficult at best to see how this could possibly be true of someone who repented and was saved.  It makes perfect sense, though, if Judas was damned.  Matthew also tells us that Judas’s very last act was to commit suicide (27:5), which is mortally sinful.

The evidence of John’s gospel seems no less conclusive.  Praying to the Father about his disciples, Jesus, once again referring to Judas, says that “none of them is lost but the son of perdition” (17:12).  It is, needless to say, extremely hard to see how Judas could be “lost” and of “perdition” and yet be saved. 

Then there is the Acts of the Apostles.  It reports that Peter, referring to Judas’s death and the need to replace him, said: “For it is written in the book of Psalms, ‘Let his habitation become desolate, and let there be no one to live in it’ and ‘His office let another take’” (1:20).  This implies the opposite of a happy fate for Judas, and a later verse confirms this pessimistic judgment.  We are told that Matthias was selected “to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside, to go to his own place” (1:25).  As Haydock’s commentary notes, the reference appears to be “to his own place of perdition, which he brought himself to” (p. 1435).

Commenting on Christ’s remark in Matthew 26:24, Akin suggests that it may have been intended as a warning rather than a prediction.  On this interpretation, Jesus was merely saying that it would be better for his betrayer not to have been born if he does not repent.  But this leaves it open that Judas did indeed repent.  And in fact, Akin claims, we have evidence that Judas repented in the very next chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, which tells us:

When Judas, his betrayer, saw that he was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, “I have sinned in betraying innocent blood.” (27: 3-4)

But there are several problems with this argument.  The first is that it simply is not plausible on its face to suppose that Christ’s words were meant merely as a warning rather than a prediction about Judas’s actual fate.  That it would be better for the damned not to have been born is true of everyone who might fail to repent – you, me, Judas, and for that matter, Peter, who also went on to betray Jesus (and who, we know, did indeed repent).  And yet Christ does not make this remark about Peter or about anyone else, but only about Judas.  The obvious implication is that the words apply to Judas in a way they do not apply to anyone else, and that can only be the case if he was in fact damned.

A second problem is that Akin ignores the other relevant biblical passages.  In John’s Gospel, Christ says that Judas is “lost” and a “son of perdition.”  Those are peremptory remarks about what is the case, not about what would be the case if Judas did not repent.  Moreover, he says these things to the Father, not to Judas or to any other disciple.  Hence they can hardly be said to be warnings to anyone.  Then there are Peter’s remarks in Acts, which imply an unhappy fate for Judas and were made after Judas’s death, so that they too cannot be mere warnings about what would happen if he did not repent.

A third problem is that the passage cited by Akin has traditionally been understood to be attributing to Judas a merely natural regret for what he had done, not the supernatural sorrow or perfect contrition that would be necessary for salvation.  This is evidenced by what happens immediately after the passage cited by Akin: “They said [to Judas], ‘What is that to us?  See to it yourself.’  And throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself” (27: 4-5).  As Haydock’s commentary notes, Pope St. Leo remarks, accordingly, that Judas showed only “a fruitless repentance, accompanied with a new sin of despair” (p. 1311).  Haydock notes that St. John Chrysostom also interprets the passage from Matthew as attributing only an imperfect repentance to Judas.

To be sure, Akin remarks that “suicide does not always result in hell because a person may not be fully responsible for his action due to lack of knowledge, or psychological factors, and because ‘in ways known to him alone,’ God may help the person to repent.”  That is true, but it does not follow that we have any serious grounds for doubting that Judas’s suicide, specifically, resulted in damnation.  For one thing, there is no actual evidence from scripture that Judas found sincere repentance just before the moment of death.  The very idea is sheer ungrounded speculation at best.  But for another thing, and as we’ve already seen, there are scriptural passages that afford positive evidence that Judas was in fact damned.  And again, that is how they have traditionally been interpreted.

Evidence from the tradition

Later authorities reiterate this clear indication of scripture that Judas is damned.  We’ve already noted that Pope St. Leo the Great and St. John Chrysostom do so.  Leo elaborates on the theme as follows:

To this forgiveness the traitor Judas could not attain: for he, the son of perdition, at whose right the devil stood, gave himself up to despair before Christ accomplished the mystery of universal redemption.  For in that the Lord died for sinners, perchance even he might have found salvation if he had not hastened to hang himself.  But that evil heart, which was now given up to thievish frauds, and now busied with treacherous designs, had never entertained anything of the proofs of the Saviour's mercy… The wicked traitor refused to understand this, and took measures against himself, not in the self-condemnation of repentance, but in the madness of perdition, and thus he who had sold the Author of life to His murderers, even in dying increased the amount of sin which condemned him.

