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What is a Moral Grammar?

This Rock Volume 18, Number 9   November 2007     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   What Freedom Means in the New Babel By Gregory R. Beabout   What is a Moral Grammar?   Words Don’t Always Mean What We Think   A Pro-Life State of the Union By Fr. Frank Pavone   Did John Write his Gospel? By Mark Shea   Further Reading   Strong Medicine: Canon Law and Excommunication By Pete Vere, JCL   Damascus Road Thirty Years after Baptism, Back in the Fold By Abbie Brown Collins   By the Book Hell? Yes! (Part II) By Jim Blackburn   Eyes to See The Solitary Wanderer Goes Astray By Michael Schrauzer   Truth be Told Secrets of the Spanish Inquisition Revealed By Robert P. Lockwood   Classic Apologetics I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church By Msgr. Ronald Knox   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Subscribe    Permissions

In order to decode the confusions of the new Babel, it helps to be able to recognize and understand competing "moral grammars." But, just what is a moral grammar?

While the term "grammar" is usually associated with the rules embedded in language, some theologians, philosophers and social theorists have stretched the meaning of "grammar" to refer to the order inherent in human actions and a way of life.

In one of the most famous books of Christian apologetics, John Henry Cardinal Newman describes the Grammar of Assent. In this case, Cardinal Newman uses the word "grammar" to mean the order implicit in various ways of affirming belief, especially religious belief.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), whom some people consider to be the most important philosopher of the 20th century, also stretched the notion of a "grammar." Wittgenstein begins his book Philosophical Investigations by reflecting on St. Augustine’s account of language. As Wittgenstein’s thought unfolds, the term "grammar" is expanded to mean a network of rules that determine what does and doesn’t make sense in a particular form of life.

As a young scholar, Wittgenstein thought that science and logic could explain everything (so that ethics and faith were unnecessary), but as he matured, he came to appreciate that modern science cannot explain everything. Wittgenstein suggested that we can understand the distinctive order in everyday, ordinary language. In his mature thought, Wittgenstein came to realize that theology, like ordinary language, makes sense, not according to the rules of modern science, but according to its own "grammar."

Wittgenstein’s notion of a grammar has been very suggestive for later thinkers. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has spent his career criticizing the grammar of modern individualism and trying to retrieve the grammar of virtue. The sociologist Robert Bellah, in his book Habits of the Heart, argues that Americans tend to speak using the grammar of individualism while engaging in forms of life that unwittingly draw from the older moral grammars of civic virtue and biblical faith.

This expanded notion of a grammar as the order embedded in human activities or in a way of life has sometimes been thought to imply a kind of relativism. Considered this way, it appears that, just as there is no way to decide if English is better than French, there seems to be no way to tell right from wrong. But this sort of moral relativism is not implied in the notion of a moral grammar. Wittgenstein wrote of "the common behavior of mankind," implying that there is a moral order (a deep grammar) embedded in human activity as such. Pope John Paul II sometimes used the term grammar in this expanded manner. For example, in his message celebrating the World Day for Peace (on January 1, 2005), John Paul II spoke of the "common grammar of the moral law."