St. Augustine of Hippo on the Natural Law: Impression of the Eternal Law

SAINT AUGUSTINE'S REFERENCES TO THE NATURAL LAW in haec verba, in so many words, are not as frequent as his references to the eternal law. In large part, this is because in many instances where he refers to the eternal law, especially in his Confessions, he is referring to the eternal law as it is made manifest in men, which is synonymous with the natural law. As St. Thomas made clear generations later, relying significantly on St. Augustine's prior thought, the natural law "is nothing else than the rational creature's participation in the eternal law," lex naturalis nihil aliud est quam participatio legis aeternae in rationali creatura. S.T. I-IIae, q. 91, art. 2. The natural law is the eternal law from the perspective of the rational creature.

One of those significant references to the natural law that we have had the opportunity to see in the context of the references to the eternal law, comes from St. Augustine's work entitled On Eighty Three Diverse Questions or De Diversis Questionibus Octoginta Tribus:

From this ineffable and sublime arrangement of affairs, then, which is accomplished by divine providence, a natural law [naturalis lex] is, so to speak, inscribed upon the rational soul, so that in the very living out of this life and in their earthly activities people might hold to the tenor of such dispensations." (Boniface Ramsey, tran.).

Hac igitur ineffabili atque sublimi rerum administratione, quae fit per divinam providentiam, quasi transcripta est naturalis lex in animam rationalem, ut in ipsa vitae huius conversatione moribusque terrenis homines talium distributionum imagines servent.

De div. quest., 53(2). Part of the providential arrangement of God, that is, part of the eternal law, that governs the entire cosmos is that man's rational nature should be inscribed with this natural law. The eternal law is within us, though its transcendent promulgator God is without us, and yet though the transcendent source of this law is without us, he remains intimately bound within us. This is the mystery of the internus aeternus that was the theme of our view of St. Augustine's Confessions. To view the eternal law or the natural law as some law imposed upon us from the outside by some tyrannous God is an absolute caricature of that law. The natural law is as much ourselves as we are, and in violating it, we are violating our fundamental nature, we are violating who we are, what we are made for, and who we are to be. Though in doing so we commit great injustice to God and to his beneficence and providence, and this aspect of sin should not be downplayed, it remains nevertheless equally important to stress that the natural law is the law that is intimately part of our being, so that it acting against it, we are betraying ourselves. We are like Judas, betraying our very nature, our internus aeternus, by following inordinately some created good or some passionate impulse for thirty pieces of silver. In trading with the natural law, by sloughing off our internus aeternus, we are like Jacob's son Esau, who exchanges his birthright for a mess of pottage.

St. Augustine Ordained Bishop

The natural law, in so many words, again makes its appearance in St. Augustine's Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount:

For who but God has written the law of nature (naturale legem) in the hearts of men? that law concerning which the apostle says: "For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing them witness and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another, in the day when the Lord shall judge the secrets of men." [Rom. 2:14-16] And therefore, as in the case of every rational soul, which thinks and reasons, even though blinded by passion, we attribute whatever in its reasoning is true, not to itself but to the very light of truth by which, however faintly, it is according to its capacity illuminated, so as to perceive some measure of truth by its reasoning . . .

Quis enim scripsit in cordibus hominum naturalem legem nisi Deus? De qua lege Apostolus dicit: Cum enim gentes, quae legem non habent, naturaliter quae legis sunt faciunt, hi legem non habentes ipsi sibi sunt lex; qui ostendunt opus legis scriptum in cordibus suis, contestante conscientia illorum et inter se invicem cogitationum accusantium aut etiam excusantium, in die qua iudicabit Deus occulta hominum. Quapropter si omnis anima rationalis etiam cupiditate caecata tamen cum cogitat et ratiocinatur, quidquid in ea ratiocinatione verum est non ei tribuendum est sed ipsi lumini veritatis, a quo vel tenuiter pro sui capacitate illustratur, ut verum aliquid in ratiocinando sentiat . . . .

De Serm. Dom. in Mont., 2.9.32. The linkage between the eternal law and the natural law is made quite explicit in St. Augustine's De libero arbitrio:

Therefore, let me explain briefly, as well as I can put it in words, the notion of that eternal law which is impressed upon our nature: 'It is that law in virtue of which it is just that all things exist in perfect order.'

Ut igitur breviter aeternae legis notionem, quae impressa nobis est, quantum valeo verbis explicem, ea est qua iustum est ut omnia sint ordinatissima . . .

De lib. arb., I.6.15.

St. Augustine in his Study by Carpaccio

During the course of that dialogue with Evodius, St. Augustine speaks about the quality of reason that exists in man, and how it distinguishes him from the beasts. Man shares life with vegetative and animal life (nutrition, growth, reproduction, health), and he shares the knowledge that he lives (e.g., senses, movement, even self consciousness). Man has somethings that he does not share with the brutes, such as the ability to laugh or to joke, i.e., risibility. "Anyone with a true discernment of human nature will say that this is a human quality, though of a lower order." De lib. arb., 1.1.18. Man also shows other unique qualities, the desire for glory and lust for power (he mentions love of praise, but had St. Augustine a dog, one wonders how he could have included this as specific to humans. What dog does not seek the praise of his master!). But these latter can make man unhappy if not subjected to reason. It is therefore reason that seems to be the compass of order in man:

Whatever sets man above the beast, whether we call it 'mind' [mens] or 'spirit' [spiritus] or, more correctly, both since we find both terms in Scriptures, if this rules over and commands the other parts that make up man, then man's life is in perfect order [tunc esse hominem ordinatissimum]. . . . We are to think of a man well-ordered, therefore, when his reason rules over these movements of the soul, for we must not speak of right order, of or order at all, when the more perfect is made subject to the less perfect. . . . It follows, therefore, that when reason, [ratio] or mind [mens], or spirit [spiritus], rules over the irrational movements of the soul, then that is in control in man which ought to be, by virtue of the law which we found to be eternal.

Illud est quod volo dicere: hoc quidquid est, quo pecoribus homo praeponitur, sive mens, sive spiritus, sive utrumque rectius appellatur (nam utrumque in divinis Libris invenimus), si dominetur atque imperet caeteris quibuscumque homo constat, tunc esse hominem ordinatissimum. . . . Hisce igitur motibus animae cum ratio dominatur, ordinatus homo dicendus est. Non enim ordo rectus, aut ordo appellandus est omnino, ubi deterioribus meliora subiciuntur . . . . Ratio ista ergo, vel mens, vel spiritus cum irrationales animi motus regit, id scilicet dominatur in homine, cui dominatio lege debetur ea quam aeternam esse comperimus.

De lib. arb., 1.8.18.

Detail of Fresco of St. Augustine

The notion of the natural law is also vividly recalled and given a splendid image by St. Augustine in his work on the Trinity, De Trinitate. In Book IV, St. Augustine speaks of the inner testimony in the soul of man the sinner that witnesses of God's existence, and that witnesses of the law of God that should govern his behavior. There is a sense in man, as if he has lost something, a state of blessedness and friendship with God, that he now no longer has. (This should not be perverted into thinking that St. Augustine believe in re-incarnation or the pre-existence of souls.) Rather, there is a witness in fallen man's nature of his prior state. The wound in him attests to his prior sense of wholeness.

For hence it is that even the ungodly think of eternity, and rightly blame and rightly praise many things in the morals of men. And by what rules do they thus judge, except by those wherein they see how men ought to live, even though they themselves do not so live? And where do they see these rules? For they do not see them in their own [moral] nature; since no doubt these things are to be seen by the mind, and their minds are confessedly changeable, but these rules are seen as unchangeable by him who can see them at all; nor yet in the character of their own mind, since these rules are rules of righteousness, and their minds are confessedly unrighteous. Where indeed are these rules written, wherein even the unrighteous recognizes what is righteous, wherein he discerns that he ought to have what he himself has not? Where, then, are they written, unless in the book of that Light which is called Truth? Whence every righteous law is copied and transferred (not by migrating to it, but by being as it were impressed upon it) to the heart of the man that works righteousness; as the impression from a ring passes into the wax, yet does not leave the ring.

. . . . unde omnis lex iusta describitur, et in cor hominis qui operatur iustitiam, non migrando, sed tamquam imprimendo transfertur; sicut imago ex anulo et in ceram transit, et anulum non relinquit.

