The Disfigured Face: The War of the Philosophers: St. Thomas on Slavery

THE SCHOOL OF SALAMANCA was the work of the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria. He has been hailed as the "Father of International Law." He was not trapped by a Spanish parochialism or jingoism; his philosophy, and his Faith, allowed him to overcome many of those nationalistic hindrances that bound the ordinary Spaniard to his belief in superiority or exceptionalism of his nation. It was these sorts of intellectual chains that bound up the intellect of that advocate of natural slavery, Sepúlveda, and made him, in an ironical way, a slave to them. Spain in the early 16th century was the glory of the earth. Headed by the Emperor Charles V, Spain was the world power. It was firmly planted in two continents. It took a great man to seek that there was a part of Spain, its earthly glory withal, that was not glorious in heaven. But Vitoria's merits were largely a reflection of his teacher, St. Thomas Aquinas.

Portrait of Emperor Charles V by Titian

It was his appointment to the University of Salamanca, and his promotion of Thomism there, that was Vitoria's greatest, and lasting work. Unusually, he did not publish any work during his lifetime, and the majority of what we have from him are as a result of notes taken from his lectures. Perhaps his most important, certainly the most frequently read, are his Relectio de indis recenter inventis, his lectures on the status of the recently-discovered Amerindians. Many of these notes, at least those on other topics, unfortunately, remain unpublished.

In his Relectio de Indis, Vitoria addressed the issue of whether Spain was justified in conquering the Americas because of the lapse of reason, the "rational insufficiency," of the Amerindians. Despite their social sins and cultural enormities (e.g., human sacrifice, idolatry), were the Amerindians capable of self-government, self-determination? Or were their cultural enormities, the product of the failure of the natural law and reason, justifications for just war and warrant for conquest? It is clear that Aristotle's authority and stature was the biggest impediment to answering the question. Specifically, the Aristotelian doctrine (found in his Politics and in his Nicomachean Ethics) that there were men who were barbarian, who were by nature slaves, and were naturally lacking in the right over themselves and their possessions. Slavery was rampant in the ancient Greek world, and Aristotle addressed the issue of whether it was a natural institution, or rather one that was conventional. Aristotle believed that slavery was a natural institution, that there were some men, who, by reason of their superiority, were naturally masters, and other men, who, by reason of their inferiority, naturally slaves.

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature? This is the question: but it is interesting that he feels the need to ask it. There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

Politics, I, 2, 1254a. Vitoria was, as may be expected, conservative, and he struggled to find a way around the Aristotelian doctrine without repudiating it. "Aristotle certainly did not mean to say that such men thereby belong by nature to others and have no rights of ownership over their own bodies and possession (dominium sui et rerum). Such slavery is a civil and legal condition, to which no man can belong by nature." Aristotle "certainly did not mean by this that such men had a legal right to arrogate power to themselves over others on the grounds of their superior intelligence, but merely that they are fitted by nature to be princes and guides." Granting, arguendo, that the American Indians were "foolish and slow-witted as people say they are," Vitoria's conclusions were that it was "still wrong to use this as grounds to deny their true dominion (dominium); nor can they be counted among the slaves." Cortest, 37 (quoting Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 233.)

Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas by Félix Parra

Vitoria's effort to circumvent Aristotle without outright repudiation has been criticized by scholars, and probably rightly so. To give to Aristotle such a slant was outside the range of probability of Aristotle's intendment.

On the other hand, Las Casas was much less deferential to the Aristotelian "natural slavery" doctrine. Cortest, 38. Las Casas maintained that there was but one human race, "una denique sola species creaturae rationalis, quae in individuis suis per universum mundum erat dispersa," "besides, there is only one species of rational creature, which is dispersed through the entire world in his individuality." (So in his De unico vocationis modo.) Though there may be differing levels of cultural achievements and though they may be laboring under social or cultural impediments, the Indians remained children of God, redeemed of Christ, and fellow brothers with the Spaniards:

Again, if we want to be sons of Christ and followers of the truth of the gospel, we should consider that, even though these peoples may be completely barbaric, they are nevertheless created in God's image. They are not so forsaken by divine providence that they are incapable of attaining Christ's kingdom. They are our brothers, redeemed by Christ's most precious blood, no less than the wisest and most learned men in the whole world.

Cortest, 41 (quoting Las Casas's In Defense of the Indians) Can one imagine Aristotle, the proud Greek, saying of the Persians or the lesser peoples, "They are our brothers"? Manifestly no. Christianity injected something precious, something magnificent, into the world, a comfort to the poor and downtrodden, and a humbling medicine, perhaps bitter in taste, to the rich and the proud. Oh let us praise the Lord God in unison with Mary for the entry into the world of this thing!

Magnificat anima mea Dominum,
et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salvatore meo . . . .
Fecit potentiam in brachio suo,
dispersit superbos mente cordis sui;
deposuit potentes de sede,
et exaltavit humiles;
esurientes implevit bonis,
et divites dimisit inanes.

Others also addressed the issue of the Amerindians' status as "natural slaves," and weighed in against Sepúlveda. Among these, Cortest cites and discusses the Jesuit José de Acosta, the so-called "Pliny of the New World," who detailed the natural and moral history of the Indies. He discusses the Dominican Domingo Bañez, the proeclarissimum jubar, the "brightest light" of Spain, and confessor to St. Theresa of Avila. He also briefly addresses the view of the Dominican Melchor Cano, that zealous prosecutor of Carranza and author of the famous De Locis Theologicis. But the real focus of his sights is Francisco Suárez, and the teacher of them all, St. Thomas Aquinas.

In his De triplici virtute theologica, fide, spe & charitate, Suárez explicitly confronts the position of Sepúlveda on Spain's right of conquest over the pagan American Indians. The three arguments commonly given were that such conquest was justified by reason of the Indian practice of human sacrifice, which warranted intervention to defend the innocent. The second argument commonly given was that such conquest was legitimated by the cultural benefits that the pagan society would receive from its conquerors' superior civilization. The third argument (which is the one that Cortest in his discussion of Suárez focuses on) is the argument that the Amerindians were, by nature, slaves, and therefore could be compelled to obedience to their superiors. Cortest, 40.

Aztec Human Sacrifice: Did it Warrant Conquest?

In addressing the last argument, Suárez doubted that, in fact, there could be peoples that were so barbarous and uncivilized "that they were neither united in a civil society, nor capable of exercising government." In other words, the capacity to live in common and provide for self-determination and self-government is so intrinsic to humanity, that one ventures into the land of theory to suggest that a people have lost this capacity. In practice, Suárez maintains, such a barbarous people with an absolute inability to self-govern have never been found.

The fact is that all of these men: Vitoria, Las Casas, de Acosta, Bañez, Cano, Suárez, and literally hundreds of others who are lesser lights but remain within the constellation of the School of Salamanca were schooled by St. Thomas Aquinas. "[T]he reason these writers share a common view concerning the doctrine of natural servitude is that Thomas himself rejected this doctrine." Cortest, 42. It is St. Thomas, steeped in the law and teachings of the Gospel, who overcame the Aristotelian "some men are by nature slaves" blight.

Cortest focuses on St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. Thomas's commentary on Aristotle's Politics is problematic in that it is difficult to tell when St. Thomas is citing Aristotle's text with approval, and when he is not. Moreover, the commentary was never completed. The Summa, though also not fully completed, presents clearly enough St. Thomas's own view on the matter of the institution of slavery. The heart of the Thomistic analysis is Question 57, article 3 of the second part of the second part (IaIIae):

From the bare nature of the case there is no reason for this man rather than that man being a slave. It is only when it is looked at pragmatically in its results that, as Aristotle says, it is expedient for him to be ruled by a wiser man whom he serves. Servitude, which is part of the ius gentium, is natural then in the second sense of our explanation, not the first.

[H]unc hominem esse servum, absolute considerando, magis quam alium, non habet rationem naturalem, sed solum secundum aliquam utilitatem consequentem, inquantum utile est huic quod regatur a sapientiori, et illi quod ab hoc iuvetur, ut dicitur in I Polit. Et ideo servitus pertinens ad ius gentium est naturalis secundo modo, sed non primo [modo].

S.T., IIaIIae, q. 57 a. 3, ad 3. St. Thomas appears, then, to reject the Aristotelian notion that some men, are by nature inferior to others. However, he does not enter into the intellectually vacuous and indefensible territory of those who hold that men are in all things equal. