The Principle of Contradiction

A strange apathy has come over many present-day Catholics. In the face of the most disturbing events, the most evident contradictions, the most shocking aberrations, they simply remain silent and unmoved.

At least in most cases, this apathy is not due to any hasty change in convictions or their destruction by an intellectual process. Rather, it results from a laziness to take an interest in what surpasses the merely individual ambit, followed by a paralysis of the capacity to judge events, to categorically affirm or desire something, to flatly deny or reject anything, and consequently, to react with seriousness, energy and efficacy.

It is not, therefore, mere resignation before the advance of what contradicts a person's most deep-rooted convictions and threatens his interests. It is indifference toward anything that does not directly affect his individual life. Without abandoning his way of thinking, he seems to have made a parenthesis of it. And just as a ray of light or a gaze penetrate a crystal without altering it, so his indifferent soul seems to be of glass, and the events cross it leaving hardly a mark. On witnessing the most absurd happenings, he will not react as long as his private life is unperturbed.

People suffering from such apathy easily fall prey to whatever stimulates their appetites and phobias of the moment. This is obvious, since their inertia cannot but profoundly affect the most noble faculties of the spirit: it weakens the intelligence and the will, and diminishes the capacity to resist.

Everything indicates that what we are witnessing is the deterioration of what Saint Thomas Aquinas considered the indispensable point of departure for all thought, desire and action: the principle of contradiction.

To understand this principle, ask yourself: How could a mother teach her child the names of things if the child did not already have the capacity to perceive that things exist as individual beings, different from himself and distinct from each other?

Who gave this primary and elementary discernment of reality to the child? Surely no teacher. Man is born already predisposed to unequivocally apply what are called the first principles of natural reason, which he begins to use spontaneously as soon as he enters into contact with the world around him. These first principles are evident, and, as such, do not need to be demonstrated or taught to the child.

Among these principles is the first notion, the most simple and universal of notions, without which intelligence cannot conceive anything. It is the generic notion of being, on which depends the first principle of reasoning. Saint Thomas, following Aristotle, defines it as the first and supreme principle of thought. It is the principle of contradiction, the most simple and universal of all judgments, which can be stated in the following truth: It is impossible for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.

Since he has the first evidence of this principle, man can know and think. Without realizing it, we use this principle all the time. Without it, we could not distinguish what is from what is not, nor one being from another. We would not know we are different from a table, an elephant or an ant. A shepherd, for example, could not know whether or not he was a wolf, or whether the wolf is a sheep. We would have no idea of the hierarchy among creatures; we could not distinguish man from irrational nature or the cosmos; we would not know of the existence of a Creator who is personal, transcendent, infinitely distinct from and superior to all His creatures and who defines Himself as "I am who am" (Exod. 3:14). Everything would be confused. We would sink into the greatest absurdities.

With the principle of contradiction, man, by connaturality, also knows the universal correlative concepts of truth and error. Truth is identified with being, since it lies in the faithful correspondence between the idea and reality. So also, error lies in falsehood, since it is the noncorrespondence between the idea and reality; it is the absence of truth and, as such, is identified with non-being.

From the principle of contradiction and the other first evidences linked to it, reason not only knows the universal distinction between truth and error; it is also capable of going from the knowledge of one thing to another. It acquires successive truths, always contrasting, explicitly or implicitly, what is with what is not, what is more with what is less, the true with the false.

The Catholic knows that in this search for truth - whereby he grasps by deductive and inductive knowledge the specific principles and laws of theology, philosophy, the sciences and human knowledge in general - he can count on the assistance of the supreme and infallible Magisterium of the Church.

Do Good and Avoid Evil

If, on the speculative plane, the principle of contradiction makes man see the distinction between being and non-being and between truth and error as primarily and immediately evident, on the operative plane it is the first natural moral principle.

As Saint Thomas explains, this is so because good - like truth - identifies itself with being. Good is what all beings by their nature desire; it is what befits their nature; it is what sustains and perfects them. And evil is the absence of good.

The principle of contradiction shows man that he should seek what is connatural with his being, what strengthens and benefits him (good), and avoid what harms or weakens his being (evil). From this comes the precept that must rule human conduct: Do good and avoid evil.

Sacred Scripture says: "Good is set against evil, and life against death; so also is the sinner against a just man. And so look upon all the works of the most High. Two and two, and one against another" (Ecclus. 33:15).

Everyone agrees that good should be done and evil avoided. But some object: "Who, concretely, can show us what good is?"

Saint Thomas, answering this objection, cites the Psalmist: "The light of thy face, Lord, has remained impressed on our minds." The Angelic Doctor explains that God endowed natural reason not only with the capacity to make the universal distinction between good and evil, but also with the capacity to know the operative general principles that permit man to practice good and avoid evil. He is led to this precisely by the Natural Law impressed on his soul, of which his own conscience gives testimony, and which, moreover, is summarized in the Ten Commandments. The habit of knowing the first moral principles, which Saint Thomas calls synderesis, is incorruptible. Finally, by exercising prudence, man can apply the general moral principles to concrete circumstances.

