Veritatis Splendor: Part 12--Lex Aeterna, Lex Intrinseca

“BEATUS VIR . . . IN LEGE DOMINI VOLUNTAS EIUS," blessed is the man for whom the law of the Lord is his will." With these words from the first Psalm, John Paul introduces his next point in his encyclical on the natural law, Veritatis splendor. Man's autonomy, he stated in his previous paragraph, is not give as a gift of God so that man may separate himself from God. Rather, the autonomy in man is relative, participatory, in that it ought to reflect the theonomy in which in participates, just like the natural moral law participates in the eternal law. Man's freedom and man's moral law is within God's freedom and law because it is "patterned on God's freedom," according to the official English translation, cum sit efficta secundum Dei voluntatem, "since it is effected [or made] according to God's will," in the original Latin.

For a man to abide by God's will is therefore consonant with the will that lies behind the freedom that God has given man. To act outside of that will is to use freedom in a manner not so willed, and, as a result, constitutes a perversion or abuse of freedom. Man is therefore not really free unless that freedom is used in conformity with God's will, which is to say, the natural moral law. Freedom is intended to do good and o avoid evil. How is this the separation of good and evil ends accomplished, and how are the means by which good is to be done and evil avoided determined? Through practical reason.

[I]n order to accomplish this [doing good and avoiding evil] [man]must be able to distinguish good from evil. And this takes place above all thanks to the light of natural reason, the reflection in man of the splendor of God's countenance. Thus Saint Thomas . . . [states] "that the light of natural reason whereby we discern good from evil, which is the function of the natural law, is nothing else but an imprint on us of the divine light" It also becomes clear why this law is called the natural law: it receives this name not because it refers to the nature of irrational beings but because the reason which promulgates it is proper to human nature.

VS, 42.

Human reason is not autonomous, as it operates under the governorship of God, the Creator of the universe, and the One Who in His Providence, sustains it and governs it through that "supreme rule of life, that "eternal, objective, and universal law by which God out of his wisdom and love arranges, directs and governs the whole world and the paths of the human community," that which, in the "classic doctrine," is known as "God's eternal law." VS, 43.** It is defined by St. Augustine as "the reason or the will of God, a God who commands us to respect the natural order and forbids us to disturb it." St. Thomas Aquinas defined it as "the type (ratione) of the divine wisdom as moving all things to their due end."†

And God's wisdom is providence, a love which cares. God himself loves and cares, in the most literal and basic sense, for all creation. . . . He cares for man not "from without," (extrinsecus) through the laws of physical nature, but "from within" (intrinsecus),through reason, which by its natural knowledge of God's eternal law, is consequently able to show man the right direction to take in his free actions.

VS, 43. The natural law is therefore not a lex extrinseca, an extrinsic law, a heteronomous law, but a lex intrinseca, and intrinsic law, a law fitted to man, natural to man, within man's very created design and being. It is a law most intimate and near.

I commit myself to Your Providence

Since the natural law participates in God's Providence, his divine wisdom, his "love which cares," it follows that the natural law is an expression of God's "love which cares." Sed Dei sapientia est providentia, amor, qui curam adhibet. God's providence cares and loves, curat et amat. More, since we are given freedom to follow the natural law, we are being invited by God "to participate in his [God's own providence, since he [God] desires to guide the world--not only the world of nature but also the world of human persons." It is God's manifest desire, given the gift of freedom and this intimate and near lex intrinseca, that God wills to have man participate in his Providence "through man himself, through man's reasonable and responsible care," through man himself, in imitation of God who gave him the gift, exercising that same "love which cares." St. Thomas Aquinas notes how the natural law is nothing less than a "human expression of God's eternal law," VS, 43, which means that man "partakes of a share of providence," being provident for both himself and for his fellow men, and indeed the world over which he exercises dominion. The natural moral law, then, is a law which loves and which cares for us: lex naturalils, lex intrinseca, curat et amat; it is a personal law, personal in terms of its source, and personal in terms of its object.

__________________________________
*The quotation is derived from the Summa Theologiae, IaIIae, q. 91, a. 2.
**Quoting VII, Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis humanae, 3.
***Contra Faustum, Book 22, chap. 27; PL 42, 418. ("ratio seu Dei voluntas quae iubet servare naturae ordinem et vetat turbare eum")
†S.T., IaIIae, q.93, a.1 ("divinae sapientiae ratione, etiam ex eo quod... ad debitum finem cuncta per eam moveantur")

Toward a Recapture of Nature in its Fullness

FOLLOWERS OF ST. THOMAS linked God's knowledge of vision (his scientia visionis) with the knowledge of future free acts of man; they were loathe to separate them. This foreknowledge in God, the Thomist argued, necessarily implies a congruent act of God's will or divine decree that such free act happen. The future free act is known by God in virtue of, in fact in that very decree; accordingly, no future act can exist unless God has also decreed its existence.

The fact that man's freedom operated under the divine causality did not bother the Thomist. Thomists felt secure with the notion that human freedom was created freedom, and so, being created, human freedom was to be measured relative to created causes or relative to divine causality. For St. Thomas Aquinas no man was free from divine causality. Human freedom, therefore, was exercised within the umbrella of divine causality or divine providence. In short, there was no concept of freedom from God or outside of God. Freedom was always seen as under God. In fact freedom from God or freedom outside God, was not seen as freedom at all, but as a fall into the abyss of slavery, and a vain one at that, for no one could outrun our outmaneuver God and his providence. A man could be relatively and yet truly free, and nevertheless be fully under the rule of God: "[B]ecause the same act of free choice is reduced to God as to a cause, it is necessary that whatsoever happens from the exercise of free choice be subject to divine providence. For the providence of man is contained under the providence of God, as a particular cause under a universal cause."* Even more directly: "[I]t is not repugnant to liberty that God is the cause of the free act of the will." Et sic non repugnat libertati quod Deus est causa actus liberi arbitrii. De malo, q. 3, a. 2, ad 4. See Long, 38-39.

God as First Cause: End of Human Nature

Molina, however, thought that the Thomist doctrine subverted man's freedom, and human freedom was a highly regarded commodity in the Renaissance. Pico de Mirandola had already published his famed Oration on the Dignity of Man, the manifesto of the Renaissance. With respect to future events, therefore, Molina sought to find some means to explain how God can know a future free act before it happens and yet assure that that act occurs freely, without being decreed or caused by God. Molina thus attenuated the causal role of God in the area of human liberty. While he tried mightily to reconcile human freedom and providence, Long--a committed Thomist--sees Molina "falling as it were by accident into the error whereby freedom is defined in respect to God rather than with respect to its finite and contingent effects." Long, 39.

