The several papers in this volume take up in turn various aspects of an integrated theory of the moral agent. Recognizing that cognitive factors are extremely important in moral action, these papers attempt at the same time to show the indispensable role of emotion, volition, character, social environment and the like in the making of a moral judgments. Within this context, then, the present paper considers the role of the religious factor in moral judgment. This issue is analogous to that running through many of the earlier papers. If it is the case that the existential factors of emotion, character, and the like are indeed integral to the development of adequate moral judgments, then these factors must be incorporated into one's theory of moral agent and subsequently attended to in one's program of moral education, if the latter is to have any chance for success. And so it would seem to be with respect to the religious factor in moral agency. Indeed in the instance of religion the issue would seem to be intensified. For if religion makes any claim on us at all it would seem to be a more comprehensive claim than that of other factors noted: the very nature of religion would seem to be such as to require recognition of its primacy in relation to morality.
But, of course, it is just the meaning of such a suggestion which must be examined here. For if an affirmation of a primacy of religion in relation to morality were seen to require making morality simply a function of religion, there would seem to result a direct challenge of the legitimacy in principle of any programs in value or moral education just so far as they are understood as distinct from programs in religious education. It is in this context that Lawrence Kohlberg, together with Clark Power, has seen it necessary, in order to carry through his program in moral education, particularly in public schools, to defend the autonomy of morality over against what he calls the "divine command theorists",1 that is, those who hold that morality is simply a function of God's revelation as recorded in the Bible.
The thesis Kohlberg and Power advance is that development of moral thinking is necessary but not sufficient for development of religious thinking.2 That is, their claim is that religion serves primarily to reassure one in one's moral judgments: it serves to support one in the face of the question as to why one should be moral, in a way proportionate to the form of that question as it emerges at any given stage of morality. Thus, while religion goes beyond morality, a certain stage of morality nonetheless precedes or is the necessary presupposition for a correlative stage of religion. In a word, then, morality is at once distinct from, but related to, religion: morality is autonomous but nonetheless in the limit needs religion. Kohlberg and Power are of course concerned to confirm their thesis with appropriate empirical studies, and in the course of their argument offer evidence which they take to testify to such confirmation. Nonetheless, they are also clear that their thesis involves distinctly philosophical-theological assumptions (MD, p. 227, and passim).
In what follows I shall be concerned to outline a theoretical position which defends the simultaneous distinctness and relatedness of religion and morality, but which does so by qualifying Kohlberg's and Power's philosophical/theological assumptions, particularly as those assumptions bear on the nature of religion. Kohlberg and Power seek to defend the autonomy of morality, and their intention is to do so precisely within the context of an authentic--non-reductionist--view of religion. To carry this through, they see it necessary to support the thesis that morality is logically prior to religion in human experience, but that morality nonetheless does not replace religion. I shall argue that such a thesis is not necessary for the maintenance of a legitimate distinctness of morality in relation to religion. Indeed, my argument will be that it is logically possible to defend such distinctness in a way which is more faithful to the integrity of religion--more faithful, that is, to what is legitimate in the concerns of the "divine command" theorists regarding the centrality of God (or of whatever functions as ultimate) in human experience.
To this end I shall suggest a theoretical position which provides warrant for the converse of the thesis of Kohlberg and Power: namely, that there is a sense in which religion is prior to, but does not replace, morality.3 To carry through this suggestion we must make a number of important distinctions, and I therefore propose to begin by examining more carefully the warrants Kohlberg and Power advance in support of their thesis and indeed of the meaning they assign to its crucial terms.
KOHLBERG AND POWER
Kohlberg and Power situate their understanding of the relation of morality and religion between what they regard as two extreme current views of that relation, namely, the fundamentalist or divine command theory on the one hand, and the Freudian atheistic emotivistic theory on the other (MD, pp. 203-208). Those who espouse the divine command theory hold that morality is ultimately defined by and rests upon revelation as recorded in the Bible or other texts taken to be sacred. Those who espouse the emotivistic theory regard morality and religion as cognitively empty. In its specifically Freudian formulation, this theory understands moral judgments as "expressions of the constellation of emotional structures termed the superego" (MD, p. 207). While "morality" in this sense is taken by the Freudian to have a necessary function in the maintenance of social order and survival, religion does not fare so well. Sharing with morality its irrational and relativistic character, religion has the additional quality of being an illusion, something akin to a collective neurosis. Kohlberg and Power take these two views of morality and religion, despite their vast differences in other respects, to be similar from the perspective of educational theory: for, in linking morality essentially with attitudes of respect for some authority figure, both hold a non-rational basis for morality (MD, p. 208) and indeed are guilty of the "naturalistic fallacy" which consists in making "ought" statements a function of "is" statements (see for example MD, p. 206). Both, therefore, regard religious thinking and scientific thinking as opposed to one another and see a rational and Socratic approach to moral and religious education as not viable (MD, p. 208).
In response to these alternatives, Kohlberg and Power propose a class of theories, which they term theories of natural law, which they understand as giving more adequate expression to the nature of morality and religion and their relation (MD, pp. 209-213). They term these theories natural law theories because they contend that the human conceptions of moral law are the "outcomes of universal human nature developing under universal aspects of the human condition" (MD, p. 210). That is, these conceptions, illustrated for example in the lives of Socrates and Martin Luther King, are not tied to any specific theology, creed, or divine command to which Socrates or King had privileged or private access. At the same time, Kohlberg and Power argue that their understanding of "natural law" theory escapes the naturalistic fallacy into which the divine command theory inevitably falls: for the "nature" which humans share in the moral order and which is thematized in moral philosophy is parallel with, but not derived from or reducible to, "nature" as thematized in science, metaphysics, and religion.
