In the past, I’ve tried to make a case for why—at a conceptual level, at least—we need not believe that the natural law tradition of ethical thinking is a dead end for inclusive ethical projects that attempt to take the experiences of marginalized persons, especially those of LGBTQ+ people, seriously. In this regard, I have a great intellectual debt, particularly to the many revisionist feminist natural law thinkers—people like Jean Porter, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Cristina Traina, and others—who have made it clear that cultivating this conceptual space, far from constituting any work of pure innovation, actually is the result of a responsible treatment and retrieval of Thomas Aquinas’s own ethical method. Consequently, a few realizations have become clear. First, the natural law tradition is not a monolithic tradition. It is, rather, a tradition of ethical inquiry comprising multiple intellectual strands, with each synthesis having its own story to tell. This is as true of the revisionist strand of the natural law as it is of John Paul II’s version of the natural law that would get enshrined in documents like Veritatis Splendor. Second—and this aspect has emerged as particularly important not only within natural law frameworks but in ethical frameworks more broadly—questions related to moral epistemology have arisen to the forefront of debates in moral theology and theological ethics. In Roman Catholicism in particular, the stakes of such epistemic questions can quickly become heightened when the magisterial authority of the bishops is invoked, since the bishops have the task of “authentically interpreting the word of God, whether in its written form or in that of tradition,” and that such a role of authentic interpretation “has been entrusted only to those charged with the Church’s living Magisterium, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ” (Dei Verbum, no. 8, emphasis mine). Such a statement sits uneasily, of course, with the historical record related to various questions upon which the authority of the bishops has been brought to bear. From matters as scientific as the Affair concerning Galileo, who believed rightly, against Church leaders, that the earth moved around the sun and that the sun does not move; to matters as dire as Catholic leaders in the past having provided divine benedictions on practices like slavery and colonization that we now rightly regard as reprehensible, the question of epistemic justification in theological argument presses itself again with great urgency: how can the Catholic Church, which often mobilizes concepts related to ‘nature’ and the ‘natural law’ in official documents related to moral questions, avoid being on the wrong side of moral controversies? The answer is that we need criteria to help better illuminate the role that magisterium—not just that of the authority of the pope and the other bishops, but also that of the entire Church, including its theologians—plays in moral argument.
There is no way that a full account of such criteria can be given here. But, in this space, I want to offer some thoughts on what might be a helpful starting point for properly understanding magisterium in a way that seeks to avoid the pitfalls of the past. It involves expanding our conversation partners—and to do so explicitly within a new synthesis within the natural law tradition: a liberative natural law that carries on the project of revisionist natural law, but does so in a direction that draws explicitly from the wealth of black and queer liberation thought. To this end, I want to provide a very brief background on the work of black thinker Aimé Césaire, and to show why his work is relevant to conversations related to the epistemology of the natural law. I believe Césaire’s work can help us reconfigure notions of ‘nature’ and ‘universality’ that ultimately benefit us in the area of natural law epistemology.
Césaire, born in 1913 in Martinique, would have some of his most formative educational experiences roughly twenty years later in France, where he would enroll in 1935 as a student in Paris’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure. (France, it is prudent to point out, colonized Martinique in the 17th century and fostered a slave economy there.) For our purposes here, two observations about Césaire’s philosophy are of prime importance. The first is that Césaire’s philosophy was richly influenced by the artistic and literary movement known as surrealism—a movement that, as pointed out by commenters like Robin D.G. Kelley and Michael Richardson, embraced the transformative potential of the imagination as an untapped resource for liberatory political movements. In Césaire’s hands, surrealism would inspire him to embrace poetry, and by extension the poet, as an epistemic link to political and cultural renewal. Poetry, Césaire believed, provided access to a world that the deadening experiences of white supremacy and other forms of social and economic exploitation that black people desperately needed. “At the root of poetic knowledge,” Césaire would write in his famous essay “Poetry and Knowledge” (1945),
lies an astonishing mobilization of all human and cosmic powers…What presides over the poem is not the most lucid intelligence, the sharpest sensibility or the subtlest feelings, but experience as a whole…Everything that has been lived; everything that is possible…Everything has a right to life. Everything is called. Everything is waiting.
Césaire believed that poetry had the potential to refocus our attention on the energies, present in life itself, that could be unleashed as both counterknowledge and counterforce to the epistemic and cultural world constructed by the European enlightenment—a world which, for its part, positioned the white person as the intellectual apex of creation, and who, in turn, subjugated all nonwhite and nonhuman life to its brutal rule according to what would emerge as the colonialist and capitalist logics of exploitation. This is, in part, why Césaire found the ritual practices of various African cultures to be so intellectually generative in his philosophy: such practices were based not in achieving mastery over nature, but were rather oriented towards cultivating relationships among human beings and between human and nonhuman life that would foreground their fundamental connectedness. This observation was one of the fundamental insights of négritude, a term invented by Césaire that would inspire pride in black existence. As Jason Allen-Paisant points out in his article, “Unthinking Philosophy: Aimé Césaire, Poetry, and the Politics of Western Knowledge” (Atlantic Studies 18.2 [2021]), “In contrast to the Western subject conceived in terms of separateness, the poetry of Négritude emphasizes the intertwinement of human consciousness and the natural world…Césaire’s poetry envisions, not some facile ‘time before’…but an alternative temporality…not a chronological one, but a temporality of the sacred that words against the predations of ‘colonial time’…”
This leads to the second relevant aspect of Césaire’s philosophy. Far from installing an ontological division into the world between white and black (as the idea has sometimes wrongly been taken to authorize), négritude actually forms a doorway towards a deeper universal understanding of (human) nature beyond the exploitative, deadly, and false exploitation posited at the base of the European enlightenment. Consider here the words of Aimé’s spouse and intellectual comrade, Suzanne Césaire (“Surrealism and Us” [1943]):
And so, far from contradicting, reducing or diverting our revolutionary attitude to life, surrealism gives it focus. It nourishes an impatient force within us, ceaselessly maintaining the vast army of negations….Our surrealism will then deliver it the bread of its depths. Finally those sordid contemporary antinomies of black/white, European/African, civilized/savage will be transcended…Colonial stupidity will be purified in the blue welding flame. Our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our amazing communions will be rediscovered.
This observation would be echoed by Aimé himself, who also envisioned a more authentic universalism at the root of his philosophy. Indeed, he described the goal for his fellow black people as one requiring an examination of “our own racial domain, sure as we are to encounter in depth the gushing sources of the universal human” (“Racial Conscience and Social Revolution [1935]”).
I believe Césaire’s work is pregnant with important insight for those of us working in the epistemology of the natural law. In other forums, I’ve tried to make an argument for how the queer epistemology of someone like José Muñoz can be meaningfully understood also as an epistemology of the natural law as Thomas Aquinas gives an account of it. The argument, in fine, is that, for both Aquinas and Muñoz, the natural law (for Aquinas) and knowledge of utopia (for Muñoz) constitute a participatory form of knowledge of human flourishing. The insight that black and queer people bring qua oppressed people is knowledge of human flourishing that foregrounds liberation, as well as knowledge of the strategies for achieving it. I believe that Césaire’s account of négritude, including the important account of poetry as a doorway into a world of vital political and cultural insight, also speaks to this reality of a knowledge that is fundamentally participatory and world-changing. Those of us working in the natural law stand to benefit from expanding our conversation partners in just these sorts of liberative directions, especially if we hope to uncover a more persuasive account of magisterium in the discernment of the natural law today.