[Music] the most significant fault lines in cultural history opened up in the 16th and 17th centuries with the emergence of a characteristically modern way of approaching life thinkers such as Descartes and Leibniz in Spinoza and Conte and Jefferson and many others really affected a sea change in the way we look at practically everything the modern emerging up out of the classical and medieval world now in almost all tellings of this story from a Western perspective this is seen as an unmitigated good certainly when I was coming of age outside the church and in sort of
the secular culture that's the way the story is always told can I say right up front that I rather emphatically disagree with that way of construing things now you'd be foolish indeed not to see that several great goods came from the modern shift especially in the areas of science and politics video for another day to explore all that but certainly very good things came out of the modern turn but I think will be also equally foolish not to see there are many ways the modern turn represented a decline a declension from classical and medieval thought
and I would say especially in the areas of art and morality now let me get it this way classical thought was very much ordered along the lines of Aristotle's four causes so aerosol said to understand something you need to look at four things the material cause what it's made out of the formal cause it's sort of essential structure the final cause where the thing is attending and then the efficient cause how it got that way if you look at those four things and you understand them adequately then you have a good grasp of a phenomenon
well one of the marks of modernity was a sort of mistrust of - of ourselves causes namely the formal and the final modern thinkers put a great stress on flux and change think of you know the emergence of evolution and so on that reality is always in flux and so the formal cause came to be questioned also many modern thinkers most I would say question finality is there really a purpose or ultimate orientation to things they doubted them the falling away of both the formal and the final led to the development of what we see
now is a characteristically modern form of science which puts a huge stress on matter what things are made out of and the efficient cause how they got that way now think of you know the the modern science is the physical sciences put a hyper stress on those two things but the falling away of the formal and the final had I would say a very deleterious effect on other areas of human endeavor as I said especially the arts and morality look at the arts first in a classical and medieval perspective what was an artist doing well
he was surveying the world to see the forms the formal structures that God the Creator had placed in things and then the artist was trying as best he or she could to mimic those forms in what he or she was producing now a very good example of this it's interesting to me someone like Michelangelo who had such a tremendous grasp of the sort of rhythms and proportions of the body it informed certainly his painting of a human body but even his architecture think of the great churches including especially st. Peters that he helps to design
one reason we find them so satisfying is that they mimic those formal proportions of the body now time as Aquinas referred to art as rector rot co-factor Billiam that means right reason in regard to the making of things now what's the rector Accio the right reason well it's a grasp of the formal structures of things which now go into the producing of artifacts that's art now the arrival of modernity we have a great questioning of formal causality things are always shifting and influx and we put a great stress on efficient causality right where things come
from so what do you find in modern art especially as it moves toward the contemporary period you see the great stress placed on the intention of the artist the externalization of the subjectivity of the artist becomes the major value that something is creative that its expressive of the artist that's what makes great art great the limit case of this is the famous line from Marcel Duchamp the 20th century a french dadaist artist who said famously what the artist spits is art in other words the complete questioning of the form formal structure of art and a
hyper stress on the efficient causality what the artist produces I would suggest we are now at the polar opposite of rector OTT co-factor billion okay that's the arts look now at ethics morality classical morality both in the ancients and the medieval is predicated upon final causality in other words what's the purpose of an act so think of what I'm doing right now the speech act I can look at it materially produced by my tongue and air and teeth and so on but what they were interested in was the final causality Oh what's the purpose of
speech and they would say well truth-telling that's the purpose of a speech act is to tell the truth therefore a good speech act is one that produces the truth a falling away from that lying deception etc is therefore something morally objectionable the determination of that is predicated upon a knowledge of the finality or purpose of the speech act or another example an act of legislation well what's the purpose of that but the production of justice if it legislative act is order toward justice it's a good Act it was ordered toward something else the good of
the or some private interest it's there for something bad finality is key is a key ingredient in the determination of moral rectitude okay so what happens when final causality is compromised but what you get is I think what you find in a lot of contemporary thinking about ethics ethics is finally a matter of what I determined to be right if no one can really know what the final cause of something is well then what finally matters is is it expressive of my desires expressive of my sense of identity and that now becomes the criterion of
morality Thomas Aquinas referred to ethics as rector rot co-ed jbeil 'i'm art was rector at co-factor Billiam right reason in regard to the making of things ethics is right reason rector ratio in regard to the doing of things I'd you billion what's the rector ratio is a clear grasp of finality or purpose now if Marshall marcel duchamp is the limit case of art what the artist spits is art I'd say people like Friedrich Nietzsche and jean-paul Sartre are the limit case of this modern sense of morality they say something like what the powerful person wills
and accomplishes is good operating beyond good and evil beyond what the society proposes is right and wrong the powerful person designs or jean-paul Sartre existence precedes essence what I want what I desire determines the kind of person I will be with those figures we're at the polar opposite of rector ratio haja billion now I'm bringing all this up because I think it provides the background for understanding why the Catholic Church speaking on morality is so often hard to hear hard to take seriously our basic stance is a modern one it's been filtered down from these
high figures I've been mentioning but through a whole series of teachers and writers Culture commentators and is now inform the common attitude so what do you hear people today say usually some version of who are you to tell me what to do I've got to be me i express my own identity I determine the meaning of my life all of that is Nietzsche and Sartre having trickled down into the common of perspective the Catholic Church is operating out of this pre-modern and again I mean that positively you see how you say pre-modern today is almost
automatically oh that means bad it means primitive no no here I think pre-modern means really good we're operating out of a very different thought system that takes formality and finality with great seriousness so we say look at an act whether it's a speech act an act of legislation or a sexual act we look primarily at finality at purpose what's the meaning the formal and final structure of that act this is why it's very hard to hear the Catholic teaching today just a last comment there are many things wrong I think with the modern approach to
these issues but I think the fundamental problem is the modern approach is boring I say it because it locks the subject so much into himself there's no kind of thrilling adventure of discovering formal truth or discovering finality and purpose all that matters is my little world of my desires my identity my sense of myself finally ho-hum I think classical morality classical art as well is a much more thrilling much more adventurous project [Music]
