Feast of St. Nicholas of Myra

Amid the clamor of the impeachment hearings and the British general election (essentially a second referendum on Brexit) is there any hope to be found, anywhere, in this Advent season? Well, here’s one. Last month, believe it or not, both Houses of Congress unanimously passed a substantive bill, and the President signed it. What could possibly have caused this political miracle: Puppy love.

The “Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act” made it a federal crime to subject animals to various sorts of torture and, more importantly, to make and distribute videos of such behavior. Apparently, (I have no personal knowledge of this), there is a particularly sick corner of the Internet dedicated to what are commonly called “crush videos,” which tells you all you need to know about them. Even more sickeningly, apparently people actually watch these things. Such behavior is illegal in all fifty states, but the World Wide Web being world-wide, individual states sometimes had jurisdictional problems in prosecuting the distributors. Hence the need for a federal crime.

The story caught my eye, not simply because it’s astonishing that the Republicans and Democrats could agree unanimously on anything, but because it concerns my favorite example of natural law. We have talked in these pages before about the core concept of natural law, that some legal concepts are inherently true, in the same way that the laws of gravity or geometry are true. When I talk or write about natural law, the example I return to is torturing puppies. It is wrong to torture puppies, and no law can make it right. That proposition invariably elicits unanimous agreement from the audience.

It’s a bit more complicate than that, however. This concept of natural law, of course, involves for a Christian the question of the nature of God. As the creator of all things, God is the source of natural law, even if, as Aquinas believed, natural law principles could be known by everyone. Which raises the moral chicken and egg problem that Plato described in the “Euthyphro” dialogue: Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? The German polymath Gottfried Leibniz put it in more Christian terms: “is something good and just because God wills it or does God will it because it is good and just”? Is torturing puppies bad because God says so, or does God say so because it’s bad. The dilemmas is this: If God wills something because it is good, then there are moral rules that do not depend on God, but if something is good because God says so, then God could say differently and, for instance, make torturing puppies good rather than evil. That dilemma has troubled and continues to trouble many people, but unnecessarily so. Aquinas gave the best answer: because God is goodness itself (not merely good) it’s a logical impossibility to say that God either is bound by external rules of goodness or could choose not to be good. It’s like asking what is north of the North Pole, or whether a triangle can have four sides.

It seems rather odd to think that we even need a law outlawing animal crush videos, that market forces, if nothing else, would put sickness out of business. Apparently not. And while it may be refreshing to have an instance of all our politicians aligning themselves with fundamental morality, too often we have the opposite example: think about Attorney General Barr (who has the jowls of Santa Claus but not the disposition) making speeches about religious liberty and morality while his Justice Department harasses mothers and children (the true protected classes in Mosaic law).

Today is the feast of St. Nicholas, who was an actual person, the 4th Century Bishop of Myra in what is now Turkey. According to James Kiefer, the legend of St. Nicholas the anonymous gift giver came from this story: A man with three unmarried daughters, lacks the money to provide them with suitable dowries. This meant that they could not marry, and were likely to end up as prostitutes. Nicholas walked by the man’s house on three successive nights, and each time threw a bag of gold in through a window (or, when the story came to be told in colder climates, down the chimney). Thus, the daughters were saved from a life of shame, and all got married and lived happily ever after. No need for lectures about personal responsibility, or prosecution for immoral behavior, or for that matter even grand poor relief social programs. In this season of Advent, we should give thanks for the rare occasion when our government chooses the higher way, and repent for the times when it, and we, do not.