In considering the relationship between religious thinking and moral thinking, Kohlberg and Power, following Stephen Toulmin, take religion to be a form of reassurance (MD, p. 212f; RM, pp. 346-48). Religion addresses questions which arise at the boundary of moral reasoning, such as "Why be moral at all?," and thereby provides support proportionate to one's moral level for continued acceptance of one's duty to be moral. Thus Kohlberg and Power state in summary that
this essay's central claim is that religion is a conscious response to and an expression of, the quest for an ultimate meaning for moral judging and acting. As such, the main function of religion is not to supply moral prescriptions but to support moral judgment and action as purposeful human activities. If this is true, it implies that a given stage of solutions to moral problems is necessary, but not sufficient, for a parallel stage of solutions to religious problems (MD, p. 226).
There are, then, two philosophical assumptions which Kohlberg and Power single out as giving rise to their hypothesis (MD, p. 227). The first assumption is that morality is autonomous, that is, a realm logically independent of religion. This is consistent with the fact that only a small minority of persons explicitly appeals to religious concerns to justify its moral judgments and that persons in even the highest stage of moral development hold widely differing religious views. The second philosophical assumption is that the development of metaphysical reasoning presupposes the development of moral or practical reasoning. The point once again is that the metaethical question which religion and metaphysics seek to answer, such as why be moral at all, presupposes the existence of a normative moral structure which is being called into question. A certain stage of morality thus precedes a comparable stage of religion, and hence is necessary for religion: but religion in turn goes beyond morality, in that morality does not suffice to answer the question it (morality) raises.
It is important to note that, up to this point, Kohlberg and Power see their philosophic position as having affinities with Dewey and Kant (MD, pp. 227-228; 243-247). That is, Kohlberg and Power share with them the view that morality precedes religion, but that religion in turn goes beyond morality. But when one presses for the fuller meaning of this common claim, a crucial difference emerges. Dewey and Kant share an agnosticism regarding any speculative, metaphysical claims as proper to the religion which goes beyond morality, whereas Kohlberg and Power in their understanding of religion proceed on a "natural law" basis which they take to be properly metaphysical (MD, pp. 228 and 246).
Kohlberg and Power adopt a natural law theory because they take such a theory to be more adequate in terms of accounting for the experiences contained in the examples of persons who seem most mature religiously, that is, who have moved to the highest or sixth stage of religious development (MD, p. 228 and p. 246). Kohlberg terms this sixth stage of religious development a "seventh stage" in relation to his well-known six stages of moral reasoning. In accord with his general thesis that a given stage of moral maturity precedes a comparable level of religious maturity, his contention is that only at the sixth stage of moral maturity is one motivated to move to the highest (sixth) stage of religious reasoning. One is forced to move beyond the realities of the human social order to an ultimate stage of religious orientation only when one's experience presses one to seek justification for acting in accord with the universal ethical principles proper to Stage 6.
This new stage is genuinely a "seventh" stage in relation to Kohlberg's six moral stages because in it one's thinking goes beyond the sixth moral stage. Nonetheless, the term "seventh stage" is at the same time properly to be taken as a metaphor because it does not add any new content or formal criterion to the formulation of specifically moral judgment. Rather, "Stage 7" provides support for the structure of morality already expressed in Stage 6, and does so by way of integrating that structure into an overarching perspective on life's ultimate meaning (MD, pp. 233-34). In a word, for Kohlberg and Power only one who is fully morally mature moves on to seek a mature solution to the question of the meaning of life in a properly religious context, and indeed in a religious context understood to involve properly ontological or metaphysical claims (MD, p. 234).
It is this demand for a cognitively or speculatively satisfying answer to the question of the meaning of life which arises out of the experience of the morally mature person, then, that both leads one into a "seventh stage" and does so in a way which seems to Kohlberg and Power to warrant distancing themselves from the agnostic philosophic positions of Dewey and Kant. That is, mature moral experience seems to demand a "realistic" or metaphysical, rather than an "idealistic" or "imaginative," kind of religion.4 But Kohlberg and Power nonetheless go on to note that the exact form which such a metaphysical religion must take is not unitary and definable (MD, p. 257). Indeed they offer Marcus Aurelius and Andrea Simpson as examples of persons who embody "seventh stage" reasoning but nonetheless do so while espousing different metaphysical/religious views (see MD, pp. 234-43). While Aurelius describes his experience in a way consistent with a pantheistic form of religion, Simpson does so in a manner more consonant with a theistic form.
In the final section of their argument, then, Kohlberg and Power describe how Spinoza and Teilhard de Chardin afford us examples of the kinds of religion/metaphysics which provide the required rational underpinnings for the experience of Aurelius (pantheistic) and Simpson (theisticChristian) (MD, pp. 246-55). And again the rational character of their accounts is crucial: however much Teilhard's position, for example, might draw its inspiration from Christian revelation, it nonetheless contains within it a theology of nature or creation which is offered as a way of accounting most adequately for the totality of experience (MD, p. 253). The point bears stressing: it is not at all the case for Kohlberg and Power that views such as Teilhard's, which are offered as "seventh stage" "foundations" for a Stage 6 morality, must not have explicitly "supernatural" sources; the point rather is simply that such views, even if "supernatural" in origin, contain within them claims which are also distinctly rational in the sense that they can be advanced as satisfying the demands of human intelligence for meaning.
It is just this final claim of Kohlberg and Power, then, which distances them from the emotivist on the one hand and the fundamentalists on the other, who would both, though with vastly different motivations, disallow any distinctly natural knowledge of the Ultimate Reality, God. But once again these "natural law" religious views offered by Kohlberg and Power are not to be understood as themselves directly generative of morality. Rather they are parallel with, and supportive of, what remains the distinctly moral reasoning of Stage 6. In a word, religion, in its most adequate stage, informs "a general natural law, ontological orientation and supports principles of justice" (MD, p. 212).