De Trin., 14.15.21. The natural law, therefore, is independent of a man's mind, even of a man's moral state or nature. This law has a source outside of man, namely, his Creator. Any law that righteous or just, omnis lex iusta describitur, is copied and transferred, not by migration, but by impression, non migrando, sed tamquam imprimendo transfertur, just like an image that is impressed unto wax by the signet ring of a King, sicut imago ex anulo et in ceram transit, et anulum non relinquit. So the eternal law never departs from God's eternity, and yet is transferred, as a ring transfers its image to wax, upon the heart of every man who works justly, that is, does good. The natural law is thus an image of the eternal law writ in the heart of man, impressed there by the Lord who made him. Just as man is made in God's image and likeness, and so participates in a manner in being, though God's being is never imparted, so likewise does man participate in the natural law, though the eternal law is not quite imparted as a possession of man. We do not become Gods and do not become autonomous legislators, but we bear the image of God and the image of the Divine Legislator. We are always radically and substantially different from the God in whose life we share, and from the eternal law with which we are impressed. We are not autonomous, but as John Paul II might put it, we remain theonomous.

As was common amongst the Fathers of the Church, St. Augustine links the natural law with the Golden Rule. "[T]his theme of popular ethical teaching found in the New Testament, was popular with the Fathers." Crowe, 66. St. Augustine was no exception. One sees the reference of the natural law in St. Augustine's 25th Sermon on Psalm 118:

No one injures another without at the same time hoping the same will not be done to himself, and in this respect he transgresses the law of nature; the very fact that he does not want to suffer the fate he inflicts on someone else means that he cannot plead ignorance of the natural law. Was this natural law not present in the people of Israel? Certainly it was, for they too were human. They could no more have been without the natural law than they could have been alien to the human condition itself.

Nullus enim est qui faciat alteri iniuriam, nisi qui fieri nolit sibi: et in hoc transgreditur naturae legem, quam non sinitur ignorare, dum id quod facit non vult pati. Numquid autem lex ista naturalis non erat in populo Israel? Erat plane, quoniam et ipsi homines erant: sine lege autem naturali essent, si praeter naturam humani generis esse potuissent. Multo magis ergo praevaricatores facti sunt lege divina, qua naturalis illa sive instaurata, sive aucta, sive firmata est.

Enarr. Psal., 118, 25.4.

Perhaps the best synthesis of St. Augustine's notion of the natural law may be taken from his correspondence. In Letter 157 (Crowe mistakenly cites Letter 158), a letter that he writes to a correspondent named Hilary, St. Augustine outlines his view on the natural law, seeing it in Pauline and Jeremian fashion as written in man's heart, as incorporating the Golden rule, and as supplemented by the positive legislation of the Mosaic law. The letter itself would warrant expansive treatment in itself, but here we shall only provide an exemplary quote:

Hence, since there is also a law in the reason of a human being who already uses free choice, a law naturally written in his heart, by which he is warned that he should not do anything to anyone else that he himself does not want to suffer, all are transgressors according to this law, even those who have not received the law given through Moses.

Proinde quoniam lex est etiam in ratione hominis qui iam utitur arbitrio libertatis, naturaliter in corde conscripta, qua suggeritur ne aliquid faciat quisque alteri quod pati ipse non vult; secundum hanc legem praevaricatores sunt omnes, etiam qui legem per Moysen datam non acceperunt.

Epist., 157.

Here shall end our patchwork treatment of St. Augustine and his doctrine of the eternal law and natural law. An obvious lacuna in this treatment is the absence of St. Augustine's great work De civitate Dei, On the City of God. However, to do it any sort of justice, that work requires a focus all of its own. Before we take part, however, it might be à propos to provide a synopsis or summary of all these teaching, one from the mind of Étienne Gilson as found in his The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine:

The Catholic Philosopher and Historian

of Philosophy Étienne Gilson

There is a law in God which, in Him, is simply God Himself, and to this law everything which is not God is subject. We call it the eternal law. Its content is a prescription of the divine reason or God's will ordering the preservation of the natural order and forbidding its disturbance. This immutable law illumines our conscience as the divine light enlightens our understanding. What the first principles of knowledge, seen in the eternal ideas, are to our reason in the order of knowledge, the first principles of morality are to our conscience in the order of action. There is therefore a kind of law in us also, consisting of the imperative commands of conscience; its rules are so many primary certitudes. We call it the natural law. It derives its certitude from the fact that it is simply a kind of transcript in our souls of the eternal law subsisting immutably in God. Consequently, all the detailed commands of our moral conscience, all the changing acts of legislation governing peoples spring from one and the same law. It is constantly being adapted to meet various changing needs. But in itself it never changes. Everything lawful in the individual and in the city is derived from it. It is truly the law of laws.

The fundamental demand the eternal law imposes on the universe in general and upon man in particular is that everything be perfectly ordered (ut ominia sint ordinatissima). Now in all places and at all times order should have the lower subject to the higher. There is no doubt that, generally speaking, everything created by God is good. From rational creatures to the lowliest of bodies, there is nothing man cannot use lawfully. His difficulty consists in distinguishing between things, all of which are good, but not equally good: he has to weight them, estimate their proper value, subordinate external goods to the body, the body to the soul of man, and then, within the soul, make the senses subject to reason and reason to God.

Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (Vintage 1967), 130-31 (footnotes omitted).


All english quotations from De libero arbitrio (The Free Choice of the Will) are from the translation of Robert P. Russell, O.S.A. in the text St. Augustine, The Teacher, The Free Choice of the Will, Grace and Free Will (CUA 1968); english quotations from Exposition 25 of Psalm 118 are from Maria Boulding, trans., Exposition of the Psalms 99-120 (New York City Press, 2003). English translation of Letter 157 is taken from Roland Teske, S.J., trans., Letters 156-210 (New York City Press, 2004). All latin quotations are taken from the excellent website on St. Augustine's works: http://www.augustinus.it/latino/.

St. Augustine of Hippo: Eternal Law Everywhere, Part 2

CONTINUING OUR STUDY OF THE ETERNAL LAW in St. Augustine's works, we shall now turn to his De libero arbitrio (On the Freedom of the Will or On Free Will). In his De libero arbitrio, his study on the existence of evil written in the context of a dialogue between Augustine and Evodius, St. Augustine describes the eternal law as the highest or supreme reason (summa ratio). It is the law under which the cosmos operates, and under which mankind is to operate if he is to find happiness. It is a law that is beyond us, and which we have no right to judge. It is a law that we will not see it if we focus on created goods, and not try to look beyond them.

During the course of this dialogue, St. Augustine gives a forthright definition of the eternal law:

Then let me briefly explain, as much as I can, the notion of the eternal law that is impressed on us: it is the law according to which it is just that all things be perfectly ordered.

Ut igitur breviter aeternae legis notionem, quae impressa nobis est, quantum valeo verbis explicem, ea est qua iustum est ut omnia sint ordinatissima.

De lib. arb., I.6.15. This eternal law demands that we turn away from things temporal, or perhaps, look through them or beyond them to the God who made them, and fixate upon the divine and eternal to which they speak.

So the eternal law demands that we shift our love from temporal things and aim it toward what is eternal.

Iubet igitur aeterna lex avertere amorem a temporalibus, et eum mundatum convertere ad aeterna.

De lib. arb., I.15.32. When reason, mind, or spirit control the irrational impulses of the soul, a human being is ruled by the very thing that ought to rule him, namely, according to the law that is eternal. De lib. arb., I.8. This suggests that we will not see the eternal law if we act outside the pale of the eternal, if we do not allow ourselves to be governed by reason, by mind, by spirit, and instead and are focused on temporal reality alone, subjecting ourselves to the tyranny of the passions, something St. Augustine stressed with such personal experience in his Confessions.

St. Augustine Ordained Bishop

In this work, St. Augustine famously distinguishes between temporal law and eternal law, and equally significantly, calls the eternal law summa ratio or supreme reason. He also links the eternal law with the temporal, making the latter subordinate and participatory of the eternal law, setting the stage for the concept of the natural moral law and its role in governing human legislation:

Can that law which is called the supreme reason (summa ratio), always to be obeyed, by which the bad merit misery, the good happiness, in reference to which temporal law is rightly enacted, rightly altered (recte fertur recteque mutatur)--can that law appear to an intelligent being as otherwise than immutable and eternal? Can it sometimes be unjust that the evil should be unhappy, the good happy, or that a moderate and responsible people should create its own magistracies, or that an evil and dissolute people should lack this power? . . . At the same time I would have you see that in temporal law there is nothing just and right that men do not derive for themselves from this eternal law (nihil esse iustum atque legitimum quod non ex hac aeterna sibi homines derivaverint). (Crowe, 64, trans.)

Illa lex quae summa ratio nominatur cui semper obtemperandum est et per quam mali miseram, boni beatam vitam merentur, per quam denique illa, quam temporalem vocandam diximus, recte fertur recteque mutatur, potestne cuipiam intellegenti nonincommutabilis aeternaque videri? An potest aliquando iniustum esse, ut mali miseri, boni autem beati sint? aut ut modestus et gravis populus ipse sibi magistratus creet, dissolutus vero et nequam ista licentia careat? . . . . Simul etiam te uidere arbitror in illa temporali nihil esse iustum atque legitimum quod non ex hac aeterna sibi homines derivaverint.

De lib. arb., 1.6.15.49-50. Like the excerpt we quoted in the last blog entry from Contra Faustum, this part of St. Augustine's dialogue was also popular with theologians, particularly those who discussed the doctrine of the natural law. For example, Crowe notes that St. Thomas Aquinas cited or referred to this parituclar passage five times in his articles in the Summa Theologia he devoted to the topic of the eternal law. Crowe, 64 n. 48.

St. Augustine in his Study by Carpaccio

It is implicit from St. Augustine's treatment of the eternal law in that part quoted above that the eternal law had a role in the administration of the affairs of men. Temporal law--that is the law of men--must conform to it. It is only in reference to the eternal law that human law or temporal law is rightly enacted or rightly altered, recte fertur recteque mutatur. Nothing is just in the affairs of men, unless it derives from the eternal law, nihil esse iustum atque legitimum quod non ex hac aeterna sibi homines derivaverint. Indeed, St. Augustine's De libero arbitrio is the source of what is probably the most celebrated concept or phrase, and the most commonly criticized by legal positivists who bristle at the thought that moral law, or the eternal law, or any other kind of higher law, ought to have anything to do with the affairs of men, or at least in the study of law. It is the source commonly given for the pithy principle: Lex iniusta non est lex, an unjust law is not law. The actual words of St. Augustine are not in fact precisely that, but put forth essentially the same principle: Nam mihi lex esse non videtur, quae iusta non fuerit. "So a law that is not just does not appear to me to seem a law." De lib. arb.1.15.11. St. Thomas Aquinas also quotes this part of De libero arbitrio during the course of his so-called "Treatise on Law," that is, that portion of the Summma Theologica that is devoted to the study of the eternal law, divine law, natural law, and human law.

The eternal law is directly concerned with human happiness: Hoc enim aeterna lex illa . . . incommutabili stabilitate firmavit, ut in voluntate meritum sit; in beatitate autem et miseria praemium atque supplicium. Itaque cum dicimus voluntate homines esse miseros, non ideo dicimus, quod miseri esse velint, sed quod in ea voluntate sunt, quam etiam eis invitis miseria sequatur necesse est. Quare non repugnant superiori rationi, quod volunt omnes beati esse, nec possunt; non enim volunt omnes recte vivere, cui uni voluntati vita beata debetur: nis quid habe adversus haec dicere. De lib. arb., I.6.16. It is an incommutable, stable, and firm law by which the human will that conforms to it is rewarded, either with happiness, if it is followed, or with misery, if one departs from it. To avoid misery, it is necessary to follow the principles of this law. The eternal law is not repugnant to higher reason, and it desires all men's happiness, though it cannot compel it. It will not conform itself to man, but man must conform himself to it.

Therefore, true liberty is not available outside the truth of the eternal law, nor is happiness available to he who does not adhere to it: Deinde libertas, quae quidem nulla vera est, nisi beatorum, et legi aeternae adhaerentium. De lib. arb., I.15.32.

It follows that the eternal law is a judge that may not be judged; it may not be criticized. It is an enormity to suggest that man should judge the law of God. Man may, in a manner, know the eternal law, but only if purified from inordinate loves that distract him or blind him to God and his law. So does St. Augustine state in his De vera religione:

Deus summa ista lex est secundum qua ratio judicat, sed quam judicare non licet. Nec iam illud ambigendum est, incommutabilem naturam, quae supra rationem animam sit, Deum esse; et ibi esse primam vitam et primam essentiam, ubi est prima sapientia. Nam haec est illa incommutabilis veritas, quae lex omnium artium recte dicitur et ars omnipotentis artificis. Itaque cum se anima sentiat nec corporum speciem motumque iudicare secundum seipsam, simul oportet agnoscat praestare suam naturam ei naturae de qua iudicat; praestare autem sibi eam naturam, secundum quam iudicat, et de qua iudicare nullo modo potest. . . . Aeternam igitur legem mundis animas fas est cognoscere, judicare non fas est.

De vera relig., c. 30.56-30.57, 58. The eternal law is the divine reason itself, and it is the judge of the true and the good; accordingly, the creation is not in a position to judge it. The eternal law is the prior principle of all life, every created essence, all wisdom. It has the same incommutability as truth. Both truth and the eternal law are firm and unchangeable. The eternal law is the law of all arts, and the art of the omnipotent artist, God himself. Inasmuch as it informs all created nature, nature must conform to it, and nature is not in any position to judge it. And although man may not know it in all its intricacies, he can apprehend that it exists, and he can know that it is the height of hubris to presume to judge it, judicare non fas est.

Detail of Fresco of St. Augustine

In is clear from a review of St. Augustine's Confessions, and from a look at various of St. Augustine's other works: his Contra Faustum, De ordine, De libero arbitrio, and De vera religione, that the concept of the eternal law was a fundamental one in St. Augustine's thought. It is one of the veins of his Weltanschaung, one of whose central features was the notion of God's providential rule over all of his cosmos, with a specific solicitude towards man. As a rational creature with an eternal soul, man had the dignity of voluntarily participating in the plan of God, the eternal law, and in so doing he would find himself acting in accord with the will of God, with truth, with reason. By refusing to allow his unruly passions the leading role in his life, but by instead subjecting them to the higher faculties of reason and of spirit, by looking beyond the mere temporal to the eternal, even the internus aeternus, the eternal internal in himself, by his willing submission to the summation of all reason, the summa ratio, of the eternal law, man would find happiness, beatitude, his place in the cosmos. Ultimately, as St. Augustine makes clear, post-lapsarian man cannot do this alone, but must rely on the grace of God that is given in Christ and through the sacramental life of the Church. The new law of the Gospel is what allows him to re-conform himself to the law of all ages, the law of truth, the universal law which itself Divine Wisdom.

St. Augustine of Hippo: Eternal Law Everywhere, Part 1

ST. AUGUSTINE INVOKES THE CONCEPT of the lex aeterna in many of his writings outside his justly famous Confession. In view of the massive corpus of St. Augustine's work, our effort to gather together and discuss some of them cannot represent itself to be exhaustive. Although we may not be able to see each Augustinian lex aeterna tree in the Augustinian lex aeterna forest, at least we can see a sufficient number of Augustinian lex aeterna trees so as to recognize the species. In this blog entry, we will focus on the most commonly cited texts that are referred to, outside the Confessions, where St. Augustine mentions the eternal law. We will introduce these texts with a background of what was the basis for St. Augustine's concept of the eternal law. In one sense, St. Augustine's notion of the eternal law is Platonically-derived, or at least it may be said to have similarities to Platonic and Stoic philosophical notions. As Crowe puts it, "St. Augustine thinks of [the eternal law] in terms of his teaching on the ideas in the mind of God, the archetypal Platonic forms that he saw, not in a world apart [as did Plato and his followers] but in the Divine Intellect, as the 'enduring and unchanging forms of everything that comes to be or could come to be.'" Crowe, 64. That is not, however, to suggest that St. Augustine did not fundamentally believe that the concept of the eternal law was contained in the revealed word of God. St. Augustine understood the concept of the eternal law as being part of and parcel, indeed, one of the basic parts and parcels, of the Christian world view as it was revealed in nature (through reason) and revelation (through faith).