In analyzing the concept of human freedom, Molina distinguished between different kinds of knowledge in God. In God, this knowledge is one and simple; however, this knowledge may be distinguished in reference to the objects of that knowledge. There are, Molina says, such things as necessary truths, which are naturally known, and which even God cannot change. An example would be the truth that bachelors are not married, or circles are round. These really are not at issue when it comes to the foreknowledge of future events. They are prevolitional, or perhaps better, supravolitional, i.e., they were outside of the will of God because God, by their very nature, could not change these truths. By definition, these truths are established by the way things are and have to be. God could not causes these things to be other than what they are. They were outside God's causality.

As to future events, Molina distinguished two sorts of events and the knowledge of God had arising out of them. Molina divided future events into contingent events and conditional future contingents or futurabilia. Contingent events were those which depend upon God's will alone, and the knowledge God has of these is absolutely free. When a contingent event is involved, God is the primary cause of it. An example of this would be God creating Adam. God could have or could have not created Adam, and that fact that God created Adam makes it true. And so this event is known by God because God caused it.

There is, however, in Molinist thought a concept of knowledge that relates to a situation that is midway between contingent truths and necessary truths. There are future events which, given certain conditions, would exist, but because of future conditions, will not, in fact, exist. These are events that depend upon the autonomous choice of the creature and relate to the future. These events involve futurabilia (future subjective contingents) or futura conditionata (future contingents). God is not their primary cause. Like the necessary truths they are prevolitional, outside of God's will and providence. The creature is their primary cause, so, from the divine perspective they are caused by secondary causes. They are outside God's causal order.

These future contingent events are known by God through what Molina, in his distinctive doctrine, called "middle knowledge" (scientia media). These events (called counterfactuals)** need not be come to pass, and if come to pass they do so not through God being their primary cause, but they come to pass depending on the choice of the creature.

The classic source text of this sort of knowledge is in the Gospel of Matthew:

Woe to you, Chorazin! woe to you, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes . . . And you Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

Matt. 11:21, 23.

God as Trinity: Man's Supernatural End

God knows through "middle knowledge" what would have happened in Tyre and Sidon and Sodom had miracles or mighty works been done there. Because God has this knowledge, Molinists say God has some control (but not total control) over the future. God knows through "middle knowledge" infallibly that, if Adam enters the store on April 5, he will buy galoshes instead of Wellingtons. He knows that if Adam were to enter the store on April 4, he would buy Wellingtons instead of galoshes. If God wants Adam to buy Wellingtons instead of galoshes, he will work things out (if He can and if He wills) so that Adam does not go to the store on April 5, but instead on April 4. In this manner, God achieves what he wills, but man remains entirely free and autonomous. God does not cause Adam to chose galoshes over Wellingtons on April 5. The cause of that choice is entirely Adam's autonomous. But God decrees the circumstances*** so as to achieve the result he wills without interfering with the freedom of his creature. The point is that "middle knowledge" represents God's knowledge without control. That means that within this middle knowledge there is no law.

And that's where the rub is. What Molina's theory does, unfortunately, is to exclude, at least speculatively, a huge part of man's activity outside of the causal order and providential governance of God, that is, outside his law. "The Molinist account unwittingly carries the implication that the domain of human action is outside divine providence insofar as outside divine causality." Long, 39. Molinism, especially if taken out of its Christian context, therefore leads to a concept of human freedom that focuses on freedom with respect to God rather than to the contingent and finite effects of God's providence, that is, secondary causes. And it is this theory that has led theologians not rooted in Thomistic doctrine to see freedom as necessarily meaning freedom, not from secondary causes, but from God's causality. Whether a cause is "contingent [and hence free] or necessary [and hence determined] is a function of that cause's relation to God." Long, 38. "That is, it is assumed that, to be free, a cause must possess the liberty of indifference with respect to divine causality." Long, 38. In fact, Long suggests that the "libertarian account of freedom as an absolute capacity outside of the governance of the omnipotent God is prevalent even among believers."**** Long, 39.

The Molinist proposition in the hands of the secular political or moral philosopher becomes a wicked notion indeed:

[I]f the human will is not subject to divine providence, then it is not ruled and measured by the eternal law. . . . Hence, if we affirm the theonomic conception of natural law, we need also to affirm that the human will is autonomous [of God] neither in being nor in action, but is moved to its act from without [by God], yet in such a manner that this motion is truly its own motion. That is to say that the very motion that is received by the will from God is that whereby it moves itself in free self-determination. Like existence itself, the positive substance of may action is most my own, yet also most a gift.

Long, 40. Ultimately, if we believe that the natural law participates in the eternal law (that is, is thenomic), we must believe that the human freedom is relative freedom, created freedom, and is a true freedom that is exercised under the Providence of God. Providence extends only to where there is power and no further. Wherever God's power is not exercised, that is, where there is freedom from God's causality, there can be no providence and no law.

Molina erred by creating an envelope of human freedom from God, and, while that thought may not have borne ill fruit while the social body was healthy and vigorous with Christian mores, it, like some sort of virus, waited until the body was weak to flare up into a feverish concept that man is not free unless he is free from God. To be sure, Molina had patched up his system with the notion of scientia media or middle knowledge. "The formulation of Molina has sadly outlived the profound Christian context of his work, which limited the ill effect of this formulation and prevented its worst implication from being drawn." Long, 39. This concept, in any event, is contrary to the received tradition. Its implication is that human action is outside divine providence, since, to be free, it would have to be outside of divine causality; that is, human freedom would have to be outside of the eternal law.

For Steven A. Long, Molina's "negative treatment of the dependence of human freedom on divine causality seems in historical terms to be one large stride in the direction of undifferentiated libertarianism of a sort that implies that the created will is a being a se," to itself, that is, self-regarding and autonomous. The consequence of such a position is disastrous:

A separate jurisdiction of human liberty is thus created that is literally beyond divine governance, so that it becomes difficult to imagine what difference even divine revelation could make to the situation.

Long, 41.

So it would appear, that the Molinist tradition as well as the Enlightenment positions "each carved out," in their various ways, "a dominion for natural human agency as absolutely independent of God. . . . tend[ing] toward making the natural realm--and particularly the natural realm of human agency--an utterly separate jurisdiction sealed off from providence." Long, 41.