The views of Kohlberg and Power as described here seem to me to make an important contribution to the contemporary discussion regarding the theoretical foundations of programs in moral education. Kohlberg's non-reductionist account of the stages of morality, expanded now in the articles under discussion to include a more detailed description of how metaphysical and religious concerns with ultimacy function in moral judgment and action, serve to open for educators a whole range of questions which long have been taken as purely private matters. Both the emotivists (positivists) and the "divine command" theorists, though in different ways and for vastly different reasons, have failed to challenge the private character of morality, precisely because they make morality a function of what is non-rational and thus not naturally accessible to all. More exactly, they construe morality as of a piece with a metaphysics or a religion taken to be essentially non-(or extra) rational, and hence non-natural and private. Kohlberg's position all along has served generally to challenge traditions which subscribe to the private character of morality. What he attempts to fill out in the more recent articles with Power is the sense in which it is possible to be genuinely religious while respecting the legitimate autonomy--the public character or cognitive status--of morality. He does this by assuming an analogous form of his earlier arguments regarding a parallelism between the structures of moral reasoning and scientific and (here) religious thinking, rather than a simple derivation of one from the other.5 But he does it also by showing us views of religion which allow us to affirm such autonomy on intrinsically religious grounds. That is, he shows that, if one wishes to be genuinely religious while nonetheless defending the public character of morality, one must develop an understanding of religion which allows, on inner-religious grounds, a metaphysics or natural theology. Put another way, one must espouse a form of religion which permits affirmation of the integrity of the distinctly "natural" structures of the world.
For present purposes, then, I shall assume with Kohlberg and Power the correctness of the thesis regarding the need for affirming a realistic metaphysics, a natural theology, as intrinsic to religion properly understood, if one is to sustain the public character of morality from within a religious context. At the same time, I should like to raise a question about the way in which they see this thesis as entailing an affirmation of the relative primacy of morality over religion. In granting an understanding of religion which affirms the integrity of the "natural" structures of things, is it not more adequate to situate that understanding within a context wherein religion is taken as having primacy over morality?
In what follows I shall argue for a sense in which this is the case on intrinsically religious and philosophical grounds. But I should nonetheless note at the outset what seems to me to be the importance a priori of facing up to the full implications of this issue. For what if it is the case that religion is needed, not only to support a level of moral judging and acting already reached, but rather, precisely, to generate that level of judging and acting in the first place? Or, put in a way similar to the broader form of the question raised by Tocqueville with respect to the political-cultural trends he saw developing in nineteenth century America: what if it is the case that we cannot successfully generate morality in our children without situating that morality explicitly in a context of religion?
THE DISTINCTIVE OF FAITH AND RELIGION
I should like to begin my discussion by returning to Kohlberg and Power and calling attention to an important ambiguity in their position which is directly pertinent to the thesis I should like to advance. In the context of their general argument regarding the primacy of morality over religion seen as emerging at the "limit" of morality (RM, p. 350), Kohlberg and Power identify another way of considering the relation of morality and religion, namely, from the perspective "of the psychological unity of the two provided by the ego" (RM, p. 350; see also MD, p. 226). They then go on to say
Insofar as religion serves to strengthen the self which makes moral decisions, it has an effect, not on the particular formulation of the moral judgment, but on whether any judgment is to be made at all and whether and how, if it is made, that judgment will be carried into action (RM, p. 251).
Drawing on the work of Fowler, Kohlberg and Power then offers three illustrations of ways in which the strengthening of the self on the part of religion can occur:
First, a religious interpretation of one's life as a vocation can renew one's sense of moral purpose and commitment (RM, p. 351).
Second, religion can serve to encourage the self confronted by the abyss between the moral ideals of the self and the injustice of the world (RM, p.351f).
Third, a religious perspective can heighten one's moral sensitivity by offering a vision of the self as intrinsically related in a familial bond with other selves. . . . Thinking of strangers as brothers and sisters [can have] the effect of making what [might be] construed as a non-obligatory situation, one in which moral action [is] obligatory. In addition, the motivation to act [can be] intensified (RM, p. 252).
Finally, in the same article from which these quotations are taken, we find the following statement:
The claim that moral stages are necessary but not sufficient for religious stages . . . is compatible with the theistic position that implicit, universal faith grounds the very possibility of making a moral judgment or acting morally. That is, in every moral judgment there is a tacit further judgment that the activity of moral judging is, in fact, necessary. Such a judgment is based not on the fulfillment of moral criteria for an ethically right act but on the fulfillment of "religious" criteria for an ultimately meaningful act (RM, p. 365).
I quote these passages because they seem to open up a way of defending a form of a primacy of religion over morality. Indeed they suggest a genuine tension with the more general thesis of Kohlberg and Power outlined above. But since Kohlberg and Power apparently do not see such a tension, we must sort further through their meaning.
The crucial distinction for Kohlberg and Power in founding the affirmations just cited is that between faith and religion. Faith, as Fowler understands it, is holistic; it is a basic stance, a system of loyalties and beliefs, which includes in its sweep both cognitive and affective factors (see for example RM, p. 347 and 355; MD, pp. 213-14; 223 and 226; Fowler, op. cit., pp. 174-75). In contrast, Kohlberg and Power would restrict religion to "that part of faith in which there is a conscious reflection on that which provides ultimate reassurance and meaning for life. Through the symbols, concepts, and theologic of religion, the concerns of one's faith are openly addressed in a reasonable way" (RM, p. 347). As they put it elsewhere, they would distinguish within the broad matrix of faith what they take to be the partially separable domains of morality and religion, while in fact redefining this broad matrix as a matter of ethical rather than faith development (MD, p. 226). Thus, though there may indeed be a certain unity in a person's ethical development, of which Aristotle's Ethics provides a good picture, within this unity moral judgment or thinking remains clearly distinguishable logically from religious judgment or thinking (MD, p. 226).