St. Augustine believed he found the source for the eternal law in, and ties the notion of the eternal or universal law to, the concept of the Divine Wisdom in Scripture. The two are succinctly equated in his De Diversis Questionibus Octoginta Tribus (On Eighty-Three Diverse Questions), in Question No. 79, where he discusses the acts of Pharaoh's magicians relative to the Mosaic miracles: Est enim lex universatatis divina sapientia. De div. quest., 79. "For the universal law is divine wisdom." What this did was join (with proper modification) the Heraclitean/Stoic/Platonic/Plotinian/Ciceronian notions of eternal order and law with the Judaeo-Christian (especially Johannine) notions of a transcendent, personal God as revealed in the Old Testament, and most notably, in the New Testament, in Christ. Crowe, 62 (citing A. Schubert passim and Truyol y Serra, 80-88.).

St. Augustine of Hippo

For St. Augustine, all creation--that is all existence, all life--was both ruled and preserved by a providential God, and this implied law, the eternal law. The "laws of the most high God preserve and govern," summi Dei legibus contineri et gubernari. De div. quest., 46.

The notion of the law in God's providential rule is even more clearly stated in St. Augustine's treatment of the questions arising from the Hebrew taking of the Egyptian gold and silver in Question No. 53, where the eternal law, as it relates to rational creation, is equated with the natural law.

From this ineffable and sublime arrangement of affairs, then, which is accomplished by divine providence, a natural law [naturalis lex] is, so to speak, inscribed upon the rational soul, so that in the very living out of this life and in their earthly activities people might hold to the tenor of such dispensations." (Boniface Ramsey, tran.).

Hac igitur ineffabili atque sublimi rerum administratione, quae fit per divinam providentiam, quasi transcripta est naturalis lex in animam rationalem, ut in ipsa vitae huius conversatione moribusque terrenis homines talium distributionum imagines servent.

De div. quest., 53(2). Thus, God's providence extends not only to the brute creation, but all life, including that creation that has reason and free will. The eternal or universal law is that law which governs the entirety of the cosmos in accordance with the wisdom of a personal God, one who is concerned with such details as the falling of a sparrow, or the hairs on one's head. In reference to rational creation, it is equivalent to the natural law. St. Augustine was convinced that "in particular, divine providence has care for the actions of men. Those who deny this, desert God and bear their own ruin about them." Crowe, 63. Crowe cites for this proposition excerpts from St. Augustine's discussions of Psalm 109 and of Psalm 145. They may be quoted in full at this point:

deserent Deum . . . quia non creedunt Deum curare quid agant.

. . . hanc habent perniciem cogitationibus suae in seipsis ut dicant Deum res humanas non curare.

God deserts . . . those which do not believe God to take care of all that which he has created

Those have pernicious thoughts in themselves who say that God does not take care of the human race.

Enarr. in Ps. 109, 145. With the awareness that St. Augustine understands the eternal law (which he equates with Divine Wisdom or the universal law, and in rational creation with the natural law) as the providential rule of God over his creation, we can turn now to the Augustinian references in his other works.

St. Augustine of Hippo at his Desk

We will begin by reviewing St. Augustine's polemic against the Manichean sect written against Faustus, one of its leaders, his Contra Faustum Manichaeum. We will then look at some of the references to the eternal law in St. Augustine's philosophical work, De ordine (On Order). Following that, we will look at the mention of the eternal law in St. Augustine's work on the issue of free choice and free will, De libero arbitrio. Other works wherein the eternal law is mentioned include De vera religione (On True Religion) and St. Augustine's Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. The final work that we will look at is St. Augustine's discussion of the eternal law in St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei (On the City of God).

The notion of the eternal law is clearly and expressly mentioned in St. Augustine's work that arose from his dispute with the Manicheean sect, specifically in his Contra Faustum Manichaeum. In Book 22 of that polemic against Faustus, the Manichean bishop, St. Augustine famously defines the eternal law, and sin as the violation of it.

Sin, then, is any kind of deed, or word, or desire whatsoever against the eternal law. And the eternal law is the divine reason or will of God, which requires the preservation of natural order, and forbids the breach of it.

Ergo peccatum est, factum vel dictum vel concupitum aliquid contra aeternam legem. Lex vero aeterna est, ratio divina vel voluntas Dei, ordinem naturalem conservari iubens, perturbari vetans.

Contra Faust.22.27. This was a celebrated text, and was frequently cited almost from the moment it was published by St. Augustine. It is found peppered throughout the works of the Scholastic theologians in the middle ages, both as a definition of sin, and as a definition of the eternal law. Sin has cosmic proportions, in that it violates not just some positive commandment of God, though it clearly may do that as well. More fundamentally, sin is an injection of disorder into the universe of creation. It is a violation of the law of the cosmos, an assault against its integrity, and a violation of God's plan for it. Man's dignity is therefore not only found in the fact that he is made in the image and likeness of God, that he bears that internus aeternus. Man's dignity, or perhaps his great responsibility, is equally seen in the fact that his behavior, even the slightest, is of cosmic proportion. By violating the eternal law, sin disturbs the harmony of the cosmos. It also violates both the will of God and the divine reason of God implicit in the eternal law, since the eternal law is ratio divina vel voluntas Dei, the divine reason or will of God.

Stained Glass Window Depicting St. Augustine of Hippo

We also see mention of the eternal law in St. Augustine's De ordine, one of St. Augustine's first works following his conversion. This work presents a sweeping view of the relationship between order in the real world external to man, and the world within him. It seeks to explain the meaning of evil in the world, one of the philosophical and theological problems St. Augustine struggled with as he moved from Manicheeism to Catholic Christianity. He refers to an unchanging, fixed, and unshaken law, the very law of God, which is, in a manner of speaking, transcribed into the souls of the wise. We are urged to discover this law of God, which is found within our very souls, our internus aeternus, and there to discover how to live virtuous lives that conform to the good, and are rightly ordered and harmonized with the divine plan. Failure to do so may result in reproof for our own good, as we kick against the goads of the eternal law.

This discipline is the very law of God, which, while remaining always fixed and unshaken with him, is transcribed in a manner of speaking into the very souls of the wise, in order that they may know that they may live better and more excellently depending upon on their contemplating this law more perfectly in their minds, living it more diligently in their lives.

Haec autem disciplina ipsa Dei lex est quae apud eum fixa et inconcussa semper manens, in sapientes animas quasi transcribitur, ut tanto se sciant vivere melius tantoque sublimius, quanto et perfectius eam contemplantur intellegendo, et vivendo custodiunt diligentius.

De ordine, 2.8.25.

In his book on devoted to the topic of free will and the existence of evil, De libero arbitrio (On Free Choice of the Will), written as a dialogue between him and Evodius, St. Augustine describes the eternal law as the ultimate source of rationality that orders the cosmos as a whole. The eternal law's reach is further: it commands the behavior of the individual man, and it is the measure, the moderator, between men, and thus the ultimate foundation of human law. We will handle St. Augustine's treatment of the eternal law in his De libero arbitrio as well as some other works in our next blog posting.

St. Augustine of Hippo: Confessions and the Eternal Law as Internus Aeternus, Part 2

REJECTION OF THE ETERNAL LAW IS SELF-BLINDING, as St. Augustine states in his Confessions. But it is always the case that we are morally blinded from seeing the eternal law by the created order; we are dazzled by the lesser lights of beautiful things in God's creation. It is perhaps as if created things were basilisks: things the sight of which seems to engender in us moral turpitude, moral blindness, even moral death. But St. Augustine makes it clear that beautiful things, while fleeting, are not evil, and so do not, in themselves, engender moral blindness or death. In his Confessions, St. Augustine clearly rejects a Manicheean or Neoplatonic dualism, where spirit is good and matter evil. Augustine, however, does see that created beauty plays a role in sin. But it is not beauty per se, but our misuse of created beauty, or our disordered attraction to created things that are otherwise beautiful and good that is the cause of sin. The created beauty about us is the cause of moral blindness or death not because it is evil, but because it may be loved inordinately, that is, in ways that are not beautiful.