The position is disastrous, as I said, because it spells the death knell for a traditional notion of natural law as a participation in the eternal law:

Within such a world, natural law, far from being what it was for St. Thomas--namely, nothing other than the rational participation of the eternal law--becomes instead the demarcation of a realm outside the governance of the eternal law. Natural law becomes, as it were, the "stalking horse" of secularism and naturalist reductionism. A more complete inversion of the character of the doctrine of the natural law cannot be imagined--indeed a transvaluation of all values. . . .

The convergent implication of secular and Molinist thought seems indeed to be the loss of nature and natural order as theonomic principles, and the loss of natural law as nothing else than a participation of eternal law. Once this theonomic character of natural order and natural law are lost, then sustaining the distinction of nature and grace simply formalizes the boundaries consequent upon the loss of God.

Long, 41, 43.

It really doesn't matter, then, whether a theologian speaks of the autonomy of man from God's causality, or whether the materialist speaks of there being no such thing as God's causality, or whether a Kantian speaks of both man's autonomy and the "causal closure" of matters physical to matters metaphysical. In any event, whether a corrupt Molinist, an Enlightenment thinker, or a Kantian, God no longer is ruler of man and of his day-to-day life. God in all three cases is banished. If God is not dead, he is irrelevant. This is practical atheism in its three strains.

It was this practical atheism that led de Lubac to "overstress teleology" and adopt the erroneous doctrine that human nature has not real natural end, but only an ultimate supernatural end, the beatific vision. De Lubac refused to keep man within the "terrestial cage" where he had been placed, a cage stored somewhere outside of the loving reach or knowledge of God. Long, 42-43. De Lubac was, in some sense, right. He was right to try to re-inject teleology in nature. He was right to want to try to tie the natural order into the divine one. But he was wrong in trying to "shoehorn" the supernatural order into the natural order, as if stuffing food down the gullet of a goose to change goose liver into foie gras. What de Lubac did was nothing less than a sort of theological gavage or force-feeding, making nature into something it was not intended to be. It did not solve the problem, the loss of the theonomic principle in nature, but confused it. Nature's theonomic order in its own right, separate and apart from the theonomic order in the supernatural calling of man, is not established by the de Lubacian solution. "[T]he loss of the theonomic character of natural order and law in its own right and not merely by analogy of attribution with supernatural order is an error of decisive importance." Long, 45.

What then is really needed, the de Lubacian proposal being wrong?

[T]he greatest need of contemporary thought is to rediscover the theonomic character of natural law, and more extendedly of natural order as such--which will require a vigorous return to metaphysics, natural theology, and ontology of nature.

Long, 47. This is the only medicine for the problems of the day. It is the answer to the fideist, the fundamentalist, the rationalist, the nihilist, the empiricist, the scientist, the materialist, the atheist, the agnostic, the relativist, the espouser of excessive human autonomy, the fatalist and determinist, the deist, the pantheist. Let the dead bury their dead theories. Let us, on the other hand, recapture the Thomist synthesis, the delightfully true balance, between the natural order, which is ordered ad unum Deum, to the First Cause, and the supernatural order, which, presupposing the natural, is ordered ad Deum unum et trinum, to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the one true and only God, to which Jew, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and whatever man holding whatever varietal of religion and philosophy of his own device, is called to worship into perfect freedom.

___________________________________
*S.T. I, q. 22, a. 2, ad 4. (Sed quia ipse actus liberi arbitrii reducitur in Deum sicut in causam, necesse est ut ea quae ex libero arbitrio fiunt, divinae providentiae subdantur; providentia enim hominis continentur sub providentia Dei, sicut causa particularis sub causa universali.); Hastings; see also S.T., I, q. 14, art. 9.
**This is the Achilles Heel of Molinism, the metaphysical status of "counterfactuals." Counterfactuals are writtten in the form, if x, then y, an antecedent and a consequent. If the antecedent is false, then how can the counterfactual consequent be regarded as true. Where is the metaphysical ground of the counterfactual being a truth that can be known if its antecedent is false?
***This, as Long notes, "treats the divine causality like that of a creature, neglecting the dependence of all created reality in being and action upon God." Long, 39. It also requires man to be autonomous from God so as to be considered free. It ignores the difference between being free as to secondary causes (finite and contingent effects, what Long calls elsewhere "terrestrial requirements"), versus being free as to primary causes (God).
****This raises another problem for Molinists that critics point to. Are we really free if our acts are determined by the circumstances into which we are placed? This is the so-called "determinism of circumstance." Long, 40.

The Plunder of Nature: Outside and Inside the Household

THE CONCEPT OF NATURE HAS BEEN DESPOILED by the barbarians of thought who styled themselves the enlightened ones. They have destroyed the outside structures, much like they burned churches and shattered their stained glass windows. They pillaged the interior, melted down the holy vessels, and spent what was valuable. What they left after their intellectual vandalism was a concept of nature in shambles. Ruins of nature, built by an unknown and unknowable architect who cared no longer for his structure. Ruins of nature, without the hearth of a spiritual soul or the smell of incense. Ruins of nature which no longer served a purpose, and end, for the altars of the natural temple of the Holy Spirit had been rent in twain. The human "nature" these men left to the world, was not the human "nature" that the men before them had known. These--we may count Hume, and Kant, and Comte, and Austin, and Bentham among them--left about as much of nature standing as the French Revolution left of the great monastery of Cluny, or the Revolutionists' children in the Old World left of the Coventry Cathedral in England or their children in the New World left of Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki, Japan. After these dismantlers, these inconoclasts of nature got done, what was missing? In a word, the theonomic principle of nature.

Urakami Cathedral after the Atom Bomb

But one may also identify what they left and what they substituted:

• They of deistic (Tindal) or pantheistic (Spinoza) persuasions severed nature from God, and saw nature as a "separate jurisdiction from divine authority and governance," no longer tied to any theistic account.


• Secular theories of progress and of morality, mainly utilitarian (Beccaria, Mill, Bentham), without regard to God or revelation were promoted.


• A reductive, materialistic and mechanical and non-teleological view of nature (Bacon), one that could be studied, and in fact could only legitimately be studied, by empirical methods alone (Locke).


• A rejection of any metaphysical thought, in both speculative and moral thinking, including any suggestion that God might be known through nature (analogia entis) or that any objective morality could be known through nature (analogia boni).

The problem of nature-in-shambles that confronted de Lubac cannot be placed entirely at the feet of secularist thought, though without doubt, especially if the intention of removing the theonomic in nature is considered, the lion's share belongs there. The problem, at least in Long's view, contains an ecclesiastical component. He sees the problem as a being the "convergent implication of [both] secular and Molinist thought." Long, 43.