Within the context of this distinction between faith and religion, then, the claims recorded in the quotations cited above would seem to fit as follows into Kohlberg's and Power's "necessary but not sufficient" hypothesis. First, insofar as one is speaking of faith, that is, of a fundamental though largely tacit system of loyalties and beliefs, it would seem to be permissible--logically possible and indeed necessary--to affirm such faith as anterior to morality. Such faith would seem to provide the initially necessary confidence in the very worthwhileness of acting morally at all (see RM, p. 365; MD, pp. 223 and 226). But secondly, insofar as one is speaking of religion (a) a certain level of morality or moral judgment must precede a parallel level of religion or religious judgment.6 (b) Insofar as religion in turn positively influences moral judgment, it does so by providing after-the-fact reassurance, namely, a proportionate measure of support for an already achieved level of morality which has been pressed to its limit. Finally, (c) religion provides such support, not by adding anything specific to the particular formulation of moral judgment, but by providing the person making the judgment with a general reason "for being and for purposeful human activity" (RM, p. 368).
Just what are Kohlberg's and Power's warrants for making the distinction between faith and religion which is central to the priority they accord morality over religion? I can discern two. First and generally, they seem to take some such understanding of religion as alone capable of protecting the autonomy of morality--that is, in the face of the challenge from divine command theorists. Secondly, a distinction between faith and religion makes possible a more careful and detailed empirical study of the relation of religion and morality (see for example MD, p. 226; RM, p. 355).
Now, I simply reject the second reason as an adequate warrant for making a theoretical distinction. Susceptibility to clearly delimited empirical study is not, of itself, a sufficient criterion for determining the intrinsic meaning of something. It would be such only on the basis of an assumed form of empiricism which I regard as indefensible and which I take it Kohlberg and Power themselves would not want to espouse. The question I wish to raise, then, is that connected with the first warrant: is there some broader understanding of religion which would allow us to affirm a priority of religion while permitting continued affirmation of the rational and hence public character of morality? In the remainder of this paper I shall be concerned to outline a form of an affirmative response to this question.
RELIGION AND MORALITY
Ultimacy
First of all, it is important to recall that Kohlberg and Power do not deny the reality in human experience of a stance bearing on ultimacy, termed by them faith, which includes tacit and affective features. They simply do not wish to call such a stance religious, that is, except insofar as it gets expressed in a cognitively explicit way. But they have offered no adequate warrant for so restricting, a priori and as a matter of principle, the meaning of religion.7 Their argument, in other words, does not suffice to rule out the logical possibility of a broader notion of religion which can nonetheless maintain the integrity of morality. It is within just this context, then, that I shall begin by adopting such a broader notion of religion. Specifically, I shall begin by accepting an understanding of religion as a stance bearing on ultimacy which includes both tacit or implicit and explicit features, and which is at once cognitive and affective.8 To aid in explaining the meaning of the various elements of this understanding of religion, and the bearing of such understanding on the question under consideration, I shall employ the classical terms of the philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas.9
To begin with, apropos of the affective-volitional factor in human cognition, Aquinas writes as follows:
From this we can easily understand why these powers include one another in their acts, because the intellect understands that the will wills, and the will wills the intellect to understand. In the same way, the good is contained under the true, inasmuch as it is a desired good.10
The will moves the intellect as to the exercise of its act, since even the true itself, which is the perfection of the intellect, is included in the universal good as a particular good. But as to the determination of the act, which the act derives from the object, the intellect moves the will; for the good itself is apprehended under a special aspect as contained in the universal true.11
Of course Aquinas uses faculty-psychology terms which may be offensive to many contemporary ears, but I do not think we need engage that debate here. For Aquinas's point can easily be translated for our purposes here as meaning (a) that there are distinctly volitional/affective and cognitional factors in each human act, which (b) are nonetheless mutually internal to one another and hence unified in the exercise of each such act. Further, there is a sense in which the volitional/affective factors have priority as what moves one to know in the first place. That is, any given act of knowing presupposes as its anterior, immanent condition a distinct tendency (wanting-seeking-desiring) to know.
This distinctly affective/volitional factor does not destroy the integrity of the cognitional process: on the contrary, it in turn precisely presupposes that integrity. Volition and cognition are given simultaneously as distinct aspects of any one conscious act: they cause the act of consciousness efficiently. Cognitional factors on the other hand have priority in the order of specification: they cause the act or consciousness formally.12
The upshot of Aquinas' position here is that some form of love, that is, some form of tending or seeking or desiring, is always distinctly internal to each act of consciousness, and hence to each act of knowing and judging. It is just this position which founds Aquinas' general claim that love is the "form" of the virtues, in the sense, that is, that it is love which is the internal dynamism which moves a person to each of his or her specific human acts.13 It follows that any adequate account of cognition, and hence in turn of moral cognition, must incorporate this distinct but internal factor of love as a necessary condition for, and in this ontological (or logical--i.e., not temporal) sense prior to, any act of cognition.
The dimension of ultimacy proper to religion emerges when we press the above description of Aquinas' position to its fuller implications. That is, each human act, when pressed to its limit, discloses itself as carrying a dimension of ultimacy. As Aquinas puts it, "of necessity everything that one desires one desires for the sake of the ultimate end."14 Now such a drive for ultimacy, as a human drive, involves in principle both affective/volitional and cognitive factors in the way and for the reasons already described. This is exactly the import of Aquinas' referring to the drive here as a "desire" (hence involving affectivity/volition) "for the sake of" (hence involving awareness or cognition). His point, then, is that in each human act there is disclosed in the limit some volition and cognition which bears on ultimacy. This does not mean that one is always explicitly aware of ultimacy or of what is functioning as ultimate in one's conscious acts. It means rather that in one's conscious acts there is some at least implicit (but with the possibility of becoming explicit in varying degrees) affirmation bearing on ultimacy which is at once cognitive and affective/volitional. In a word, each of our human acts in the limit discloses something which we value the most or ultimately, and such valuing is at once a matter of love and knowledge (cognition).15
Religion, then, as I understand the term, is a stance bearing on ultimacy which includes simultaneously both love and knowledge, and does so in both implicit and explicit ways. As the terms of this brief description suggest, this understanding of religion has roots in at least one major philosophical/theological tradition. But before considering the significance of this understanding of religion for the thesis of Kohlberg and Power, I think it is important here to record disclaimers in connection with two features which are commonly affirmed of religion, at least in its Christian form.
First of all, is it not the case that participation in community, or indeed affiliation with some institution, is integral to what we mean by religion, and hence that any adequate definition of religion ought to include this feature? My response to this question is this: (a) if one accepts, as I do, the ontological claim that the human being is essentially social and historical, it of course follows that a historical community is in principle involved in, internal to, each of one's acts. There is no such thing as an action by a human being--and hence in turn a specifically religious action--which is atomic or simply an act of an individual. (b) But the relevant point in the present context, in my judgment, is that what specifies particular actions, and hence communities organized around such actions as religious in the first place, is precisely the bearing of those actions or communities on ultimacy.
The point, in other words, is not that religion does not--that is, given the social-historical character of human being--entail participation in a historical community. Rather the point is that it is the bearing on ultimacy which originally specifies as religious any given instance of human participation in community, which is to say, any given historical community. In the present chapter I restrict myself to a consideration of the sense in which love and knowledge, both tacitly and explicitly, are in principle involved in this stance bearing on ultimacy which essentially characterizes religion. Clearly a more comprehensive and systematic treatment of religion would require a thematizing of the elements of participation in community--for example, such factors as particular rituals, symbols, stories, and the like--which, in light of the social-historical character of human being, are internal to one's basic love and knowledge. But I nonetheless abstract from these factors in the present chapter for the simple reason that their inclusion, however much it would enrich and amplify my thesis regarding the primacy of religion in relation to morality, is unnecessary in terms of establishing the basic sense of that thesis.
The second disclaimer I should like to make surfaces in connection with the possible charge that religion in the sense adopted here is defined in terms of the human relation to what is ultimate rather than, for example, in terms of the God who is ultimate. This objection will be addressed more fully later in connection with the challenge raised by the "divine command theorists". Nonetheless, I should like to stress in the present context that the understanding of religion as outlined here does not rule out the possibility that the proper way of understanding the human relation to God is in terms of a relation of a created being to its creator, that is, in the first instance in terms of gift to giver. It may well be the case that we are properly related to what is ultimate only when we see our actions as already in some fundamental way consequent upon the primary and gracious acting of an ultimate and personal agent. But the initial point of my definition here is exactly that it may turn out to be the case. That is, the definition does not preclude such a way finally of conceiving religion; it simply leaves the question open. In a word, my definition of religion is concerned in the present context to express what is necessary for religion; it is not concerned to express what suffices finally for an adequate conception of the necessary features of religion.
The Priority of Religion over Morality
What follows, then, from an understanding of religion as I have formulated it, specifically in terms of the thesis advanced by Kohlberg and Power regarding a relative priority of morality over religion? First of all, insofar as religion involves a fundamental affectivity/volition, it is thereby anterior to, as immanent within, any given moral judgment; it is precisely a necessary ontological condition for such a judgment. That is, as a human act each moral judgment presupposes love as its immanent or "moving" condition, and in the limit some ultimate love (love bearing on ultimacy).
Further, such basic or ultimate love which characterizes religion carries within itself, however implicitly, some cognitive claim. It follows that the basic love which is a presupposition for moral judgment is not blind or simply irrational, but already carries within itself a cognitive direction. To put the point more sharply, it already carries within it, however implicitly, a cognitive claim about the nature of what is ultimate.
Does this sense of the priority of religion, then, destroy any possible integrity of the process of moral judging? I suggest that it does not. The key to defending this suggestion lies in making a number of distinctions: first, insofar as religion is a matter of love, one must recall that love was affirmed to be prior in its own order. That is, love never replaces the cognitive factors involved in any human act. On the contrary it presupposes them as given simultaneously. It follows that, while, on the one hand, the love bearing on ultimacy which characterizes religion does condition the knowing process in a real or internal way, it nonetheless always and as a matter of principle leaves that knowing process formally intact. It therefore follows further that it leaves morality, insofar as morality is a matter of knowing (that is, moral judgment), formally intact. To put the matter more precisely: however much one's basic love might impede or assist one's intelligent inquiry in matters of morality, that love can never specify what is true in such matters. What constitutes justice in the moral order, for example, remains distinctly a matter of the formal requirements of moral intelligence.
In sum, then: (1) insofar as religion, as basic love or love bearing on ultimacy, presupposes the distinctness of the cognitive factor in morality, and in this sense depends on it to specify what it is that is moral, one can legitimately affirm with Kohlberg and Power the "autonomy" of morality. For morality can never be simply or formally absorbed into religion; and religion, as basic love, adds no new content to the particular formulation of moral judgment. At the same time, the initial point I wish to stress here is that moral judgment already and always presupposes the immanent and hence anterior moving force of basic love. In this sense moral judgments are conditioned, indeed transformed: while not specifically or formally different, they are nonetheless still internally different in the sense that they are suffused with one's basic love. It is in this sense, then, that the function of religion is not only to reassure but, anteriorly, to assure.
(2) Secondly, as we have seen, the basic love which characterizes religion carries within it, however implicitly, a cognitive claim about the nature of what is ultimate. If this is true, it follows, in light of the preceding analysis, that such a cognitive claim also exercises some influence on moral judgment. One's implicit claim regarding the nature of the ultimate internally affects one's understanding of the nature of morality. To illustrate this point in relation to Kohlberg and Power, I would suggest that their very conception of morality as prior to religion presupposes, precisely as an anterior, immanent condition, an implicit claim about the nature of ultimacy--that is, an implicit religious claim: namely, that whatever it is that is ultimate is such that its existence is compatible with the existence of the "natural" structures of the world as we know it. They already presuppose, as the necessary immanent condition for advancing their understanding of morality intelligently, a certain natural theology of a sort they eventually work out explicitly, but then only in the context of its providing support after the fact for their conception of morality.
