In my last post, written a long time ago (I’ve been quite busy), one comment asked that I:
stop assuming Fr Rhonheimer is wrong, and think through the arguments more carefully.
Such a comment indicates that, in the judgment of the reader, I have come to my conclusion about Rhonheimer’s arguments driven at least initially by the precedent assumption that he is wrong, and that beyond that, I have only considered the moral issue of prophylactic condom usage in a superficial manner.
If such is the commentator’s judgment, so be it. All I can say is, I do not think it is the case, and I have one advantage in making such a judgment that the commentator does not have: I know my own intellectual biography.
When I first heard about Rhonheimer’s 2004 Tablet article, it did push me to further study. To be perfectly honest, it did strike me as not true, but I knew that I did not have the exact answer as to why, so I suspended my judgment. I then did three things: 1) I chose Rhonheimer’s view on the prophylactic use of condoms as the topic for my STL Thesis, still not sure how the answer was going to turn out, for I wanted to use the License Thesis as an opportunity for in-depth research. 2) I read much of Rhonheimer’s books and articles, mainly trying to grasp his moral action theory and his view of the natural law. 3) I undertook an even more in-depth study of St. Thomas’ moral works.
I came to the judgment that both Rhonheimer’s moral action theory and his view of the natural law are flawed. I think that Rhonheimer himself thinks he is a faithful Personalist-Thomist, and I think he is particularly good at dressing his speech in argumentation and vocabulary that makes young theologians take him seriously “because he sounds so Thomistic.”
As most readers might know, the debate on condoms goes on (for a line-up of all that has been thrown back and forth, follow this link or follow this one). Rhonheimer at times has spoken more meekly of his own position, but has made it clear that he is not changing his mind, as his latest in Sandro Magister’s blog indicates.
There are two sections from this “Reply to the Open Letter of Luke Gormally” that exemplify well my points of issue with Rhonheimer. The first section regards Humanae Vitae 15, which states that certain therapeutic means for curing diseases of the body, but which will also have an effect of rendering a person sterile, whether temporarily or permanently, can be employed.
“…this passage implies that intending the therapeutic end is not a further intention rendering good an otherwise evil act (impeding procreation) but is instead the proposal or intention that specifies the very object of the act. So by extracting a cancerous ovary, for example, one directly does something which will impede procreation. The therapeutic end, however, is what defines the object of this act as an act of healing (This follows the clear teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas that the human act has a single proximate end from which it gets its species and that the relation to a natural end is accidental to the morality of the act. See “Summa Theologiae” I-II, q.1, a.3, ad.3).
The second touches more on the natural law, which, in Rhonheimer’s mind, is above all a law of reason, as exemplified by the virtues:
“Contraception is against nature because it impedes the virtue of chastity (especially the subset of it which I call procreative responsibility) by rendering superfluous the need to imprint right reason into bodily behaviour (by acts of refraining from sexual intercourse for reasons of procreative responsibility). A sinful act must be defined from the starting point of the requirements of the virtue of temperance and, in the present case, chastity, and not vice versa, as you propose. This, after all, is the methodology Aquinas has taught us: that to know whether an act is sinful you must know to which virtue it is opposed. It is the ends of the virtues – which coincide with the principles (or precepts) of natural law – which, by looking at what opposes them, define sinful moral behaviour.”
In both of these texts, Rhonheimer claims St. Thomas’ patronage for his own moral action theory and his own virtue ethics. But my research has led me to the conclusion that Rhonheimer is, simply, a bad reader of St. Thomas. I will address the issues that I have with his moral action theory and his virtue ethics in the next two posts.
(See Part II: Moral Action Theory)
(See Part III: Virtue Ethics)