Similarly, in The City of God, St. Augustine writes:

Do we justly execrate the deed of Judas, and does truth itself pronounce that by hanging himself he rather aggravated than expiated the guilt of that most iniquitous betrayal, since, by despairing of God's mercy in his sorrow that wrought death, he left to himself no place for a healing penitence? … For Judas, when he killed himself, killed a wicked man; but he passed from this life chargeable not only with the death of Christ, but with his own: for though he killed himself on account of his crime, his killing himself was another crime. (Book I, Chapter 17)

It is true that Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa held out hope that Judas repented.  But these Fathers also famously flirted with universalism, which the Church has since condemned, and this renders suspect their understanding of the scriptural passages relevant to this particular topic.

In De Veritate, St. Thomas Aquinas writes:

In the case of Judas, the abuse of grace was the reason for his reprobation, since he was made reprobate because he died without grace.  Moreover, the fact that he did not have grace when he died was not due to God’s unwillingness to give it but to his unwillingness to accept it – as both Anselm and Dionysius point out.  (Question Six, Article 2.  The context is Aquinas’s consideration of an objection to a thesis on predestination that he defends in the article.  But the lines quoted reflect assumptions he shares in common with his critic.)

The Catechism of the Council of Trent promulgated by Pope St. Pius V, in its treatment of penance, says: “[Some] give themselves to such melancholy and grief, as utterly to abandon all hope of salvation… Such certainly was the condition of Judas, who, repenting, hanged himself, and thus lost soul and body” (p. 264).  And in its treatment of the priesthood, the Catechism says:

Some are attracted to the priesthood by ambition and love of honors; while there are others who desire to be ordained simply in order that they may abound in riches… They derive no other fruit from their priesthood than was derived by Judas from the Apostleship, which only brought him everlasting destruction. (p. 319)

The Church has also never prayed for Judas’s soul in her formal worship.  On the contrary, the traditional liturgy for Holy Thursday contains the following prayer:

O God, from whom Judas received the punishment of his guilt, and the thief the reward of his confession, grant us the effect of Thy clemency: that as our Lord Jesus Christ in His passion gave to each a different recompense according to his merits, so may He deliver us from our old sins and grant us the grace of His resurrection.  Who liveth and reigneth.

Further authorities could be cited, but this suffices to make the point that it has been the common view in the history of the Church that Judas is in hell.  Indeed, so confident has the Church been about this that the supposition that Judas is damned has traditionally been reflected even in her catechesis and her worship. 

Now, this would be extremely odd if there really were any serious grounds for hope that Judas is saved.  As the Code of Canon Law famously reminds us, “the salvation of souls… must always be the supreme law in the Church” (1752).  And Christ famously commanded us to pray for our enemies (Matthew 5:44).  How then, consistent with Christ’s teaching and with her supreme law, could the Church for two millennia fail to pray for Judas’s soul if there really were any hope for his salvation?  The Church also assures sinners that there is no sin, no matter how grievous, that cannot be forgiven if only one is truly repentant.  What better illustration of this could there possibly be than the repentance of Christ’s own betrayer – if indeed he really had repented?  And yet the Church has not only never held Judas up as a sign of hope, but on the contrary has pointed to him as an illustration of what awaits those who refuse Christ’s mercy.

The only evidence from the tradition Akin cites in defense of his own position are some remarks from Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.  In particular, he notes that John Paul once stated that it is not “certain” from Matthew 26:24 that Judas is damned.  And Benedict, Akin notes, once remarked that it is “not up to us” to make a judgement about Judas’s suicide.

But this is hardly a powerful response to the case from scripture and tradition that I’ve summarized.  For one thing, John Paul II’s remark was not made in the context of a magisterial document, but rather in the interview book Crossing the Threshold of Hope.  It is merely the expression of his opinion as a private theologian.  Moreover, it is merely an assertion about Matthew 26:24 and fails to address the considerations that indicate that the passage does indeed show that Judas is damned.  Nor does John Paul address the other relevant scriptural passages, or the evidence from the later tradition.

Benedict XVI’s comment was made in the course of a general audience, which has a low degree of authority compared to the relevant passages from scripture, the Fathers, and the rest of the tradition cited above.  Moreover, Benedict also acknowledges that “Jesus pronounces a very severe judgement on [Judas],” and goes on to contrast Judas’s fate with Peter’s:

After his fall Peter repented and found pardon and grace.  Judas also repented, but his repentance degenerated into desperation and thus became self-destructive.  For us it is an invitation to always remember what St Benedict says at the end of the fundamental Chapter Five of his “Rule”: “Never despair of God's mercy”.

Needless to say, these remarks from Benedict tend to support rather than undermine the traditional view that Judas’s suicide shows that he had succumbed to the sin of despair.

“So you’re telling me there’s a chance?”

It may seem frivolous, when dealing with so serious a subject, to allude to a crude comedy film like Dumb and Dumber.  But it contains a line that is so apt that I will take the risk.  In a famous scene, Jim Carrey’s character asks a girl he has a crush on how likely it is that she might someday reciprocate his feelings.  She says the odds are “one out of a million.”  To which he replies: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!  YEAH!!”

What she actually means, of course, is that the odds are so extremely low that, practically speaking, there is no chance at all.  But the lesson he draws is that, because she didn’t quite say that there is zero chance, he has reasonable grounds for hope. 

Jimmy Akin is a smart guy for whom I have nothing but respect, so I am certainly not likening him to the Jim Carrey character!  But on this particular issue, it seems to me that he, like others who have resisted the traditional view that Judas is damned, are committing an error similar to the one that character commits.  Because, they suppose, the evidence from scripture and tradition doesn’t strictly entail that Judas is damned, they judge that it is reasonable to hope that he is not.  In effect, they look at what the evidence is saying and respond: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”  And like Carrey’s character, they thereby entirely miss the point.

Did Spanish Scholastic thinkers influence British liberalism? You can now access my Religion and Liberty review of Projections of Spanish Jesuit Scholasticism on British Thought: New Horizons in Politics, Law, and Rights, edited by Leopoldo J. Prieto López and José Luis Cendejas Bueno.

Continuing our look at Jacques Maritain’s Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, let’s consider some arresting passages on the conception of human nature the modern world has inherited from Descartes.  Maritain subtitles his chapter on the subject “The Incarnation of the Angel.”  As you might expect, this has in part to do with the Cartesian dualist’s view that the mind is a res cogitans or thinking substance whose nature is wholly incorporeal, so that it is only contingently related to the body.  But it is the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas and its implications that Maritain is most interested in. 

For a Scholastic Aristotelian like Aquinas, though the human intellect is immaterial, it is unfurnished until sensory experience gives it contact with mind-independent physical reality.  Even when it rises to the highest of the metaphysical heights and comes to know something of the immaterial and divine First Cause of all things, it does so only on the basis of inference from what it knows about matter.  An angelic intellect, by contrast, is completely separate from matter and thus from sensory organs.  Its knowledge is built into it at its creation.  And since it is God who then furnishes it, there is, naturally, no chance of error so long as the angel wills to attend to what it knows.

Descartes’ account of human knowledge essentially assimilates it to this angelic model.  For him, knowledge of the basic structure of reality is innate, rather than deriving from sensory experience.  This includes knowledge even of the nature of material things.  We need only confine our judgements to accepting those propositions and inferences that strike us as “clearly and distinctly” true and valid, respectively, for God would not allow us to be misled about those.  Error creeps in only when the will overreaches that limit and embraces some claim or inference that is not clear and distinct.  A purely mathematical conception of matter is a natural concomitant of this account of knowledge, for it alone has the requisite clarity and distinctness.

The problem, of course, is that we are not in fact angels; a faculty of infallible judgment is not built into us; and we cannot read off the natures of mind-independent things from our ideas of them.  Hence, when we interpret human knowledge in light of Descartes’ erroneous model, we are bound seriously to misunderstand it.  On the one hand, we might fall into a dogmatism that mistakenly takes a certain successful – but nevertheless limited and fallible – way of conceiving of the world as if it were an exhaustive and necessary way of doing so.  On the other hand, we might fall into a subjectivism that despairs of ever getting beyond our own ideas to objective reality.  Both tendencies result from taking our own representations of the world to be all we really know directly.  The first tendency, which takes these representations to be angel-like in their adequacy to reality, yields excessive optimism.  The second tendency, which comes to see that our representations are not angel-like, yields excessive pessimism.

Kant did not transcend these two opposite extreme errors of dogmatism and subjectivism, but rather combined them.  On the one hand, he takes what is essentially just a modern, post-Cartesian account of the nature of the mind’s cognition of reality and dogmatizes it – confining our knowledge of the natural world to what post-Newtonian science has to tell us about it, and ruling out altogether any genuine knowledge of what transcends the natural world (such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul).  On the other hand, he takes even our knowledge of the natural world to be knowledge only of how it appears to us, and not of things as they are in themselves.

The upshot, says Maritain, is that:

With [Descartes’] theory of representational ideas the claims of Cartesian reason to independence of external objects reach their highest point: thought breaks with Being.  It forms a sealed world which is no longer in contact with anything but itself; its ideas, now opaque effigies interposed between it and external objects, are still for Descartes a sort of lining of the real world… Here again Kant finishes Descartes’ work.  If the intelligence when it thinks, reaches immediately only its own thought, or its representations, the thing hidden behind these representations remains for ever unknowable. (p. 78)

Ironically, though, the sequel is not greater humility but rather a prideful self-deification.  If it cannot make sense of a reality independent of itself, the modern mind all too often decides to make itself the measure of reality:

The result of a usurpation of the angelic privileges, that denaturing of human reason driven beyond the limits of its species, that lust for pure spirituality, could only go to the infinite: passing beyond the world of created spirits it had to lead us to claim for our intelligence the perfect autonomy and the perfect immanence, the absolute independence, the aseity of the uncreated intelligence… [I]t remains the secret principle of the break-up of our culture and of the disease of which the apostate West seems determined to die…

[B]ecause it wants an absolute and undetermined liberty for itself, it is natural that human thought, since Descartes, refuses to be measured objectively or to submit to intelligible necessities.  Freedom with respect to the objective is the mother and nurse of all modern freedoms… we are no longer measured by anything, subject to anything whatever!  Intellectual liberty which Chesterton compared to that of the turnip (and that is a libel on the turnip), and which strictly only belongs to primal matter. (pp. 79-80)

Hence the varieties of idealism and relativism (perspectivalism, historicism, social constructivism, postmodernism, etc.) that have plagued Western thought and culture in the centuries after Kant. 

That’s an old story, of course, and a more complicated one than these remarks from Maritain let on.  But it’s not what I want to consider here.  Rather, what catches my eye is the comparison of the modern mind (as it tends to conceive of itself) to “primal matter.”  What does Maritain mean by this? 

Prime matter, in Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy, is the pure potentiality to take on form.  Prime matter by itself is not any particular thing at all.  It becomes a concrete particular thing of some kind – water, gold, lead, a star, a tree, a dog, a human body, or whatever – only when conjoined with some substantial form or other.  And qua pure potentiality for form, it can become any of these things.  It is not limited to being a physical thing only of a certain kind (as is secondary matter, matter already having some substantial form or other).  (For discussion and defense of the notion of prime matter, see pp. 171-75 of Scholastic Metaphysics and pp. 310-24 of Aristotle’s Revenge.)

Maritain’s analogy is clear enough, then.  Just as prime matter can become anything (or at least anything physical, to be more precise) so too do constructivist and relativist theories make of human nature something indefinitely malleable.  But this might at first glance seem an odd criticism for an Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher like Maritain to level against such views.  For Aristotle holds that knowledge involves the intellect’s taking on the form of the thing known.  And there is no limit in principle to what forms the intellect might in this way take on.  Indeed, Aristotle famously remarks in De Anima that, given this power of the intellect to take on the forms of all things, “the soul is in a way all the things that exist” (Book III, Chapter 8).  But if Aristotelians themselves allow that the intellect can in this sense become anything, why is there a problem with the views Maritain is criticizing saying something similar?  And why compare these views’ conception of human nature to prime matter, rather than to Aristotle’s own conception of the intellect?

The answer is to be found by answering another question, namely: What is the difference between the way prime matter takes on a certain form, and the way the intellect takes it on?  The difference is this: When prime matter takes on the form of a dog, the result is a dog.  But when the intellect takes on the form of a dog, the result is not a dog.  Rather, it is knowledge of a dog.  When Aristotle says that the soul – or to be more precise, one specific faculty of the soul, the intellect – is all things, he is, of course, speaking figuratively.  The intellect does not really become a dog when it grasps the form of a dog.  To be sure, the figure of speech is apt, because, by taking on the form of a dog, the intellect takes on the nature of a dog.  The intellect takes on “dogginess.”  But to take it on merely intellectually is precisely to take it on without actually being a dog.  By contrast, for matter to take on that nature just is to take it on in the sort of way that does entail being a dog. 

This should make it clear why Maritain’s analogy is appropriate.  Views that take reality to be relative to our perceptions, our language, our conventions, etc. make human beings out to be something like prime matter insofar as they entail that what a human being is (and not just what a human being knows) is indefinitely malleable, susceptible of changing with changes in perception, language, conventions, etc.  And, in fact, that is simply not true of us.  We are, among other things, by nature rational animals, and no change in our perceptions, language, conventions, or the like can change that in the least.  The most such changes can do is blind us to reality, but without changing reality itself.