My second point, then, is that there is already a fundamental metaphysical or natural theological claim built into the basic love which characterizes religion, and that this claim, as carried within that basic love, is itself already and always internal to, and hence presupposed by, any given moral judgment. As a matter of principle, then, the quality of such a claim has an internal bearing on the quality of one's conception of morality. Thus, in the case of Kohlberg and Power, their non-relativist conception of morality already presupposes as its anterior, immanent condition some non-relativist claim about the nature of ultimacy. Once again, religion not only reassures after the fact of moral judgment; it provides an anterior assurance--which in this case is cognitive--that is necessary in order to have a moral judgment at all.
(3) Finally, there is the difficult question of how the affirmation made in principle here regarding the relation between religion and morality works out in the detail of the several stages of religion and morality described by Kohlberg. Given the correctness of my general thesis, there should follow a correlation between the stages of religion and the stages of morality. That is, all along the way there should be some correlation between the quality of one's basic love and basic cognitive claims, on the one hand, and the quality of one's moral judgment, on the other. And it would seem that the particularities of such correlation can be determined only by relevant empirical studies.16 I would only suggest, apropos of such empirical studies that, if they are to be undertaken in critical fashion, they must face up to two theoretical issues which I believe are raised by my general thesis: first, if the relation between love and knowledge is in the first instance an ontological rather than temporal one, it would seem to follow that love and knowledge will always be found in mutual relation, that is, as simultaneously affecting each other in the unity of one act. This implies a problem for any empirical effort to ascertain clearly the priority of one factor over the other as these factors come to expression in the context of religion and morality. In what sense is it possible to engage an empirical study of the mutual relation of love and knowledge in the context of religion and morality without collapsing that relation into a simply temporal one? Secondly, religion as basic love or love bearing on ultimacy carries within it tacitly (but not only tacitly) affective/volitional and cognitive factors. What are the consequent systematic limitations involved in trying to assess the influence of religion on one's moral life, in terms of how explicitly a given person is able to formulate his or her basic love and knowledge? How does one measure or make explicit what essentially includes a tacit or implicit character?
But we must press on. As suggested in connection with my second disclaimer above, does not the priority of religion over morality in the sense in which I have outlined it precisely fail to meet the thrust of the challenge coming from the divine command theorists? That is, does not this defense of a certain priority of religion remain in the kind of human or "natural law" context which is exactly in question when one sees religion and morality as radically a function of God's gracious acting?
Resolution of the challenge arising from the divine command understanding of God seems to me to hinge on a proper grasp of the Christian understanding of God.17 I take the heart of that understanding to be a sense of God as creator of the world ex nihilo, and hence of the world as created.18 The significance of this understanding in terms of the present context seems to me to be twofold: on the one hand, it establishes God as agapic love, and hence as an utterly gracious actor or agent. God, as the plenitude of being, has no inner lack or need, and hence acts gratuitously in creating the world. It thus follows further that the world and the things within it are, in their inner reality, gifts. To be, for anything in the world, is at once to be given.19 This leads to the second key feature of this understanding of God: namely, that the things of the world, all of which have their own nature and hence an excellence according to their kind, are seen at the same time to have those natures by virtue of the ongoing gracious activity of God.20
The point, then, is twofold: on the one hand, the natural necessities structured into the things of the world are transformed by being placed in the context of God's agapic love; but, on the other hand, those natural necessities are maintained within that love. To put it another way, God's will is disclosed precisely through the intelligible structures of the natural world. In a word, this understanding of God in relation to the world allows one to cut through, by transforming its context, the classical dilemma set by Plato in the Euthyphro as to whether God commands something because it is inherently right, that is, right by virtue of its own natural necessity, or whether it becomes right by virtue of God's command. For the Christian understanding of God as creator implies affirmation of a coincidence of God's will and the natural necessities of things.21 It should be noted, then, that this understanding of God is at once a faithful and a reasonable claim. That is, the disclosure of God in revelation as loving Lord of the universe carries within it a certain metaphysical claim about the ways things are.22
The upshot of this understanding of Christianity for the present discussion seems to be twofold: on the one hand, such an understanding affirms the radical primacy of God's gracious activity as interior to and immanent within, the activity of the things of the world. In so doing, there is affirmed a transformation of the context of the activity of the things of the world. At the same time, this inner transformation is not seen as destroying the integrity of the natural necessities involved in the activity of the things of the world: on the contrary such a "graced" transformation is seen to coincide with such natural necessities. It seems to me, therefore, that such an understanding suffices in principle to meet the legitimate sense of the concern of the divine command theorists regarding the primacy of God; and to do so while protecting the integrity of the "natural" world necessary to maintain the legitimate sense of the autonomy of the "natural law" morality sought by Kohlberg and Power.
To put the matter more specifically in terms of the context of the salient aspects of the relation between religion and morality as recorded above, I would note the following. First, the general primacy of religion in the sense recorded above is now understood in terms of the radical primacy of God's graciousness. That is, my loving activity, the distinctly moral specificity of that loving activity, and indeed the entire sweep of the activities which make up the world, are all now seen as founded upon, and sustained by, God's loving activity. Secondly, it remains the case that, while religion in its Christian form does not add any specific content to the particular formulation of moral judgment,23 it nonetheless transforms the context of that formulation: (a) the love which internally transforms justice while maintaining its formal integrity is now seen in the first and founding instance to be God's love; and (b) the necessary condition regarding one's conception of ultimacy, that is, in terms of sustaining the integrity of the "natural" moral order is met in the understanding of God as creator ex nihilo, and hence of the world as creation. Finally, then, regarding the question of the correlation between one's stages of maturity as a Christian and one's stages of moral maturity, I should suggest that the comments made above regarding the correlation between religious maturity generally and moral maturity, as well as the limitations involved in an empirical study of such correlation, hold in the present context.
