When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts.
It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the revelation that the divine justice and divine mercy are conjoined. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender control.
Even the suicide desires his own good: he wrongly imagines that he would be better off dead. The moral problem is not that we love ourselves but that we love ourselves the wrong way.
In the same way, filling a cavity restores to the tooth its natural function of chewing. Healing does not transcend our nature; it respects it.
To be evil at all, Satan needs good things he can abuse, things like intelligence, power and will. Those good things come from God.
Trying to understand man without recognizing him as imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving.
Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge.
Those are just platitudes. Everyone has his own idea of “playing fair.” “Does he? Try making up your own idea of what’s fair–say, “giving the greatest rewards to the laziest workers”–and see how seriously people take you.
The goods of fidelity, for example, are plain and concrete to the man who has not strayed, but they are faint, like mathematical abstractions, to the one who is addicted to other men’s wives.
The problem was not that they failed to find these principles written upon their hearts, but that they could not bring themselves to attend closely to the inscription.
Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don’t. We don’t eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.
A wise man governs his eyes, not because it is wrong to delight in beauty, but because otherwise his delight may suffer transmutation into something very different.
Or perhaps the syndrome we are witnessing is preemptive capitulation: If we reduce our conscience to rubble before the bad men get here, they will have nothing to destroy.
If he makes humanity God and yet cries out against God’s inhumanity, it is clear who has really been accused.