St. Augustine does not disdain the beauty of the world; he indeed relishes in the beauty that is in it, recognizing it as a trace or signature of God, the beauty ever ancient and ever new. But temporal beauty, wherever we find it, is just that: temporal. Any created beauty is not the internus aeternus, which is beauty eternal that too late St. Augustine learned to love. See Conf. 10.27.38. And our use of temporal beauty needs to be ordered so that it complements, and in a sense follows, and does not distract from, the internus aeternus, the eternal law, the eternal beauty. In his Confessions, St. Augustine regrets that he failed to regulate his disordered passion for women in his youth, and "fixed a bound to their sweetness," so that the tides of his youth "might have spent themselves upon the conjugal shore," and enjoyed the blessings of family as the law of God prescribes (sicut praescribit lex tua, domine). Conf., 2.2.3. Better even than marriage would it have been if he had been able to restrain the passion entirely for the sake of God himself in the gift of celibacy, and could thereby expected the greater happiness of the Lord's own embraces (felicior expectarem amplexus tuos). Conf., 2.2.3. As it was, he enjoyed sexual relations with women in a manner not consonant with the eternal law, and so blinded himself to the God, the internus aeternus, that was present with him, and before him, and within him, though, in his moral blindness, he saw him not.

St. Augustine by Phillippe de Champaigne

St. Augustine elaborates a few chapters later on the goods of this world, expanding beyond the desires of the flesh between the sexes that, by God's law, are ordered to marriage, procreation, and family. He addresses all created goods, and seeks to place them within a proper hierarchy of desire. It is a paragraph that is remarkable for its moderateness, and advocates not so much asceticism, as temperateness:

There is a desirableness in all beautiful bodies, and in gold, and silver, and all things; and in bodily contact sympathy is powerful, and each other sense has his proper adaptation of body. Worldly honor also has its glory, and the power of command, and of overcoming; whence proceeds also the desire for revenge. And yet to acquire all these, we must not depart from you, O Lord, nor deviate from your law [adipiscenda non est egrediendum abs te, Domine, neque deviandum a lege tua]. The life which we live here hath also its peculiar attractiveness, through a certain measure of comeliness of its own, and harmony with all things here below. The friendships of men also are endeared by a sweet bond, in the oneness of many souls. On account of all these, and such as these, is sin committed; while through an inordinate preference for these goods of a lower kind, the better and higher are neglected, even you, our Lord God, your truth, and your law [et veritas tua, et lex tua]. For these meaner things have their delights, but not like unto my God, who has created all things; for in Him do the righteous delight, and He is the sweetness of the upright in heart [rectorum corde].

Conf., 2.5.10. Sin, then, is simply the acting out or willing of this disordered desire. It is the inordinate love of things, which though good in proper order, or in proper proportion, or in due measure, become evil for us when inordinately, disproportionately, or immoderately loved. Even such a good as friendship must be within or under God, who is our friend supreme. Conf., 4.9.14. What happens in such immoderate desire or love is that internus aeternus, that is God, under which all things ought to be ordered, is pushed aside or is demoted from his proper place. And by acting against the internus aeternus, we violate the law of God, the lex aeterna, which is also the lex interna, and we thereby lose God, though he never loses us.

None loses you, but he who leaves you. And he who leaves you, where does he go, or to where does he flee, but from you well pleased to you angry [a te placido ad te iratum]? For where does he not find your law in his own punishment? And your law is the truth, and the truth you [et lex tua veritas et veritas tu].

Te nemo amittit nisi qui dimittit, et quia dimittit, quo it aut quo fugit nisi a te placido ad te iratum? nam ubi non invenit legem tuam in poena sua? et lex tua veritas et veritas tu.

Conf., 4.9.14. "And your law is the truth, and the truth you!" Et lex tua veritas, et veritas tu! The eternal law, truth, God, all joined by the implied copula of identity. Indeed, by avoiding the compula is (est) between lex, veritas, and tu (Deus), law, truth, you (God), perhaps St. Augustine desires to stress their absolute identity, avoiding any Clintonesque ambiguity in the word "is". The eternal law = truth = God. Assertio ambigua non est. By acting outside of the eternal law, we act outside of truth, by acting outside of truth, we act outside God, though we never really flee God. But because of the state of our soul caused by our choice, we change a God well pleased to a God angry, and, though St. Augustine neglects to mention it, it is a "fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" when were are outside his law. (Heb. 10:31). For even outside his law we are in his law, and we find in his law our own punishment, which is nothing but the necessary fruit of our own act against the internus aeternus; violating the lex aeterna is violating the lex interna. Sin is therefore not only an act against God, an insult and act of injustice against him, but equally an insult to ourselves. And whereas God is not hurt by our sins (to suggest that God is hurt would be to suggest that we can change God, that God is passible, which is blasphemy; although unquestionably our act is a great injustice against God), we, passible creatures that we are, are the only ones hurt by our sins.

Augustinus und der Teufel (Saint Augustine and the Devil) by Michael Pacher

Acting against the internus aeternus, the lex aeterna, veritas, Deus (it is all one and the same), puts us in a form of torpor, of moral slumber, spiritual lethargy, even one that may feel (in the fuzziness ambivalence of our state) and we may mistakenly classify as sweet (dulciter). Conf. 8.5.12. But the reality is that no one would prefer the state of drowsiness when one finally comes to the sober waking state. And this is true for the man that wakes to internus aeternus, the lex aeterna, the veritas that is God. At some point in time expressly or formally, and perhaps always implicitly or materially, St. Augustine knew that he should rouse himself from his ambivalent state between sleep and wakedness. "So it became certain to me," St. Augustine says, "that it would be better to give my self up to your love [caritas], than to give myself up to my own cupidity [cupiditas]." Conf. 8.5.12.

But the former course pleased me and overcame me, the latter pleased me and bound me. For I did not have the means to answer your calling to me, "Awake, you who sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light." And to you showing me on every side, that what you said was true, I, convicted by the truth, had nothing at all to reply, but the drawling and drowsy words: "Presently, see here, presently," "Give me a while." But "presently, presently," had no present; and my "Give me a while" went on for a long while. In vain did I "delight in your law after the inner man [legi tuae secundum interiorem hominem]," when "another law in my members [alia lex in membris] warred against the law of my mind [legi mentis meae] and brought me into captivity to the law of sin [lege peccati] which is in my members." For the law of sin [lex peccati] is the violence of custom, whereby the mind is drawn and held, even against its will; deserving to be so held in that it so willingly falls into it. "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death" but your grace only, through Jesus Christ our Lord?

Sed illud placebat et vincebat, hoc libebat et vinciebat. Non enim erat quod tibi responderem dicenti mihi, `surge qui dormis et exsurge a mortuis, et inluminabit te Christus,' et undique ostendenti vera te dicere, non erat omnino quid responderem veritate convictus, nisi tantum verba lenta et somnolenta: `modo,' `ecce modo,' `sine paululum.' sed `modo et modo' non habebat modum et `sine paululum' in longum ibat. frustra condelectabar legi tuae secundum interiorem hominem, cum alia lex in membris meis repugnaret legi mentis meae et captivum me duceret in lege peccati quae in membris meis erat. Lex enim peccati est violentia consuetudinis, qua trahitur et tenetur etiam invitus animus eo merito quo in eam volens inlabitur. miserum ergo me quis liberaret de corpore mortis huius nisi gratia tua per Iesum Christum, dominum nostrum?

Conf. 8.5.12. This discussion, clearly drawing from St. Paul's letter to the Romans (7:22-25), is the story of the ambivalent soul. In this section, there are a lot of laws that St. Augustine appears to mention here, but they may be reduced to two, and their interaction in the soul half-awake and half-asleep causes an impossible irresolution. There is a call upwards, and a pull downwards. There is a desire to be awake, but the desire to remain in the comfort of one's slumber. There is the desire to rouse into a better life, but the heavy momentum or intertial resistance which seems impossible to overcome. Our waking souls are like Jean Buridan's ass, seemingly unable to decide between the hay of the lex aeterna and the hay of the lex peccati. We are stuck in the internal epic struggle between two regimes in man, two regimes that are at odds. The first regime is that of the internus aeternus, where God in us is chief, and where the lex aeterna, which is also the law in our mind seek rule. The other regime is where the Devil is chief, where the lex peccati, the so-called fomes peccati, the "violence of custom," violentia consuetudinis, rule by default of our fallen human state. Only Christ's grace can provide the impetus that gets our souls out of their ambivalency, that ends the tug-of-war between laws that is within us, and places us solidly into the camp of the lex aeterna. Grace is the divine addendum that creates the catalysis, that sufficiently overcomes the urge of the lex peccati, the lex membris nostris of Romans 7:23. Grace appeared personified as Lady Continence to St. Augustine elsewhere (Conf. 8.11.27), saying, "Stop your ears against those unclean members of yours upon the earth, that they may be mortified. They speak to you of delights, but not as the law of the Lord your God (lex domini dei tui)."

The catalysis caused by the grace of God through Christ gets St. Augustine over the ambivalence caused by the equipotent pulls of the two laws in man, the lex aeterna which is part of the internus aeternus, and the lex peccatis or lex membris, which is part of the disorder in the nature of post-lapsarian man. The shift in him is patent in the prayer he makes in the Eleventh Book of his Confessions:

Lord, have mercy on me and hear my desire. For I think that it is not of the earth, nor of gold and silver, and precious gems, nor decorative apparel, nor honor and power, nor the pleasures of the flesh, nor the body's necessaries during this life of our pilgrimage; all which are added to those that seek your kingdom and your righteousness. Behold, O Lord my God, where my desire comes. The unrighteous have told me of delights, but not such as your law, O Lord. [non sicut lex tua, Domine] Behold where comes my desire. Behold, Father, look and see, and approve; and let it be pleasing in the sight of your mercy, that I may find grace before you, that the secret things of your Word may be opened unto me when I knock. I beseech, by our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, "the Man of your right hand, the Son of man, whom you made strong for yourself," as your Mediator and ours, through whom you have sought us, although not seeking you, but did seek us that we might seek you, [per quem nos quaesisti non quaerentes te, quaesisti autem ut quaereremus te], your Word through whom you have all things, and among them me also, your only (begotten), through whom you have called to to adoption the people who believe, and therein me also. I beseech you through him, who sits at your right hand, and "makes intercession for us," "in whom are hid all treasures of wisdom and knowledge." Him do I seek in your books. Of him did Moses write; this he himself said; this Truth said.

Conf., 11.2.4

Fresco of St. Augustine by Botticelli in the Church of Ognissanti, Florence

The eternal law, therefore, is the law that the leads us to heed to the internus aeternus. Heeding the internus aeternus, which remains supressed while we are in the sloughs of slavery, under the tyranny of of the fomes peccati, while we are chained to the demanding lex peccati, at first leads to the equipolent situation, where the lex aeterna and the lex peccati have seeming equal claim upon the struggling soul. Grace, the catalyst, breaks the tie, and sends the penitent sinner into the company of the saints. His life become re-ordered in light of the lex aeterna, and his desires find origin in the internus aeternus, and find joy in the easy yoke and light burden of the lex Domini.

What is the end of the lex aeterna? "The law," St. Augustine says, "is good to edify, if a man use it lawfully." Ad aedificationem autem bona est lex, si quis ea legitime utatur. Conf. 12.18.27. Why? Because the end (finis) of the law, says St. Augustine, quoting 1 Tim. 1:5, is "charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned,"caritas de corde puro et conscientia bona et fide non ficta. Conf. 12.18.27.

And what, or better, who, is love? Deus caritas est. God is love. So the lex aeterna has its beginning, its source, in the internus aeternus, which is God. The lex aeterna, which is nothing other than God and truth, is the means by which we are edified, if used legitimately. And what is the end of this legitmate use? Love, which is to say, God himself. For St. Augustine, God is the source of the eternal law, the eternal law is the means that comes from the source and the royal way whose end is God. So God is the source, means, end of the eternal law. And the source, means, and end is to be found, and all it wants is discovery, in the internus aeternus in each and every human person.

This completes our review of the lex aeterna in St. Augustine's Confessions. We will now turn to his mention of the lex aeterna in his other works.

St. Augustine of Hippo: Confessions and the Eternal Law as Internus Aeternus, Part 1

WE WILL BEGIN OUR REVIEW OF AUGUSTINE's teaching on the eternal law and natural law by focusing on the references to the eternal law in his Confessions, a work, that, as we mentioned in our last blog entry, John Paul II described as one "that is simultaneously autobiography, philosophy, theology, mysticism and poetry, a work in which those who thirst for truth and know their own limitations have always discovered their own selves." To understand the concept of the eternal law as St. Augustine understood it means that we need to come to grips with his anthropology. John Paul II mentions that one of St. Augustine's themes, as it were, is the God-man relationship. St. Augustine did not understand man apart from God, and so his anthropology is nothing but a part of his theology. St. Augustine saw God as present in the human person, and therefore God's eternal law was ever present there. This notion of God as "the eternal internal," internus aeternus, is central to his concept of law, for it means that the eternal law, which is equivalent to God, is also the "the eternal internal," the internus aeternus, in man. Conf. 9.4.10. Man cannot escape this internus aeternus, he can only refuse to believe in it and refuse to love it more than the internus temporalis or the externus temporalis, the temporal within him, or the temporal without him, and in so doing he lapses into moral and intellectual darkness. John Paul II states in his Apostolic Letter Augustinum Hipponesem:

But it was above all in studying the presence of God in the human person that Augustine used his genius. This presence is both profound and mysterious. He finds God as "the eternal internal,"(90) most secret and most present(91)—man seeks Him because he is absent, but knows Him and finds Him because He is present. God is present as "the creative substance of the world,"(92) as the truth that gives light,(93) as the love that attracts,(94) more intimate than what is most intimate in man, and higher than what is highest in him. Referring to the period before his conversion, Augustine says to God: "Where were You then for me, and how far away? And I was a wanderer far away from You.... But You were more internal than what was intimate in me, and higher than what was highest in me";(95) "You were with me, and I was not with You."(96) Indeed. he insists:

"You were in front of me; but I had gone away from myself and did not find myself, much less find You."(97) Whoever does not find himself does not find God, because God is in the depths of each one of us.

AH, II.2. (footnotes below).

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo

It is within this sort of relationship between God and man that the eternal law plays a role. The eternal law is the eternal internal law, the most secret and yet most present law, more intimate to man than man himself and the laws he posits for himself, the law is higher than what is highest in him. In reality, this relationship between man and the eternal law is derivative, in fact, it is identical to, the relationship between man and God:

He writes in the De Trinitate that man "is the image of the one whom he is capable of enjoying, and whose partner he can become."(99) This faculty "is in the soul of man, which is rational or intellectual . . . immortally located in his immortality," and therefore the sign of his greatness: "he is a great nature, because he is capable of enjoying the highest nature and of becoming its partner."(100)

AH, II.2 (footnotes below).

Keeping this notion of the eternal internal, the internus aeternus, in mind, we can now turn our attention to the references to the eternal law in St. Augustine's Confessions. For example, in his Confessions, St. Augustine chastises men, with whom he was probably familiar during his life as a rhetorician and professor of rhetoric, for being sticklers when it comes to human conventions and custom such as those arising from grammar and rhetoric. Though sticklers for such rules, standards, and customs as they relate to grammar and speech, yet they ignore the infinitely more important "eternal rules of everlasting salvation," the aeterna pacta perpetuae salutis, that "unwearied law," lege infatigabili, that exhibits itself not in a "science of letters," but in "the writing of conscience," in scripta conscientia, and the divine commandments and the Golden Rule found therein. Conf. I.18.28. Such men, intimately familiar with the rules of grammar and speech, are more concerned whether the say hominem or 'ominem, than whether they are disregarding the the great rules of existence, the eternal law of God that speaks to us through principles of the natural law. They are focused on the internus temporalis or the externus temporalis, as it were, and so fail to see the internus aeternus.

Fresco of St. Augustine

Augustine admits that he was foolish like most men, and was not able to see the eternal law of God, that most perfect law of God Almighty, the lege rectissima dei omnipotentis, that which is always and everywhere the same, ipsa ubique ac semper esset. He acted more like a fool in an armory who put greaves on his head instead of a helmet, and then complained that they did not fit.

