Do not variations in different times and places regarding the moral code prove that there is no objective moral law?
No. Differences of opinion regarding some question do not prove that there is no correct answer to that question. Scientists disagree about the temperature of the center of the earth; their disagreement does not mean that the center of the earth and its heat do not exist.
Human beings as made by God are meant by him to behave in a certain way, and this applies to them all. To worship God, to be merciful, chaste and honest are right for all men, and their opposites are wrong for all men. Understanding of this moral law has varied at different times and places, and the degree of an individual’s personal guilt is affected by the degree of his understanding. But ignorance and misunderstanding do not affect the fact that a certain type of conduct is right and another type of conduct wrong for human nature as God made it. . . .
Seeing that God knows all things and is all-powerful, how can man be free?
God’s knowledge and power and man’s freedom are not on the same plane of existence—any more than God and man are on the same plane of existence. If a person on our own plane of existence knows in advance what our actions will be, that may mean some lack of freedom on our part. But it does not necessarily do so, and this may be some little help to us in seeing that God’s knowledge does not do so. For example, if I am broke, and I write to a good friend of mine—a relatively wealthy one—to ask for a loan, I know before I so much as post the letter what my friend’s response will be. But this does not mean that his help is anything but a free act on his part. We are not to suppose that God’s total knowledge of us is something of this nature, but the analogy may help us to see that knowing someone’s actions does not mean determining them. On the other hand, if someone on our own plane of existence has real power over us, that will certainly limit the exercise of our freedom.
But we cannot argue from this to a contradiction between God’s knowledge and power, which are unlike any other, and our freedom. In fact, God in his almighty power causes us to be free, as he causes a tree to grow. Our freedom is not a contradiction of his power but a manifestation of it: His power is not a limitation of our freedom but the source of it.
One picture that we must try to get out of our minds is of God knowing our actions “in advance.” God’s existence is not extended in time, like ours. He is in his eternal present. All that is past, present, and future to us is present to him (and a different kind of “present” from ours), and to speak of his knowing “in advance” is meaningless. We cannot picture God, on Monday, looking forward to what we shall do on Tuesday. Monday and Tuesday are successive to us, but not to God. To him, Monday and Tuesday are equally present as part of the time-sequence that he created. He, as God, is not involved in that time-sequence; he wholly possesses all that he eternally is in a single, infinite “now.” . . .
If heaven does offer us “that good which is complete in itself, and without need of supplement, the good that the will is not able not to will,” how could Lucifer and other angels fall?
Heaven, in this sense, means the beatific vision: the fulfillment of the life of grace—our share in God’s life—in the enjoyment of direct knowledge, in his essence, of him who is truth and love. The highest knowledge of God possible apart from this vision can be compared to it only as seeing reflections in a dark mirror can be compared to seeing face to face. This fulfillment of knowledge means fulfillment of love in the same unmeasurable degree, which means perfect happiness: the “beatific vision” is the “blissful-making sight.”
It was not from this that the angels fell. They were created in grace, not in the beatific vision: their state left room for rejection of God as well as free choice of him. Those who chose him entered into the vision.
What was the manner of the rejection of him by the others, we do not know. In some form or other, it must have been a refusal to accept their total dependence upon him as the sole source of all that they were and had: an attempt, in some form, to be their own supreme good, their own god. . . .
Since Eve was the only woman in existence at that time, whom did Cain marry?
In the first generation of human beings brothers, of course, must have married their sisters—to which there is no biological objection in a thoroughly healthy stock, nor any social objection in the circumstances of the beginning of the human race. Genesis, in its stories of human origins, takes the presence of women for granted, seldom naming them and merely observing, in chapter 5, verse 4, that Adam “begot sons and daughters.”
But—since the question was asked about Cain—would we be right in thinking that we ought to have this first generation of humans in mind when we read the story of Cain and Abel? We now know that names in the Old Testament may often stand for nations or races rather than individuals. “Adam” may well sometimes stand for the whole human race; “Eve” for all women. In the story of the fall, we know from the Church’s teaching that these names stand for the two particular individuals who were the first human pair and whose particular act of choice is there told to us. But this may not still apply at the beginning of chapter 4, the story of Cain and Abel.
Indeed, it seems more reasonable to suppose that the inspired writer (whose whole concern is with man’s position before God, not with archaeology) is here skipping over many hundreds of thousands of years, when he gives the story of the murder of the shepherd by the farmer. For we know by ordinary human knowledge that there have been men on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years; whereas agriculture seems to have begun only within the last ten thousand years. . . .
I have been told that a certain council of the Church described a Pope, then dead, as a heretic. If the Pope is infallible, how could he be a heretic? . . .
The condemnation took place at the Sixth General Council, held in 680 at Constantinople. At this Council, a heresy that had disturbed the Eastern half of the Church for half a century was at last clearly condemned. The heresy had started as an attempt by Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, to reconcile to the Church the Monophysites (one nature-ites) , who rejected the definition of the Council of Chalcedon (in 452) that in Christ are two natures, divine and human, united in one Person. By a complicated misunderstanding, the Monophysites regarded this definition as an approval of the earlier Nestorian heresy (condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431), which saw our Lord as two persons, one God and one man. Monophysites considered that Catholics (who believed and believe in two natures in one Person) were really Nestorian heretics. In an attempt to convince them that Catholics were not Nestorians, Sergius devised a way of speaking of Christ that involved saying that he had only one will. But this (though it did achieve, in 633, a sort of reunion for a time) really meant denying that our Lord was truly and fully a Man: if he had no human will, so that he did not, as Man, make acts of choice, his was not a real humanity. The heresy is called Monothelism (one-will-ism). There were Catholics in the East who saw that error was at the root of this “reunion,” so Sergius found himself attacked. So he wrote to Pope Honorius for support—and he got it!
The Pope failed so entirely to see the point of the argument that he did two things that greatly assisted the spread of the heresy. He said that the “one-will or two-wills argument”—and connected arguments—ought not to be discussed further at all: which, since Monothelism was in possession at Constantinople and had the emperor’s support, meant favoring Monothelism—if no one was allowed to argue about it, it would simply continue in possession. And he also said, in so many words, in a letter to Sergius, that it was right to speak of Christ as having only one will. He probably meant by this only that Christ’s human will was always perfectly in unity with the will of God; nevertheless, he did in that letter make a statement that simply agreed with the current heresy—and the statement that the Pope agreed with them was used as a weapon by the Monothelites, despite the protests of Honorius’s successor, John IV.
At last (and after Pope St. Martin I had died in prison in resistance to the Monothelite emperor) the Third Council of Constantinople met. It accepted, as “Peter speaking by Agatho,” the teaching of the new Pope that in Christ there are two wills, the divine and the human. It then condemned by name, as heretics, those who had supported the heresy, and amongst them Pope Honorius, “because in his writings to Sergius he followed his opinions and confirmed his impious teaching.” Pope Agatho confirmed the condemnation, emphasizing then and later that Honorius’s great fault lay in neglecting to teach the truth to the Church when the Church needed it. It is evident, and striking, that he assumed (as we do) that though Honorius could, as an individual, be muddled over the whole question, and could in a letter to another bishop even subscribe, vaguely, to the heresy, yet if only he had fulfilled his public office, as Pope, of giving a definite teaching to the whole Church on the matter, he would have given the right one—for he would have been divinely prevented from giving a wrong one, and the heresy would then, by his authority exercised toward the whole Church, have been checked.