Author's Response

Abstract

Author's Response Mark Massa SJ First, my sincere thanks to the three reviewers. It is always an honor to have one's scholarship taken seriously by scholars as smart as Rodger Van Allen, Christina Astorga, and John Grabowski. I'm delighted that the conversation about interpreting how (or whether) natural law "develops" continues in their responses to my book. My sense from the moment I started this project was that people would respond differently to it. So first: I'd like to offer a preliminary contextual observation before I get to the substance of the three reviews. The project that resulted in the writing of my book began during my final year as dean of the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College. As anyone who has had the privilege of serving in an academic administrative position knows well, one has to build into one's day thirty or forty minutes of "non-decanal activity"—reading or writing that has nothing to do with budgets, bylaws, or personnel issues (if only to keep one's mental balance). Thus, during the 2015–16 academic year I disappeared from the dean's office every day for at least 30 minutes, without my cell phone (to the frustration of my superb administrative assistant) to bury myself in the stacks of the Theology and Ministry Library. The task I set for myself was to reread the books that, over the course of three decades, have shaped my life as a scholar. One of the most important of those works was Thomas Kuhn's landmark study in the history and philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book I had read as an undergraduate in a philosophy of science course. The Jesuit community I lived in at the time included three moral theologians, two of them "virtue ethicians," and one of them an expert in Thomas and virtue ethics. How, I had been wondering for some time after our lively dinner conversations, did one make sense of the "development" of Christian morality if one set end-to-end Aquinas, Suarez, John Ford, Richard McCormick, Charles Curran, Germain Grisez, and Lisa Sowle Cahill? If one accepted all of them as theologians whose basic project was to offer smart "natural law" interpretations of the Catholic moral tradition, how might one understand the "development" of that tradition? Or was the word [End Page 72] "development" (a word that Kuhn himself tended to use in scare quotes when referring to the course of scientific research) perhaps the wrong one? The conclusion I came to was that it was indeed the wrong word unless one understood that there simply was no linear progression linking natural law discourse from Thomas to Humanae Vitae to Jean Porter. My narrative, in other words, takes as axiomatically true that Catholic moral theology has been marked by the same degree of disjunction, rupture, and discontinuity as Kuhn had discovered in studying the history of biology and physics. Successive models of natural law simply do not build on each other, despite the fact that most of them claimed be in the "Thomistic tradition" of natural law. And thus my book. Rodger Van Allen, with his usual and much-respected acuity, lucidly adumbrates the larger theme of my book: I had not set out to write a book about either birth control or the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae itself (both of which already have a number of superb studies in print, to which I direct the reader in my Introduction). Thus, it is no surprise my book is neither of those things. Rather, as Van Allen correctly notes, Humanae Vitae provides the occasion for pursuing a much larger (and in my opinion, more basic and more interesting) historical and epistemological question: how does Catholic theology "develop"? Or does it "develop" in anything like a linear, progressive, or organic manner (as several recent pontiffs have asserted—largely without proof, in my opinion). Or, in fact, is that word misused when talking about the history of Catholic theology? Thus, my book is more focused on tracing the morphology of change in Catholic theology than on the history of natural law theory per se. As Van...