Nor had I knowledge of that true inner righteousness (iustiam veram interiorem), which does not judge according to custom, but out of the most perfect law of God Almighty (ex lege rectissima dei omnipotentis), by which the manners of places and times were adapted to those places and times-being itself the while the same always and everywhere (ipsa ubique ac semper esset, non alibi alia nec alias aliter), not one thing in one place, and another in another; according to which Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses, and David, and all those commended by the mouth of God were righteous, but were judged unrighteous by foolish men, judging out of man's judgment, and gauging by the petty standard of their own manners the manners of the whole human race.

Et non noveram iustitiam veram interiorem, non ex consuetudine iudicantem sed ex lege rectissima dei omnipotentis, qua formarentur mores regionum et dierum pro regionibus et diebus, cum ipsa ubique ac semper esset, non alibi alia nec alias aliter, secundum quam iusti essent Abraham et Isaac et Iacob et Moyses et David et illi omnes laudati ore dei, sed eos ab imperitis iudicari iniquos, iudicantibus ex humano die et universos mores humani generis ex parte moris sui metientibus

Conf. 3.7.13. This law governs all things, as it is the underlying law behind the Providence of God. And therefore it is behind all temporal things, governing all things, even those seeming evils, from the schoolmaster's cane (as a child, Augustine disliked to learn Greek, and so apparently recalled suffering the schoolmaster's ferule) to the vicious tyrant who would burn Christians as torches. Some things we learn handily, under the suave impulsion of curiosity in freedom, others we learn by bitter compulsion of external restraint on our liberty and fear. All this is governed by the Providence of God.

But this last restrains the flow of that freedom, through your laws, O God, your laws (legibus tuis, deus, legibus tuis), from the switch of the schoolmaster to the martyr's testing, your laws being effective to mix for us a salutary bitterness, re-calling us back to you from the pestiferous delights which too us away from you.

Sed illius fluxum haec restringit legibus tuis, deus, legibus tuis a magistrorum ferulis usque ad temptationes martyrum, valentibus legibus tuis miscere salubres amaritudines revocantes nos ad te a iucunditate pestifera qua recessimus a te.

Conf., 1.14.23. This interplay between the eternal law of God and the natural law written in men's heart, is also referred to later in his Confessions, in St. Augustine's famous deliberation of the childhood experience in the stealing of a pear gratuitously, officiously since he had absolutely no need for it, and he stole it just so that he could throw it to swine to eat. It was an arbitrary, irrational theft. "Theft is punished by your law (lex tua), O Lord, and by the law written in men's hearts (lex scripta in cordibus hominum), which iniquity itself cannot blot out." Thus the lex tua, the lex Domini, the law of the Lord, is reflected in the lex scripta in cordibus hominum, the law written in the heart of man. It manifests itself even inconsistently in the corrupt heart of a thief, who will not suffer that the goods he has obtained by thievery ought to be stolen by any man. And yet man can be so wanton that--for the most arbitrary and shallow reasons, even no reason at all, or even for the sake of violating it and no other reason--he can violate that law, as St. Augustine himself did in stealing pears in his youth. Man has the faculty of free will in which he can act in accordance or against that eternal law, although he cannot escape the consequences of his decision. There is nothing man can do to escape the internus aeternus of the eternal law of God; it is indeed, writ in his nature, in his very intimate heart, and it remains there, even in the most inveterate sinner, like the hound of heaven, waiting for the bearer to turn to it. When he does, he will lament like St. Augustine, in what may be the most beautiful words in Western literature ever written by a penitent sinner come to God:

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! Et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam, et in ista formosa quae fecisti deformis inruebam. Mecum eras, et tecum non eram. Ea me tenebant longe a te, quae si in te non essent, non essent. vocasti et clamasti et rupisti surditatem meam; coruscasti, splenduisti et fugasti caecitatem meam; fragrasti, et duxi spiritum et anhelo tibi; gustavi et esurio et sitio; tetigisti me, et exarsi in pacem tuam.

Conf. 10.27.38. When we sin, it is not that we sin against the eternal law of God that is outside us, it is we sin against the eternal law of God that is within us. Our failure to discover the eternal law of God within us, and to embrace it, and to love it, is, in fact, a failure to discover ourselves, to embrace ourselves, and to love ourselves. This is because we have no meaning, we have no existence, we have no law, but for God. All this is true because God (and his eternal law, for there is no law only where there is no God) is the internus aeternus.

Disobedience of the eternal law, though it may go unpunished by human authority, and though it may even suggest a seeming liberty, is not to be mocked. Disobedience to the eternal law leads not only to punishment associated with divine justice, but it anticipates divine punishment by resulting in moral blindness. In such a manner St. Augustine viewed the academia at the schools in Carthage, which apparently acted under a false notion of academic freedom not unlike our professorate of today:

Different is it at Carthage where there exists among the scholastics a most disgraceful and unruly license. They burst in impudently, with gestures almost furious, disturb all order which is established for the good of the students. Divers outrage they perform, with a wonderful fastness, that would be punishable by law, were they not considered supported by custom [read academic freedom]; that custom evincing them to be the more miserable, in that they now do as licit is what by your eternal law shall never be lawful (quod per tuam aeternam legem numquam licebit); and they think they do it impunity, whereas they are punished with the very blindness whereby they do it, and suffer incomparably worse than what they do.

Contra apud Carthaginem foeda est et intemperans licentia scholasticorum: irrumpunt impudenter et prope furiosa fronte perturbant ordinem, quem quisque discipulis ad proficiendum instituerit. Multa iniuriosa faciunt mira hebetudine et punienda legibus, nisi consuetudo patrona sit, hoc miseriores eos ostendens, quo iam quasi liceat faciunt, quod per tuam aeternam legem numquam licebit, et impune se facere arbitrantur, cum ipsa faciendi caecitate puniantur et incomparabiliter patiantur peiora, quam faciunt.

Conf. 5.8.14. In ignoring the internus aeternus, and in seeking a law in another place, whether it be our will (autonomy); or the customs of men; or in the academic halls where all sorts of foolishness may be whispered in the halls, spoken of in academic conferences, or published in erudite journals under the guise of human ingenuity; or in the brothels; or in the bottle; or at the bank; in Main Street or on Wall Street or in the Red Light District, it matters not where, we are only blinding ourselves. There is no liberty in blindness, in self-mutilation, in the plucking out of our moral eyes. And refusal to listen and to cede one's will and one's reason to the internus aeternus, or what is the same thing, the lex aeterna, is not some act of maturity or independence or noble declaration of freedom. It is in fact, nothing less than some sort of perverse metaphysical self-spite, an acting out, in the life of the soul, of an Oedipal self-blinding. And we can hear the words of Tiresias to the Theban King Oedipus, that all the world's fortunes, bring but little joy, and all the world's raiment are but beggar's weeds, and that by desiring these temporal things inordinately, we have blinded ourselves, though we still wear the purple robes of a child of God, and the staff of one on pilgrimage in a strange land. Our job will be to come back home by listening to the internus aeternus, the lex aeterna that is our guide to sight and to haleness and joy.

And yet his fortune brings him little joy;
For blind of seeing, clad in beggar's weeds,
For purple robes, and leaning on his staff,
To a strange land he soon shall grope his way.

Footnotes to cited text of JP II, Augustinum Hipponesem
90. Confess. 9, 4, 10: PL 32, 768.
91. Cf. Confess. 1, 4, 4: PL 32, 662.
92. Ep 187, 4, 14: PL 33, 837.
93. Cf. De magistro 11, 38-14, 46: PL 32, 1215-1220.
94. Cf. Confess. 13, 9, 10 PL 32, 848-849.
95. Confess. 3, 6, 11: PL 32, 687-688.
96. Confess. 10, 27, 38: PL 32, 795.
97. Confess. 5, 2, 2: PL 32, 707.
. . .
99. De Trin. 14, 8, 11: PL 12, 1044.
100. De Trin. 14, 4, 6: PL 42, 1040.

St. Augustine of Hippo: The Natural Law as the Eternal Law in Man

THE ETERNAL LAW WAS AT THE HEART of St. Augustine's conception of law and of order, in the area of morality, and in the area of human law. Augustine's conception of the "eternal law" is one that encompasses the eternal plan of the world, a product of divine reason and divine will, a law which governs the entire abyss of the cosmos, including the very abyss of the cosmos within man, not with an arbitrary will, but within a divine ordering that is manifestive of reason, nay, even more: love. The existence of this eternal law is seen in the sheer magnitude and ordering of the cosmos, in the course of the stars and planets, and in the growth of plants and movements of beasts. It is inscribed in a particularly powerful way in the human soul as the natural law, the inward compulsion towards the moral life; its voice is conscience, and its imperium the good. In this next area of blog postings we will discuss St. Augustine, and review his concepts of the eternal law and the natural law. St. Augustine will be the last of Church Fathers whose work on the natural law we will review, and will close out our current series of the natural law in the Church Fathers.

St. Monica, St. Augustine's Mother

St. Augustine, Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis (354-430), is a giant in Christian thought. He was a Romanized African, a Berber, born in the ancient provincial Roman city of Tagaste, now modern day Souk Ahras (سوق أهراس‎) in the country of Algeria. St. Augustine was the product of a Christian mother--herself a saint--St. Monica, and a pagan father, Patricius by name. Augustine received a classical education, but the influence of his mother did not seem to take on the young Augustine. Probably as a result of the influence of his father, or perhaps the result of his peers, or perhaps the result of young passions too difficult to tame, or perhaps a combination of all three, Augustine soon rejected the Catholicism of his mother, and immersed himself in pagan thinking and pagan libertinism.

Icon of St. Augustine of Hippo

While studying rhetoric, Augustine had an intellectual conversion at the age of nineteen as he was reading Cicero's dialogue Hortensius, a work that is--alas--now lost. This sparked his interest in philosophy and in the life of the mind, but it did not change his hedonistic life style, and it did not bring him back to the Church, at least not at once.

Eventually, Augustine went to Carthage, where he studied rhetoric. In belief and in morals he continued the life of a pagan. He took to carousing, to womanizing, eventually spurning even marriage, and settling down with concubine, with whom he lived for almost thirteen years, and who gave him a son named Adeodatus. Later, as we shall see, in his Confessions, he complained about the unruly life of both the students and professors at Carthage. He taught in Tagaste, and then in Carthage, where he founded a school of rhetoric. After nine years in Carthage, he went to Rome, believing that he would best further his career there. Disappointed in Rome by the lack of paying students, he eventually went Milan where he obtained a prestigious position as professor of rhetoric at the imperial court there. Not very nobly, he abandoned his concubine, hoping to get into a marriage that was more socially acceptable, but he soon broke off his engagement and began a relationship with another concubine. Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo. During this time, Augustine became interested in the Manichee sect, a sect he was later to reject, largely because a disappointing meeting with one of the leaders of the sect, Faustus of Mileve.

After leaving Manicheeism, Augustine plummeted into the depressive depths of skepticism. "He fell into a profound depression," Pope John Paul II states in his Apostolic Letter on St. Augustine, "and indeed despaired of ever coming to know the truth." Augustinum Hipponensem, I (herein AH). However, he did not stay long in the sloughs of skepticism, but, prompted by, and responding to, the internal promptings of God's grace, and as a result of the combined efforts of his mother, the encouragement of his friend Simplicianus, his reading of the Neoplatonists who tore him from materialism, and his hearing of the homilies of the great St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan (all of whom were agents of God's actual grace), St. Augustine began his journey back to Christianity and to the Catholic Church.

Mosaic of St. Augustine (=St. Austin)

The internal crisis which eventually resolved itself into Augustine's accepting Christ and his Church came about by his reading of the life of St. Anthony of the Desert and the voice of a child, or perhaps an angel. The event is profoundly moving, and his told by St. Augustine himself in Book 8 (Paragraphs 28 and 29) of his Confessions (Outler, trans. with revisions) Here he speaks of what John Paul II called being "struck by the lightning-flash of grace." AH, II:

Now when deep reflection had drawn up out of the secret depths of my soul all my misery and had heaped it up before the sight of my heart, there arose a mighty storm, accompanied by a mighty rain of tears. That I might give way fully to my tears and lamentations, I stole away from [my friend] Alypius, for it seemed to me that solitude was more appropriate for the business of weeping. I went far enough away that I could feel that even his presence was no restraint upon me. This was the way I felt at the time, and he realized it. I suppose I had said something before I started up and he noticed that the sound of my voice was choked with weeping. And so he stayed alone, where we had been sitting together, greatly astonished. I flung myself down under a fig tree--how I know not--and gave free course to my tears. The streams of my eyes gushed out an acceptable sacrifice to thee. And, not indeed in these words, but to this effect, I cried to thee: "And you, O Lord, how long? How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever? Oh, remember not against us our former iniquities." For I felt that I was still enthralled by them. I sent up these sorrowful cries: "How long, how long? Tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now? Why not this very hour make an end to my uncleanness?"

I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which--coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, "Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it" [tolle lege, tolle lege]. Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon. For I had heard how [Saint] Anthony, accidentally coming into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what was read had been addressed to him: "Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me." By such an oracle he was forthwith converted to thee.

So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle's book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof." [Rom. 13:13-14] I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.

The event was one of transformation. Augustine sold all his inheritance, gave up his women, his hope for future advancement in the secular world, and returned to Africa where he began to live a monastic life with a group of his friends. Tragically, his son died soon after his conversion. Eventually, he was ordained a priest in the Hippo Regius (modern date Annaba (عنابة), Algeria. He was later ordained coadjutor bishop Hippo in 395, and upon succeeding to that post at the death of the existing bishop, St. Augustine remained as bishop of Hippo until his death at 430.

His labors on behalf of the Church and Christ show an indefatigable spirit. Unbelievably prolific in light of his episcopal duties which he took extremely seriously, and to which he devoted himself sedulously, St. Augustine left myriad works of various kinds. He had polemical works against the Arians, Donatists, Manichaeans, and Pelagians. He had doctrinal works such as his De doctrina christiana (On Christian Doctrine), De Trinitate (On the Trinity), or De libero arbitrio (On Free Choice of Will). He also wrote moral and practical works such as De mendacio (On Lying), De bono coniugali (On the Good of Marriage), and De sancta virginitate (On Holy Virginity). He penned works on Scripture, including commentaries on Genesis, St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (De sermone Domini in monte), and his celebrated commentary on the Psalms, Enarrationes in Psalmos. He also authored some more personal works such as his Soliloquies and his famous Confessions. He also penned a massive work on Christianity and history and political philosophy, De Civitate Dei, On the City of God, a work that he described as his magnum opus et arduum. He left numerous letters and numerous homilies. Most men could not read through it all in a lifetime.

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo

The effect of his teachings on the Church were great when he authored his works, and they remain significant to this day. As John Paul II stated it in his Apostolic Letter on St. Augustine, he "has been present ever since in the life of the Church and in the mind and culture of the whole western world." AH, pref. His notions of creation (ex nihilo), of grace, of original sin, of free will, of evil as the privity of good, of the natural law, of "just war," of marriage and its goods--one could recite a dozen more--all remain de rigeur for the theologian and religious scholar. There is scarcely any part of Catholicism, or of Western thought for that matter, that is unaffected by him. These works, along with the three unfinished works remaining at his death at seventy-six years of age, are evidentiary of his "sleepless diligence and to his unconquerable love for the Church." AH, III.

St. Augustine did not prepare a treatise dedicated to law. As Crowe stated it in his book on the history of the Natural Law: "St. Augustine . . . wrote no distinct treatise on law [, but] he provided almost all the elements of a formal scholastic Tractatus de legibus." Crowe, at 62. What this means, of course, is that St. Augustine's teaching on the eternal law, the natural law, and the interplay between these and human law, must be gleaned from his writings, which are numerous, and certainly beyond the grasp of this author. It is important, therefore, to remember John Paul II's warning, which is no less true for St. Augustine's teaching on law than it is for any other of his subjects: "It is difficult to venture forth upon the sea of Augustine's thought, and even more difficult to summarize it--this indeed is almost impossible." AH, II.

With that caveat firmly in mind, we will begin that review by focusing on the references to the eternal law in St. Augustine's Confessions, a work, that John Paul II described as one "that is simultaneously autobiography, philosophy, theology, mysticism and poetry, a work in which those who thirst for truth and know their own limitations have always discovered their own selves." AH, I. The eternal law, one might add, will be part of every man or woman's autobiography, even if, God forbid, he or she should reject it. It will be part of everyone's philosophy and theology, those worthy of the name. It will be at the heart of true mysticism, and will be the center of any poetry that speaks of the true and the good.