Implications
It remains for us to say a word about the implications of the primacy of religion over morality as defended here in terms of programs in moral education projected for use in public schools. Though religion in some form (some set of ultimate convictions) is a necessary condition for morality, and thus must be incorporated into any program in moral development which would be complete, it does not follow that such a thesis has the practical effect of forcing programs in moral education out of public schools--to the would-be satisfaction of both the divine command theorists and the atheistic/agnostic emotivists. But this suggestion of course hinges on the correctness of the thesis whose meaning I have sketched above. I would reformulate that thesis for the present context as follows: there is a concern structured into every human being which bears on what is ultimate and which carries in principle, though in varying degrees of explicitness, a cognitive claim about the nature of what is ultimate. This concern, as fundamental, is thus operative (again in varying degrees of explicitness) in each of one's conscious activities. In the present context bearing on political life, it follows that this concern is operative in the conscious activities of constructing cultural (social-political) institutions.
What I wish to suggest here, then, is that, given the general ontological claim outlined in this paper, it follows that there can be no society or group of human beings which is simply without some set of convictions in matters of ultimacy and hence religion. No society can avoid reflecting such convictions, however implicitly, in its cultural--and hence educational-institutions.24
This brief theoretical claim makes no pretense of solving the enormous difficulties involved in trying to spell out its exact implications for educational practice. The claim nonetheless does entail a transformation of the conventional context of the discussion of religion in public life as undertaken in light of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. By conventional here I mean the positivist context which assumes the possibility of simple neutrality in public life in matters of religion. If such neutrality is not possible, then it is a matter not of whether the institutions of society, including its educational institutions, will reflect such convictions regarding ultimacy, but rather of which sort of convictions they will reflect. The issue which should thus set the context for discussion of religion in public schools, specifically here that discussion as it emerges in the debate between the divine command theorists and Kohlberg and Power, is not whether but how religion in the sense affirmed in this paper, that is, some set of convictions bearing on ultimacy, should be incorporated into public schools and indeed integrated into programs of moral education in such schools. In light of the position sketched in this paper, the answer would seem to involve an effort by educators, first, to become self-conscious about the convictions bearing on ultimacy which are de facto operative in their current educational practice and, secondly, to assess the adequacy of those convictions. Such assessment should be careful to show how the religious convictions maintain the integrity, which is to say the public character, of morality.
In a word, then, though the understanding of religion outlined above provides some theoretical guidelines relevant to the problem of religion in public moral education, this paper makes no pretense of solving the profoundly difficult and complex issues bearing on educational practice which are involved in carrying through a solution to this problem. My minimal suggestion here is simply that Kohlberg and Power, in their legitimate concern to protect the autonomy of morality in the face of the constitutional challenge, have too readily conceded the positivist understanding of the place of religion in public life--which is to say, the positivist assumption that it alone is without an "orthodoxy" in matters of religion. What is needed, in my judgment, is rather an approach which begins by recognizing the de facto presence of religion (a set of convictions bearing on ultimacy) in public life, and then, within this context, goes on to elaborate an understanding of religion which both retrieves an adequate sense of religion on its own terms, and secures the gains on behalf of the freedom of individuals made in the development of democracy in the modern West.
In conclusion, I should like to recall the limits of the argument I have sketched in relation to Kohlberg's and Power's understanding of the relation between morality and religion. In an effort to defend the autonomy of religion in the face of the challenge from fundamentalists, Kohlberg and Power consider it necessary to advance the thesis that morality is a necessary and prior, but not sufficient, condition for religion. In advancing this thesis, they make religion coextensive with the explicitly cognitive elements of faith. In response my argument has been, first, that they do not provide an adequate warrant for so restricting the meaning of religion and thus leave open the legitimate possibility of a broader understanding. Within this context, then, I have offered a form of a broader definition of religion and have attempted to show how such a broader definition would permit accommodation of Kohlberg's and Power's concern to protect the integrity of morality, while nonetheless entailing a form of the converse of their thesis regarding the relation between morality and religion: namely, that religion is a necessary and prior condition for, but does not simply replace, morality. As all of this suggests, the intention of my argument has not been to justify an alternative view of religion simply, but rather to show that it is possible to defend the integrity of the moral order from within a context of a primacy of religion. In so doing, my intention has been to suggest an alternative to the views of both Kohlberg and Power and the divine command theorists, which nonetheless would accommodate what is legitimate in the concerns of each. Finally, then, I have suggested a sense in which, given the understanding of religion developed in the paper, there follows a transformation of the conventional--positivist--context of the discussion of the place of religion in public life and hence education.
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana
1. Lawrence Kohlberg and Clark Power, "Moral Development, Religious Thinking, and the Question of a Seventh Stage," Zygon, l6 (1981), pp. 203-207. (Hereafter MD) This article also appeared in Kohlberg's The Philosophy of Moral Development, Vol. I of Essays on Moral Development (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).
2. MD, p. 255. See also F. Clark Power and Lawrence Kohlberg, "Religion, Morality, and Ego Development," in Toward Moral and Religious Maturity, ed. by J. Fowler and A. Vergote (Morristown, N.J.: SilverBurdett, 1980), p. 365. (Hereafter RM.)
3. See James Fowler's criticism of Kohlberg in Fowler's "Stages in Faith: The Structural-Developmental Approach," in Values and Moral Development, ed. by Thomas C. Hennessey, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1976), pp. 207-211.
4. But, of course, in itself this precisely does not meet directly the challenge posed by Kant: namely, granted that the drive to understand things in their ultimate roots and foundations--which emerges in the experience of those who are most advanced morally--is a necessary feature of the human spirit, how do we know that that drive is not profoundly misleading and even destructive if understood "realistically", that is, as leading to a disclosure of the way things ultimately are? In a word, Kohlberg and Power show that our experience leads us away from Kant's idealism, but Kant's challenge bears precisely on the ontological warrant for "giving in" to experience on this point. I do not raise this issue here in criticism of Kohlberg and Power; indeed, they clearly do not intend their argument as a "proof" of their suggested metaphysical turn (see for example MD, p. 246). I raise the issue only to note that, while such "proof" is a distinct task yet to be engaged, I will nonetheless assume, with Kohlberg and Power and for the purposes of this paper, the "correctness" of their metaphysical turn.
5. Kohlberg's understanding of the relation between moral reasoning and scientific reasoning is taken up in Ch. IX above.
