While the nature of malice often acts in direct ways like war to do its evil, it also operates in subtle, devious methods to carry out its agenda of hatred, revenge, or harm. While God suffers a blunt attack from atheism, blasphemy, and sacrilege, the enemy also uses roundabout plots to wage its warfare. While Satan’s fall from Heaven in his rebellion against God does not prompt a new open war, it provokes an indirect insidious attack by tempting Adam and Eve and causing the tragedy of the Fall. Harming the children deals a blow to the father, and destroying the happiness of Adam and Eve in Paradise declares war against God. The deviousness of evil always finds more cunning and vicious means to perpetrate acts of belligerence and retaliation.
To subvert creation, natural order, and moral law also asserts violence against God. In this artful way the strategy of evil in modernity continues its aggression against the Creator by deconstructing and subverting all that is natural, normal, human, and reasonable. While the rhetoric that underlies these tactics justifies them in the grandiose language of freedom, equality, rights, progressivism, liberalism, and enlightenment, they all have a single-minded goal—an underhanded attack upon God, the author of the created order, human nature, and the moral law. To destroy the natural or normal, willy-nilly, combats God. Since Nature functions as the handmaiden of God’s Providence to carry out His plan and purpose, any blow to Nature also becomes an assault upon God. This is the prevalent modern technique of warfare—to attack God by eliminating the universal meaning of “natural.”
One method of attacking God, the source of all life and creation, is to destroy the family that serves God’s great design for the fruitfulness and generosity of love. Strategies to destroy the family are legion: reinvent it as having a “plurality of forms” as the United Nations has done, redefine marriage as a same-sex union as The Supreme Court has decreed, encourage divorce for any or all reasons (“no fault divorce”), ruin the self-giving of love of husband and wife with contraception, substitute cohabitation for marriage, and legalize abortion. All these strategies substitute a man-made order for God’s providential design, abnormal practices for natural behavior, and new moralities and arbitrary laws for old traditions, the Natural Law, and The Ten Commandments.
To redefine the family as any form of arbitrary arrangement or assortment of people undermines the norm of the traditional family consisting of a father, mother, and children—the child’s need for both paternal and maternal love, example, and influence. To reinvent marriage as a same-sex union perverts the fruitfulness of love’s procreative nature and destroys the divine institution of marriage founded on the bond of man and woman’s unitive complementary love. To remove all stigmas and all deterrents from divorce repudiates sacred moral teaching about the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage and grants a respectable, normative status to an intrinsic evil. The attack upon God has assumed a blatant, relentless onslaught against everything designated as “natural,” even maleness and femaleness.
To prescribe, approve, and promote contraception as a benefit to marital harmony violates the gift of total self-donation in love, and to make contraception available as a standard practice for unmarried couples only encourages promiscuity and sexually transmitted disease. To make light of cohabitation and to tolerate it as a “lifestyle” or fashionable modern custom cheapens the beauty of love’s purity and mocks the magnificence of marriage. And to legalize abortion as a woman’s right or as a legitimate way to embrace a liberated way of life for women twists the meaning of justice by denying the fundamental right to life intrinsic to all human beings. If there is no “nature,” no Mother Nature or human nature and no masculine or feminine nature, then God’s created order no longer exists as pre-ordained, established, objective, wise, and universal.
If there is no Nature, it follows that there is no God as the Creator of heaven and earth and of man and woman and of marriage and love. And if there is no God, as a character Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov argued, “Everything is permitted.” If there is no Nature, there is no Natural Law, the self-evident truths of right and wrong written on the human heart and inscribed on the conscience—all the fundamental moral teachings like the Ten Commandments that no human being cannot “not know” by pleading invincible ignorance. As C.S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity,
Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of doublecrossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five . . . . Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman.
If everything is permissible because there is no Natural Law and no God, then all guilt is removed—no sin, no crime, no injustice, no shame, no disgrace, no evil—only intolerance and judgmentalism.
Yet no matter the ingenious ways man’s elaborate, torturous, or sophistic thinking attempts to deny Natural Law, God, sin, or guilt, he cannot change the structure of moral reality. Popular culture, legal decisions, politically correct ideologies, and propaganda can use all the powers of government, the influence of the media, and economic threats to browbeat human beings into accepting a world where everything is permissible, yet the Natural Law knows the difference between truth and lie. Truth, like nature, will “out” as the saying goes. If the conscience is dulled in the daytime by the many voices of propaganda that repeat good is evil and evil is good, it does not cease speaking in the night or at some quiet reflective moment. If all the members of a political party or the majority of judges in The Supreme Court call the unnatural the natural, it does not persuade the light of common sense. Mere legality never produces conviction or speaks to reason. Because truth has a grace attached to it, neither might, money, nor bribery can change the human heart or the Natural Law.
Because evil has a stench, the mind and heart detect the foul smell that the ugliness of evil always produces as Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in the bodily parts of aborted babies testifies. Abortionists like Bernard Nathanson suffered the haunting guilt that ultimately troubled his conscience, awakened a profound sense of remorse, and led to a conversion to the Catholic faith. Employees of Planned Parenthood like Abby Johnson no longer could tolerate the atrocity of shedding the blood of innocent children violently attacked in the womb with instruments that amount to weapons. The Natural Law never ceases to speak. Mother Nature will not be denied. The stark nature of evil will expose its raw brutish loathsomeness. God’s truth never changes and is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Just as legalized slavery and Soviet Communism were ultimately abolished, so too the fate of all unjust laws that do not conform to the Natural Law or God’s teachings is doom.
No matter how many governments or courts call evil good and legalize it, these decrees cannot pass the test of time, change the nature of things, win the heart, or gain the status of truth. Some portion of the human race and The Catholic Church will never stop opposing the unnatural and the unjust or adapt to it. Self-evident truths do not just exist as axioms or postulates in geometry but abide in the mind, heart, and conscience of the entire human race. All the might, lies, and attacks intended to deconstruct Nature, human nature, male nature, and female nature imagine a great triumph because of some leader’s decision or some political party’s victory “on this side of history.” But all the tragic consequences, deadly effects, and untold sufferings that attend these decisions prove beyond a doubt that the gates of Hell will not prevail in their war against God, Nature, and man no matter how many indirect assaults and treacherous weapons they wield. Satan’s open battle suffered a great defeat, and Satan’s underground war awaits the same fate. Man’s indelibly moral nature remains. Man’s endowment of Natural Law never dies. Guilt is as real as physical pain.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Queen of Heaven Academy and part-time for Northeast Catholic College.
