There are two things that guide humanity: reason and love. 

Humans alone can use language and rational deliberation, as Aristotle observes: “All men by nature desire to know.” 

In his philosophy, we determine through reason how virtue is a tempered response between two extremes. It leads to eudaimonia—happiness in life—through this kind of rational deduction, and makes up the telos of human existence. 

In this analysis, then, reason guides towards some measure of truth about what it means to be human and how the soul should  be ordered. But reason alone is not enough.

The idea that the reason is the only thing that gives worth to humanity has been used throughout history to justify great atrocities. John C. Calhoun argued in his Speech on the Oregon Bill that slavery was a “positive good” because those who are incapable of reasoning for themselves need a master to rule over them. Using the example of children, Calhoun asserts, 

While infants they are incapable of freedom, being destitute alike of the capacity of thinking and acting, without which there can be no freedom (…) liberty is the noblest and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances.

If reason alone is the sole guide of humanity, then Calhoun is right: children and the disabled are lesser beings without developed faculties of speech and reason. But hearing this idea causes revulsion. Whether it is a result of nature or upbringing, we intrinsically know that it is wrong to declare people less human based on their mental abilities.

Christianity collides with the world of secular philosophy by injecting eternal love that consumes humanity into the divine life of God. In the openings to their respective Gospels, St. John the Apostle declares Christ as the Incarnate Logos, and St. Matthew hails Jesus as the long awaited Jewish Messiah. He is Eternal Reason and Divine Love. He manifests the love of God in the Incarnation and completes humanity.  

St. Augustine writes that God, who is Love, made us for Himself—we are restless until we rest in Him. We can know through reason that our souls are disordered and restless, and we can know how they ought to be ordered, but reason itself does not reorder the soul. We must act in accordance with reason to order our souls, just as an orchestra must work in accordance with the written music to perform a symphony.

A musical score of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 can sit in a dark closet for a long time, but without the propelling incentive of a musician, or better yet a group of musicians, it is just ink on wasted paper. The logos of sheet music is insufficient without the musician’s action. In the same way, simply knowing that courage is the midpoint between rashness and cowardice does not make one courageous. Courage needs to be compelled. 

St. Aquinas wrote, “To love is as a matter of fact an act of the will that tends towards the good.” Reason is dependent upon love to be the spark that compels movement. In the Divine Comedy, Virgil leads Dante through Inferno, Purgatorio, and through Paradisio where he beholds God. The process of Purgation that souls undergo is ultimately spurred on by the love of God in even the most disordered and restless souls—but the beginning instigation is love of God.

This can be seen very clearly in the relation of parents to children. In her book, Women and the New Race, Margaret Sanger states that “The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children.” She attempts to prove this claim by saying,

“The immorality of large families lies not only in their injury to the members of those families but in their injury to society. If one were asked offhand to name the greatest evil of the day one might, in the light of one’s education by the newspapers, or by agitators, make any one of a number of replies. One might say prostitution, the oppression of labor, child labor, or war. Yet the poverty and neglect which drives a girl into prostitution usually has its source in a family too large to be properly cared for by the mother, if the girl is not actually subnormal because her mother bore too many children, and, therefore, the more likely to become a prostitute.”

Throughout this chapter of her book, Sanger argues that having more than a few children causes economic trouble and unhappy people, but she never considers that parents love their children regardless of crime statistics or market reports. 

As with much of Progressivism in the twentieth century, Sanger ignores realities that common individuals innately know. We know that mothers clean their dirty children, rock their babies to sleep, and feed their hungry families because they are motivated by love. Why explain why children are blessings or why motherhood is an honorable occupation? There are innumerable rational reasons as well why large families are good for society, but even that rational deliberation is not the primary motivation for the exhausted mother who is cooking the third meal of the day. Even if in the moment a mother is annoyed that her son won’t stop wearing his dirty shoes on the clean carpet, she will still tend to his scraped knee because she loves him. Her stock portfolio will look no better after the bandage is applied, and her town may still be filled with crime after dinner is served, but motherly love transcends those ills. 

Reason, then, can recognize disorder, but like wind blowing a sail, only actions that participate in Divine Love can bring order to fruition. The same Love that moves the sun and the other stars moved the Son of God to lay down His life to restore order to the world.

Bradley Haley is a freshman who plans on studying philosophy and politics.