The Apathy of the Unthinking Person

So what would happen to the intellectual and operative life of man without the light of the principle of contradiction? The intelligence could grasp nothing; the will would not receive from the intelligence any reason to tend one way or the other. This life would become the emptiness of non-thinking, the inertia of non-desiring; it would become the absolute apathy of the superior powers of the soul. Were such a thing possible, the primacy of the sensibility would transform man into a purely instinctive animal. True faith, moral conduct, culture and civilization could not even exist.

Yet everyday life shows that the principle of contradiction is frequently ignored, first in one point, then another, until it is eventually deadened in almost all its final applications.

As an example of this, take the middle-aged Catholic of today who witnesses the most shocking contradictions with apathy. In his youth he knew and practiced the Faith, still in its traditional splendor. He saw and judged things from the orderly and crystalline perspective of the principle of contradiction.

How did this enormous change in him occur?

More than likely, it began not in a mere mistake of the intellect, but in a weakness of the will, which darkened the intelligence and dampened the sensibility. In other words, at a certain moment he began to diminish his love of virtue, religion, the Church and, finally, God Himself. As a consequence, a certain interior light that enabled him to admire upright and sacred things began to grow dim without him noticing. He became increasingly insensitive to the beauty and the attractions of good and truth, even though theoretically he still understood their reason for being. But he no longer sought them, because his will desired other things, and good and truth seemed less attractive to him. He still acknowledged the existence of evil and error, but could no longer see with exactness all their perverse consequences. In his spirit the well-defined opposition between good and evil, truth and error, gradually disappeared, making it increasingly difficult for him to recognize evil and error in their early stages. Whenever called upon to define himself, he took a neutral or indifferent stand, and thus avoided any clash with evil.

But the firmament of Catholic doctrine is unitary. When man departs from a truth or good, he abandons an entire constellation of correlative goods and truths and, little by little, the very firmament of the Faith becomes obscured in his spirit. He will cease to admire piety and the liturgy, for example, or will no longer feel the tranquil joys of family life. And from omission to omission, from fall to fall, he will end up seeking happiness in the morbid frenzy of corruption. He will no longer see the evil of religious indifferentism, nor the evil of divorce and temporary unions, even though he might remain officially united to his lawful wife.

How could such an individual possibly possess the seriousness of spirit necessary to consider those subjects from the perspective of the principles? He will end up indolently accepting both indissoluble marriage and divorce, or even free love. Everything is swiftly lost in the mists of subjectivism. Beauty and ugliness, good and evil, error and truth, will become confused in his spirit. The principle of contradiction, the first distinction between being and non-being, the root of his certainties, the highest reason of his actions and the vigor of his judgments, will be profoundly jeopardized.

He may conserve old habits acquired from a coherent concept of the universe; he may mumble a quick and distracted prayer before a statue of the Blessed Virgin, as he recalls the "old-fashioned" Catholicism of his mother. Depending on the course of his life, his temperament, his circles, his activities, he may still retain more or less defined ideas about other matters. For example, he may favor private property and free enterprise, but he will do so more for practical and functional reasons (greater productivity or the maintenance of public freedoms) than anything else. Even these reasons, however, will be based not so much on the objective observation of reality as on the general consensus of the circles that have prestige in his eyes. Should he defend private property, his destructive relativism regarding religious practices and the Christian notion of the family will prevent him from doing so on the basis of Natural Law and, even more, Divine Law. It will never occur to him to relate the right of property with the seventh and tenth commandments, which forbid stealing and coveting the goods of others. Being a principled voter will mean so little to him that he will support an anti-Catholic candidate if he is "moderate" and "pragmatic." Doctrines and the great general questions of the day will interest him less and less. He will be overcome by a slothful unwillingness to discuss or even think of such things and will dislike persons or situations demanding serious thought.

How could this individual do anything but run faster and faster after his immediate interests and a life of pleasure? Most of his certainties lack solidity, and he himself lacks the necessary assurance to orient his will in the search for more noble goods, whose beauty he can no longer sense and whose value he can no longer weigh. And here the effects exacerbate their causes. A person invaded by such insensibility and with a darkened intelligence and weakened will is incapable of governing the inferior passions, which, unrestrained, increase the darkness and weakness. The person's non-thinking indifference can only worsen.

A crusade to invigorate the principle of contradiction is needed. Apathetic Catholics have forgotten that the Church is the sign of contradiction, the sign of separation of good and evil. So let us remind them. Let us enliven the sense of everything that separates truth from error, good from evil, beauty from ugliness. And let us pray that in time today's apathetic Catholics will heed what the Holy Father, echoing Our Lord himself, once said: "Learn to call white, white; black, black; evil, evil; and good, good. Learn to call sin, sin, and not to call it liberation and progress, even though fashion and propaganda are opposed to this."

Orlando Lyra is a Catholic writer.