The reference, of course, is to the Spanish Renaissance Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina (1535-1600). Long blames Molina for the current trend among Catholic theologians to "view free human action as standing outside divine governance and causality," an idea which, of course, is "incompatible with the understanding of nature as a theonomic principle." Long, 37. This is hardly what Molina--a commentator of St. Thomas Aquinas, part of the religious corps of of St. Ignatius, and loyal Catholic--would have intended. So how, in Long's view, did this come about?

Luis de Molina

At heart, the problem stems from Molina's emphasis on human liberty,* and his particular effort at reconciling this broad libertarian view of human liberty, on the one hand, with the concepts of God's providence, foreknowledge, predestination, and grace, on the other.

Now, the problem of reconciling human freedom, on the one hand,and God's providence and foreknowledge and the efficaciousness of grace, on the other, is, to put it mildly, knotty. And to outline both the Thomist view and the Molinist view on the matter and contrast them would, to do the matter justice, take a book in itself. This is hardly a matter to be handled in a blog posting.

But we shall try, beginning with our next post.

_____________________________
*In Molina's Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione. The controversy caused by the publication of this work resulted in Pope Clement VIII institute a special board of inquiry called the Congregatio de Auxilia, which met at least 181 times. The commission eventually drew up a list of propositions and in 1607 prepared a bull to condemn 42 propositions of the work. However, the bull was never published, as the Pope at that time, Paul V, decided to postpone the condemnation, and, in fact allowed the opinions of Molinism and Thomism to be held. In any event, despite surviving condemnation, the Jesuit order got the picture of the general disfavor toward Molinism and the General of the Jesuits at the time Acquaviva decreed in 1613 that the Jesuits should teach the Congruism of the Jesuit Francisco Suarez and refrain from teaching Molinist theories. In the late 1800s, the theories of Molina enjoyed revival. See generally Hastings, Selbie, Gray, eds., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 8 (s.v. "Molinism")

Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: The Eternal Law

MARITAIN INSISTS ON THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF THE ETERNAL LAW, as a faithful Thomist would be expected to do. The natural law's "definite meaning" requires the concept of the Eternal Law. For Maritain, the concept of Eternal Law "is not solely theological," i.e, a revealed truth; it is also a "philosophical truth, as well." Maritain, 40. The existence of the Eternal Law, then, is a truth that can be grasped by the use of reason and its ability to come to the conclusion that God exists, that he is the first cause of all being, "activating all beings." Maritain, 40. One thereby can arrive at a notion of philosophical Providence, that is, that the "entire community of the universe is governed by the divine reason." Maritain, 40.

Hence there is in God, as in one who governs the entirety of created beings, this very reality which is the judgment and command of the practical reason applied to the governing of a unified community: in other words, this very reality which we call law. Eternal Law is one with the eternal wisdom of God and the divine essence itself.

Maritain, 40. This is classic Thomistic doctrine: the Eternal Law is the eternal wisdom of God, indeed, it is God himself. It has deep roots in Stoicism and Platonism and the Church Fathers. As the Sachsenspiegel, the Mirror of Saxons, the ancient Germanic law code put it in its old German: Got is selber recht, dar umme is im recht lip,* "God is himself law, therefore law (or justice) is dear to him." The once-barbarian Saxon tribes clearly grasped this fundamental truth as tightly as they had grasped their scramseaxes, though modern barbarians, who no longer hold scramseaxes but instead iPods and iPhones, appear to have let the notion of the eternal law slip from their grasp.

Recourse to the concept of Eternal Law is needful if we are to find a sure foundation of natural law. In the classical view, law is a work of reason, and the natural law is therefore a divine work of reason the source of which must be "Subsistent Reason, the Intelligence which is one with the First Truth itself," that is to say, "the Eternal Law." Maritain, 40. "Hence there is in God, as in one who governs the entirety of created beings, this very reality which is the judgment and command of the practical reason applied to the governing of a unified community: in other words, this very reality which we call law."
--Jacques MaritainLaw, St. Thomas observes, is both in the ruler and the subject that is ruled, and so the Eternal Law is both in God (and is God) and is in us in a manner of speaking, "insofar as [man] participates in the measure and rule existing in the one who rules." Maritain, 41. This participation in the Eternal Law, in men and in a manner of speaking all creation, is called the natural law, and men, like all creation, participate in it "insofar as they derive from it the inclinations through which they then naturally toward their proper operations and ends." Maritain, 41 (quoting S.T. Iª-IIae q. 91 a. 2 co. "Manifestum est quod omnia participant aliqualiter legem aeternam, inquantum scilicet ex impressione eius habent inclinationes in proprios actus et fines.")

Man, however, participates in the Eternal Law in a markedly more dignified way that that part of creation which is not free and which does not have a rational nature.

We should note that, among all creatures, the rational creature is subject to divine providence in a particular way--a "more excellent way," St. Thomas writes--inasmuch as it has a share in providential government, by being provident both for itself and others."

Maritain, 41 (excellentiori quodam modo divinae providentiae subiacet). Accordingly, the rational creature participates in the eternal reason through its rationality, and as a result, even the rational creature has a natural inclination to the actions and ends that are proper to it. As St. Thomas Aquinas puts it: Unde et in ipsa participatur ratio aeterna, per quam habet naturalem inclinationem ad debitum actum et finem. (S.T. Iª-IIae q. 91 a. 2 co.) In the rational creature, these inclinations are in accordance with its nature, and are therefore "inclinations of knowledge," or "rational and intellectual inclinations." Maritain, 41. Yet, as part of creation generally, the rational creature also shares the general natural inclinations to which all material creation is subject, a "natural law" so to speak. But the rational creature, by virtue of its rationality, participates in the eternal law is a definitively distinct way; it has its own specific and unique "natural law." The rational creature has a specific concept of natural law wherein "all that is good and all that is evil is only an impression of the divine light in us." Maritain, 42.

At this point, Maritain refers us to article 4 of question 19 of the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae:

Wherever a number of causes are subordinate to one another, the effect depends more on the first than on the second cause: since the second cause acts only in virtue of the first. Now it is from the eternal law, which is the Divine Reason, that human reason is the rule of the human will, from which the human derives its goodness. Hence it is written (Psalm 4:6-7): "Many say: Who showeth us good things? The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us": as though to say: "The light of our reason is able to show us good things, and guide our will, in so far as it is the light (i.e. derived from) Thy countenance." It is therefore evident that the goodness of the human will depends on the eternal law much more than on human reason: and when human reason fails we must have recourse to the Eternal Reason.

Respondeo dicendum quod in omnibus causis ordinatis, effectus plus dependet a causa prima quam a causa secunda, quia causa secunda non agit nisi in virtute primae causae. Quod autem ratio humana sit regula voluntatis humanae, ex qua eius bonitas mensuretur, habet ex lege aeterna, quae est ratio divina. Unde in Psalmo IV, dicitur, multi dicunt, quis ostendit nobis bona? Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, domine, quasi diceret, lumen rationis quod in nobis est, intantum potest nobis ostendere bona, et nostram voluntatem regulare, inquantum est lumen vultus tui, idest a vultu tuo derivatum. Unde manifestum est quod multo magis dependet bonitas voluntatis humanae a lege aeterna, quam a ratione humana, et ubi deficit humana ratio, oportet ad rationem aeternam recurrere.

S.T. Iª-IIae q. 19 a. 4. co.

We see therefore an intimate relationship between the goodness of the human will, which depends upon reason, which in turn depends upon the natural law as its immediate measure, but which depends "all the more on the eternal law, which is the divine reason." Maritain, 42. This series of dependencies makes it clear that "the goodness of the human will depends much more on Eternal Law which is the Divine Reason than on Human Reason [or Natural Law]."* Maritain, 42.

The dependence is total, absolute. The dependence upon the Eternal Law is not merely limited to being some foundational yet distant root, foundation, or guarantee, which allows us to use our reason virtually independent and free of the divine reason. No, more actively, the "divine reason alone is the author of natural law, and natural law emanates from it." Maritain, 42. What this means is that "the divine reason is the only reason to be considered. . . . Indeed, in the case of Natural Law, human reason has no share in the initiative and authority establishing the Law, either in making it exist or in making it known." Maritain, 43.*** Man is not free to use his reason to make the natural law.

For Maritain, this is particularly significant because for him it means that both the content of natural law and the means of knowing that content are determined by God. Human discursive and conceptual reasoning is not the source or means of knowing the natural law. The source or means of knowing the natural law is through inclinations, through connaturality, through that intellectual feltness or intellectual tendentiousness which is built in man and which precedes, in both authority and dignity, man's conceptual and discursive reason.

The formal medium by which we advance in our knowledge of the regulations of Natural Law is not the conceptual work of reason, but rather those inclination to which the practical intellect conforms in judging what is good and what is bad. Through the channel of natural inclinations the divine reason imprints its light upon human reason. This is why the notion of knowledge through inclination is basic to the understanding of Natural Law, for it brushes aside any intervention of human reason as a creative factor in Natural Law.

Maritain, 43.

From this notion of the Eternal Law and the natural law's participation in it, and what it means, Maritain turns to the analogical character of the natural law. That will be the topic of our next post.

_____________________________________
*A copy of a manuscript of this document is available at Sachsenspiegel Online. The Mirror of Saxons has been the subject of a previous posting on Lex Christianorum on the Eternal Law. See Lex Aeterna: God is Law.
**The section in brackets was not in the original Leçon 2 - La loi naturelle ou loi non écrite, but was added in a revision published as "Natural Law and Moral Law" in Moral Principles of Action: Man's Ethical Imperative, Ruth Nanda Anshen, ed. (New York & London: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
***The first emphasis is in the original. The second emphasis is mine.

Schubert on St. Augustine's Teaching on the Eternal Law, Introduction

IN THE NEXT SERIES OF BLOG POSTINGS we will be translating P. Alois Schubert's Augustins Lex-Aeterna-Lehre (Munster: Verlag der Aschendorfschen 1924) from the German. Schubert's work is divided into two parts. Part I addresses the teaching of St. Augustine on the eternal law. Part II explores the sources of St. Augustine's teachings, paying particular attention to the direct Ciceronian and Plotinian influences, the scriptural Johannine contribution, and the indirect Stoic and Heraclitean contributions to St. Augustine's thought. It is significant to note the role that the eternal law has on both epistemology and moral philosophy, as it provides a sound basis for both theoretical and practical reason, for truth and good.

St. Augustine From the pulpit in the Oud-Katholieke Kerk

(Old Catholic Church) in The Hague

by Jan Baptist Xavéry

Augustine's Lex Aeterna Teaching
Its Content and its Source

by: P. Alois Schubert, S.V.D.
Introduction

The philosophy of Kant and the philosophy of the Scholastics oppose each other abrubtly. The first teaches of the autonomy of human reason, the latter of the theonomy of the individual. Both trends seek to encompass the World in a philosophical way, and to guide back the multiplicity of things into their unity. The Scholastics see this unity in the eternal law, in the lex aeterna. The Kantian philosophy rejects a metaphysical principle of unity (Einheitsprinzip) and thereby removes the eternal law as a foundation of any theory of knowledge.(1) It limits itself from ascertaining and investigating critically the laws in the cosmos (Gesteze im Kosmos). As to the question from where the cosmic law (Weltgesteze) ultimately originates, it gives no answer. That is to say, it precinds from answering such a question because the answer would be beyond the boundaries of human reason.(2)

It is different for the Scholastics. The Scholastic philosophy holds in high esteem the critical work of human reason. It strives towards understanding not only the order of the world (Weltordnung) in its natural relation (Zusammenhang), but also in its ultimate metaphysical cause. It finds this relation (Zusammenhang) and this ultimate cause in the eternal law (ewigen Gesetz). Now, what does the Scholastic philosophy understand by the eternal law? Thomas Aquinas, the greatest Scholastic, says in regard to it: "Lex aeterna nihil aliud est quam ratio divinae sapientiae secundum quod est directiva omnium actionum et motuum."(3) The eternal law is the divine wisdom insofar as it governs all actions and motions. Thomas clarifies this definition by the following analogies:(4) Before expressed in the artistic work, there rests in the mind of the artist the same idea. In the same manner, in every ruler there rests a type of any norm of action (Handlungsnormen) which is directed at his subjects. As one can in the first case speak of the idea of the work of art, so can one in the second case call the type of the action law. With respect to the creation, God stands as an artist, and with respect to his creatures, he stands as a ruler. He may be referred to as an artist because he has thought and created the world in conformity with his creative ideas, and he may be referred to as a ruler because he rules his creatures in conformity with certain norms.