6. Kohlberg and Power note that this claim is ambiguous at the lower stages (l-3) (RM, p. 359), but this is not crucial to my basic concern in this paper.
7. Indeed, it is not clear that Kohlberg's and Power's formulation, if interpreted literally, can itself legitimately disallow a broader understanding of religion which would include faith: for in distinguishing religion from faith, they nonetheless define religion as "that part of faith . . ." (RM, p. 347) (emphasis mine). But if that is what is meant, then religion would seem to be, on their own terms, a specification of faith. And since a specification (specific differentiation) occurs within, not outside, its appropriate genus, it would seem to follow, on Kohlberg's and Power's own terms, that religion must carry within it the element of faith.
8. My understanding of religion here, then, is similar to what Fowler means by faith. I would only note that I specify faith as religious in the first instance by virtue of its bearing on ultimacy, and not, as Fowler apparently does, by virtue of its connection with some particular institution taken to be religious. (Cf. J. Fowler, "Faith and the Structuring of Meaning," in Fowler and Vergote, op. cit., p. 53.) But see my further qualification of this point in Section V below.
9. For an expansion of my argument as sketched here, see my "History, Objectivity, and Moral Conversion," The Thomist, 37 (1973), esp. pp. 578-588. For what I take to be an analogous form of this argument cast in a more contemporary idiom, see the effort of Michael Polanyi to retrieve, in the context of the modern Western tradition of critical thought, the Augustinian--hence fiduciary, volitional, affective--roots of knowledge: Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 266 and passim.
In connection with my claim outlined here in the context of religion, see the arguments developed elsewhere in this volume regarding the importance, for adequate moral judgment and action, of volitional and affective factors (cf. especially the chapters on choice, character, and emotion).
10. Summa Theologiae, 1, q. 82, a. 4 ad primum.
11. Ibid., I-II, q. 9, a. l ad tertium.
12. See the following quotation from André Hayen, which I think captures the heart of Aquinas' position as I have tried to express it here: "Saint Thomas' perspective is . . . concrete; it is that of the actual exercise of human activity. The will is intrinsically constitutive of intellection, not as intellectual, but as act of intellection: the judgment finds its completion in a willed engagement, not as an act of intelligence, but as an act of knowledge" (my translation) "Le lien de la connaissance et du vouloir dans l'acte d'exister selon saint Tomas d'Aquin," Doctor Communis, 3 (1950), p. 88.
13. Strictly speaking, of course, Aquinas's claim is that charity, that is, love as a "supernatural" virtue, is the form of the virtues (See S.T. II-II, q. 23, a. 8; and De Caritate, a. III). The purpose of my suggestion here is merely to record one of the ontological foundations for such a claim.
14. Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. l, a. 6.
15. See in this connection Karl Rahner, Hearers of the Word (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), p. 105 and passim.
16. See the various studies cited by Fowler and Kohlberg and Power in the articles noted above. I would stress here, however, that though the studies of Kohlberg and Power may seem to be at odds with the general thesis I have advanced in this paper, I take those studies to be inconclusive insofar as they presuppose the restricted understanding of religion which I have rejected.
17. The analysis that follows does not necessarily carry the implication that the Christian understanding of God is the only one that involves, or could involve, the type of resolution I propose regarding the relation between God's acting and the acting of the entities of the world. I simply abstract from this question in light of the theme of the present paper, which concerns the fundamentalist Christian challenge to Kohlberg's program. Secondly, it suffices for the purposes of this paper that the understanding of God offered here in the name of Christianity be one of the logically possible ways of understanding the Christian God. It is not necessary for my purposes to defend the stronger claim that it is the only possible way of understanding the Christian God.
18. By this statement I do not mean that a full-blown sense of God as a creator ex nihilo is explicit in the Christian scriptures, but only that this is the interpretation of scripture which retrieves the full and proper sense of the Lordship of God which is central to scripture. For a study of the meaning of creation, see Kenneth L. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982). Cf. also in connection with my brief treatment of the Christian understanding of God here: Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982); John Courtney Murray, The Problem of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); and Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (New York: Seabury Press, 1970). Perhaps I should note, in view of some current tendencies to oppose creation and evolution, that creation as I understand it here--and indeed in what I take to be its properly Christian understanding--is quite compatible with a theistic theory of evolution.
19. For a rich sense of the way the notion of creation ex nihilo, and hence of the world as gift, transforms the conventional meaning of "the given," see Schmitz, op. cit., pp. 34ff and passim.
20. See Sokolowski, op. cit., pp. 2l-23.
21. A good illustration of this general claim here might be found in Aquinas' working out of the meaning of natural law in light of St. Paul's understanding of law (See his Treatise on Law).
22. See the works of Murray and Sokolowski cited above. The claim is put trenchantly by Murray: "How odd of God it would have been had he made man reasonable so that, by being reasonable, man would become godless" (op. cit., p. 76).
23. A different context would require a fuller development of the sense of this assertion. Briefly, its basis is that God's will as creator is manifest in the natural necessities of the things created. On the one hand, this seems to transform the context of morality by personalizing it, though such a personalization does not seem to involve the addition of another formal content or criterion for moral judgment. On the other hand, religion in its Christian form may legitimately make, if not "natural", then "positive", additions to morality, provided that those additions be interpreted as fulfillments rather than destructions of the natural order of things. A detailed treatment of this issue is beyond the scope of the present paper.
24. In connection with my argument here see the following: Walter Berns, Freedom, Virtue, and the First Amendment (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957); Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance", in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, edited by Robert Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); Glenn Olsen, "You Can't Legislate Morality: Reflections on a Bromide", Communio: International Catholic Review, 2 (1975), pp. 148-162; Walter Nicgorski, "Democracy and Moral-Religious Neutrality: American and Catholic Perspectives," Communio, 9 (1982), pp. 292-320; and my "0n the Critical Study of Religion: Positivism, the First Amendment, and the Roemer Case," Communio, 3 (l976), pp. 300-317.