These creative ideas and these ruling norms of God form the divine world plan (Weltenplan). Now the reasoning will (Vernunftwille) of God, insofar as it has devised and formed all things and has ordered them toward their final end (Endziel), carries with it a law-like (gesetzhaften) character. That forms the eternal law. It is clear that this magnificent idea of the eternal law radiates great light upon the universe. God, the eternal Logos, had all things from eternity devised, and in time created, following eternal, unchanging norms. He guides all things in conformity with the highest purpose of his creation, powerfully continuing from one end to another, everything in a smooth ordering. Reason perceives this as the central sun (Zentralsonne), around which the entire creation gravitates.(5) The Scholastic philosophers uniformly accepted this conception of the lex aeterna.(6) It would be but a charming exercise to investigate the sources of the Scholastic teaching on the lex aeterna, and determine whether the character of this teaching is specifically Christian, or whether the source of it is in ancient philosophy. But it is firmly established that Thomas Aquinas in his teaching on the lex aeterna essentially based himself on Augustine. So only two things will be determined in the following investigation:

1. What is Augustine's teaching regarding the lex aeterna?
2. Upon what sources does the character of this teaching of Augustine rely?

__________________

(1) Vgl. Seydl, Ewiges Gestz, Wien, S. 75.
(2) Vgl. Kant, Im., Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Renner, Berlin 1907, I Bd., S. 212
(3) Thomas v. Aquin, Summa theol., 1, 2, qu. 93, a. 1, ad 6.
(4) Ibidem.
(5) Vgl. Cathrein, Viktor, Moralphilosophie, Freiburg i. B. 1904. I. Bd., 4. Aufl., S. 343.
(6) Lehmen, A., Lehrbuch der Philosophie, Freiburg i. B. 1912, 3. Bd., 3 Aufl. S. 92.

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.

Law, Sit Up Higher: Richard Hooker and the Natural Law, Part 19

HOOKER CLOSES HIS FIRST BOOK of his great work Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity with a short synopsis and an apologia for having turned "aside from that beaten path" and focused on the origin of laws, instead of simply succumbing to a pragmatic presentation "more popular and more plausible to vulgar ears." I.16.1, 135. He has discussed, he says, the nature and the force of laws "according to their several kinds" and viewed them from the vantage point of origin. I.16.1, 134. In reviewing all laws, Hooker has identified a hierarchical structure, as it were, of law, all founded upon the basis of the eternal law of God:

--The Eternal Law: "the law which God with himself has eternally set down to follow in his own works."
--The Law of Nature: "the law which [God] has made for his creatures to keep, the law of natural and necessary agents."
--The Celestial Law: "the law which Angels in heaven obey"
--The Natural Law: "the law whereunto by the light of reason men find themselves bound in that they are men"
--Political Law: "the law which [men] make by composition for multitudes and political societies of men to be guided by"
--The Law of Nations: "the law which belongeth unto each nation" and "the law that concerns the fellowship of all"
--The Divine Law: "the law which God himself has supernaturally revealed"

In the First Book of his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which contains an introduction into or prolegomena of the matter which he intends to discuss in full in the following books, Hooker has focused on the origin of laws. Knowledge of the origin of laws (as distinguished from their mere description through some sort of empirical or pragmatic analysis) he argues, allows us better to discern if laws are "reasonably just and righteous or no." I.15.1, 135. "Is there anything which can either be thoroughly understood or soundly judged of 'till the very first causes and principles from which originally it springs be made manifest?" Hooker asks rhetorically.  Wise men, Hooker notes, have always gone to origins in answering questions.  In the same manner, Hooker has seen fit to focus on the origin of law before handling the particular matter at issue: the episcopal governance of the English established church in light of the presbyterian models advanced by the Calvinist, and the congregationalist models being put forth by the Puritan interests.

(We, of course, shall not review the remainder of Hooker's work, as it does not relate in sufficiently to the matter of the natural law.  However, we must be grateful to Hooker for having begun from "originals," in his "First Booke," as that allowed us the intellectual privilege of reading a classic and yet unique treatment of the natural moral law, perhaps the best in the English language, and certainly one within an Aristotelian/Thomistic framework.  In an earlier blog entry, we put forth the four requirements of a competent natural law theory as outlined by Fr. John Courtney Murray in his We Hold These Truths: a realist epistemology, a teleological metaphysic of nature, a natural theology, recognizing that there is a reasonable, personal God, creator of that nature, and  a morality that posits an order of reason and therefore of freedom.  Hooker's treatment of the natural law meets with everyone of these requirements.  Though as we have noted , as a result of historical circumstances, it suffers from an anti-Catholic bias, this bias does not affect the treatment of the natural law, but imposes itself only when Hooker begins to handle divine law.)

To get back to Hooker's conclusion, there is for him a large chasm of understanding between learning by law as distinguished from learning about the law.

Easier a great deal it is for men by law to be taught what they ought to do, than instructed how to judge as they should do of law; the one being a thing which belongs generally unto all, the other such as none but the wiser and more judicious sort can perform.

I.16.2, 135-36. (This reality may explain the tendency towards legalism or Phariseeism in men, a tendency which must be resisted. But this reality also should warn us from supposing that all men have the requisite wisdom and prudence, the sophrosyne, to go solo in the matter of morals and law. To suggest, in the name of the natural law and freedom, that we all autonomously ought to follow their unformed conscience and are equally competent to sorting out thorny problems of the natural law as self-legislators, without regard to the teaching Church or wise man, the sophron, among us is a recipe to relativism and antinomianism.)

In any serious dabbling with matters of law, Hooker teaches, one ought always to have the eternal law before him. This advice, of course, is ignored--even unknown--by the positivists, realists, and other modern schools of legal philosophy or jurisprudence.

Yeah, the wisest are always touching this point the readiest to acknowledge, that soundly to judge of a law is the weightiest thing which any man can take upon him. But if we will give judgment of the laws under which we live, first let that law eternal be always before our eyes, as being of principal force and moment to breed in religious minds a dutiful estimation of all laws, the use and benefit whereof we see; because there is no doubt but that laws apparently good, are (as it were) things copies out of the very tables of that high everlasting law, even as the book of that law has said concerning itself  "by me Kings reign," and "by me Princes decree justice."

I.16.2, 136.  Citing Proverbs 8:15, Hooker elaborates further on the role of the eternal law in fashioning the natural moral law and the human positive laws that govern us:

Not as if men did behold that book, and accordingly frame their laws, but because it works in them, because it discovers and (as it were) reads itself to the world by them when the laws which they make are righteous.

I.16.2, 136. Even if personally we are unable to see the wisdom or the good in any particular human law, we ought to give benefit of doubt to the legislator and obedience to any particular law. Though Hooker recognizes that there are times to obey God rather than men, this principle is not to be presumed. or adopted lightly in each and every circumstance where our "private law" is irked by the "public law."  Indeed, there ought to be a sort of presumption against disobedience on the grounds that a human law offends against the natural law or eternal law. This presumption is based upon the fact that most of us are ignorant of how inferior laws "are derived from that supreme or highest law." I.16.2, 136. "Surely," Hooker states, "there must be very manifest iniquity in laws, against which we shall be able to justify our contumelious invectives." I.16.2, 136.

The eternal law impresses itself on the law of nature, that law that governs "natural agents." I.16.3, 136. Though the law of nature may not seem pertinent to man's natural and supernatural life, the "rules and axioms of natural operations have their force" upon men even in the area of man's natural moral law and supernatural destiny. As an example of this interrelationship between the law of nature and the moral or supernatural life of man, Hooker points toward marriage. Marriage, an institution with fundamental basis in the law of nature, is yet the symbol of the love that Christ has towards his Church. This is an example where the "axioms of that law," that is the law of nature, "whereby natural agents are guided, have their use in the moral, yeah, even in the spiritual actions of men, and consequently in all laws belonging unto men howsoever." I.16.3, 137. We ought not to look at the natural and supernatural life of men as disembodied realities. We are linked to nature as a whole, albeit called to a higher moral, even supernatural life.

The Celestial or Angelic law that Hooker discussed, though it would seem to be irrelevant to the issue of human guidance, is in fact not so. "[B]etween the law of their heavenly operations and the actions of men in this our state of mortality, such correspondence there is, as makes it expedient to know in some sort the one, for the other's more perfect direction." I.16.4, 137. Man shares with the angels a subordination to God: men are fellow servants with the angels. As the angel told St. John in his apocalyptic vision, conservus tuus sum, "I am a fellow servant." (Rev. 19:10) Angelic obedience is a pattern, and an ideal towards which man must strive. And those things that make the angels rejoice are patterns for our lives. "So that the law of Angels we cannot judge altogether impertinent unto the affairs of the Church of God." I.16.4, 138-39.

Title Page of Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie

The varietals of law, then, all flowing from God's eternal law, must be considered in judging the right:

[A]ll serve but to make manifest that as the actions of men are of sundry distinct kinds, so the laws thereof must accordingly be distinguished. There are in men operations some natural, some rational, some supernatural, some political, some fully ecclesiastical. Which, if we measure not each by its own proper law, whereas the things themselves are so different; there will be in our understanding and judgment of them confusion.

I.16.5, 138. This is the error of Hooker's opponents. (This would also be the error of those of the Protestant Reformers, ancient (e.g., Calvin) and modern (e.g., Barth), some of whom we have reviewed in earlier postings, that reject the eternal law and the natural moral law as a result of their erroneous teachings concerning the "depravity of man") It is their error, Hooker states, "to think that the only which God has appointed unto men in that behalf is the sacred Scripture." I.16.5, 138. Man is governed by the law of nature, and even in acting in conformity with it, glorifies God. Even in breathing, sleeping, moving, we glorify God. The law of reason that God has placed in us, if St. Paul is to be believed, is a "universal law of mankind," "a rule which God has given unto all men for that purpose." I.16.5, 139. The laws of our political societies, the laws of nations, these also have a role in man's governance, as we are enjoined by Scripture to be subject to the higher powers. (Rom. 13:1).

One ought not to downplay the importance of the public law, as too quick a tendency to disobey it and place one's private whims in its place causes severe disorder. This disposition makes such men "unframable into societies wherein they live." I.16.6, 140. It is as if they prefer to live in a legal wilderness, outside the pale of social and harmonious life. "Thus by following the law of private reason, where the law of public [reason] should take place," these men "breed disturbance." I.16.6, 140. Even in such basics as food and in fasting or abstinence, the entire gamut of law--the law of nature, the natural law, the public law of society (both civil and ecclesiastical), and the divine law--have a role. To concentrate on one law, even if it be the divine law as revealed in Scripture--and ignore or neglect the others is, for Hooker, a very grave error."Thus we see," concludes Hooker, "how even one and the selfsame thing is under diverse considerations conveyed through many laws, and that to measure by any one kind of law all the actions of men were to confound the admirable order, wherein God has disposed all laws, each as in nature, so in degree distinct from [the] other." I.16.7, 142.

Wherefore, that here we may briefly end, of law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world, all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power, but Angels and men and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peach and joy.

I.16.8, 142.

And here concludes our review of the judicious Hooker's first book of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. It is a work of great merit, one well-within the classic Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition. It insists on a message which has been suppressed by the secularists and humanists of our age: all law, even human law, participates and must find its source in the eternal law of God, and in the most direct internal source of that eternal law of God, the natural moral law, or the law of reason that is within us, not withal rejecting the role that the divine law, graciously revealed by our loving God, may have. Grace builds upon nature. The divine law upon the natural law. And all law, strictly so called,--there are no exceptions--is from God.

Portrait of Richard Hooker

Law, Sit Up Higher: Richard Hooker and the Natural Law, Part 3

HOOKER'S DEFINITION OF THE ETERNAL LAW is slightly broader than the traditional scholastic doctrine because of a distinction in the eternal law Hooker seeks to emphasize. In his discussion of the eternal law, Hooker seeks to distinguish between what he calls the "first law eternal" and the "second law eternal." Hooker is aware that this formal distinction in the eternal law takes him out of the general scholastic presentations of the eternal law. For Hooker, however, it is not that there are two eternal laws, but one eternal law which differs depending upon focus.

Portrait of Richard Hooker

Hooker notes that most scholars would present the eternal law as being "the order . . . which [God] has set down as expedient to be kept by all his creatures." I.3.1, 63 This he calls the "second law eternal." Under this perspective, the eternal law is typically viewed ad extra, from the perspective of the thing or person subject to the eternal law. Hooker, however, emphasizes that the eternal law may also be viewed as it were, ad intra, as God's self-imposed limitation with respect to his creation, and this emphasis on the Divine Lawgiver is what leads to his notion of the "first eternal law." Hooker's view of the eternal law, which encompasses the formal distinction between "first" and "second" eternal law, is thus "more enlarging," broader, indeed richer in explaining phenomena. In any event, particularly with respect to his notion of "first eternal law," Hooker is clearly on the side of the theologians that maintain that God operates in his Creation and in his providential governance of that Creation under potentia ordinata, an ordered, reason-and-law informed power. Hooker therefore clearly rejects the notion of an arbitrary, will-only informed power, the potentia absoluta of the nominalists such as Occam, and some of the more extreme Protestant reformers.

Hooker's "second" eternal law may be distinguished further, depending upon the subject in which that eternal law is manifest. For brute creation, or "natural agents," the eternal law may be called "Nature's law." "Celestial law" is that eternal law which "Angels do clearly behold and without any swerving observe." The "law of Reason" (what we would call the natural law or natural moral law) is that part of the eternal law "that binds creatures reasonable in this world, and with which by reason they may most plainly perceive themselves bound." Law that derives not from the creature's reason, but "by special revelation of God," is called "Divine law." "Human law" is derived either from the law of Reason or Divine law. "All things therefore, which are as they ought to be, are conformed unto this second law eternal . . ." I.3.1, 63.

Hooker acknowledges that creatures sometimes do not conform to the second law eternal, in particular voluntary agents such as humans who frequently disobey the second law eternal as it is made manifest in the law of reason, divine law, or even human law. Likewise, even the brute creation sometimes shows a lack of perfection in apparent violation of the eternal law as manifest in the law of nature. Even so, all things, "even those things which to this [second] eternal law are not conformable, are notwithstanding in some sort ordered by the first eternal law." I.3.1, 63. That is, any manner of either evil or good in the world by creatures does not taint, much less abrogate the first eternal law. And so Hooker asks rhetorically:

For what good or evil is there under the sun, what action correspondent or repugnant unto the law which God has imposed upon his creatures, but in or upon it does God work according to the law which himself has eternally purposed to keep, that is to say, the first law eternal?

I.3.1, 63-64.

Hooker further distinguishes between that eternal law that is manifest in brute or inanimate creation, and that which applies to voluntary agents, that is creation with free will.

[God's] command those things to be which are, and to be in such sort as they are, to keep that tenure and course which they do, imports [suggests] the establishment of nature's law. The world's first creation, and the preservation since of things created, what is it but only so far forth a manifestation by execution, what the eternal law of God is concerning things natural?

I.3.1, 65. For Hooker, nature's law is of manifest importance, as its keeping assures the continued existing of man, who relies on the order found in the cosmos, and without which order his existence would end:

Now, if nature should intermit her course, and leave altogether, though it were but for a while, the observation of her own laws: if those principal and mother elements of the world, whereof all things in this lower world are made, should lose the qualities which now they have, if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself: if celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions and by irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen: if the prince of the lights of heaven which now as a Giant does run his unwearied course, should as it were through a languishing faintness begin to stand and to rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture, the winds breathe out their last gasp, the clouds yield no rain, the earth be defeated of heavenly influence, the fruits of the earth pine away as children at the withered breasts of their mother no longer able to yield them relief, what would become of man himself, whom these things now do all serve?

I.3.2, 65-66. There is, Hooker concedes, in nature as in art, apparent disorder, a lack of harmony or beauty. Nature appears sometime errant. On occasion, a musician plucks the wrong string and creates disharmony. An artist's chisel cuts an errant groove in the marble before him. The world is not perfect; it limps. Pagans attributed this to the curse or malediction of the gods, an explanation which Christians reject, though they may not be able to comprehend, as a result of the weakness of their minds and the limits of their breadth, how the disorder and chaos fits in with God's greater perfection. It remains true, Hooker insists, that

howsoever these swervings are now and then incident into the course of nature, nevertheless so constantly the laws of nature are by natural agents observed that no man denies but those things which nature works, are wrought either always or for the most part after one and the same manner.

I.3.3, 66.

In further addressing the issue of the law of nature, Hooker rejects both a Platonic exemplarism or idealism and a pantheistic construct of the eternal law, and seeks to steer a course somewhere down a philosophical and theological via media. On the one hand,

we are not of [the] opinion . . . as some are that nature in working has before her certain exemplary drafts or patterns, which subsisting in the bosom of the Highest, and being thence discovered, she fixes her eye upon them, as travelers by sea upon the pole-star of the world, and that according thereunto she guides her hand to work by imitation.

I.3.4, 66-67. On the other hand, Hooker clearly rejects any pantheistic interpretation: there is no divine soul in nature, no "art or knowledge divine in nature herself working." I.3.4, 67 (emphasis added). Nature acts knowing neither what it does, nor why. Rather, anything divine is to be found outside of nature, "in the guide of nature's work." I.3.4, 67. Steering thus between Platonic idealism and pantheism, Hooker opts for a sort of internal, necessary and unintelligent entelechy in nature. The intellectual capacity of brute Nature should be distinguished from that of its Creator. And though it may appear that Nature acts as if "she did both behold and study how to express some absolute shape or mirror always present before her," and though Nature may show such "dexterity and skill" so as to be even beyond the capacity of intellectual creatures, as to nature's apparent intelligence: "it cannot be." I.3.4, 67. This seeming intelligence is evidence of some divine art, some guide, "some director of infinite knowledge to guide her in all her ways." I.3.4, 67. And who is this guide but "the God of nature," in whom we live, and move and have our being, as St. Paul poetically states (see Acts 17:28).

It is not within man's comprehension to know the hows or whys of God's knowledge, appointment, holding up, and framing of this second eternal law as it shows itself in the law of nature, in short, the particularity of God's Providence. In understanding God, humans are as limited as brute animals are in understanding human behavior.

The manner of this divine efficiency being far above us, we are no more able to conceive by our reason than creatures unreasonable by their senses are able to apprehend after what manner we dispose and order the course of our affairs. Only thus much is discerned, that the natural generation and process of all things receives order of proceeding from the settled stability of divine understanding. This appoints unto them their kinds of working, the disposition whereof in the purity of god's own knowledge and will is rightly termed by the name of Providence.

I.3.4, 68. God, therefore, is in command of Nature, and Nature "is therefore nothing but God's instrument." I.3.4, 68.

Before Hooker takes leave of the law of Nature, he reminds the reader that the law of Nature is both individual or particular, and social or general. It guides both individual agents as they tend to their own perfection, and also individuals in the form of a law "which touches them as they are sociable parties united into one body." I.3.5, 69. This law

binds them each to serve unto others' good, and all to prefer the good of the whole before whatsoever their own particular [good], as we plainly see they do, when things natural in that regard forget their ordinary natural want . . . even as if it did hear itself commanded to let go the good it privately wishes, and to relieve the present distress of nature in common.

In the next blog entry, we will review Hooker's discussion of the Celestial law, or that law "which Angels do work by." I,4.1, 69.

Title Page of Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie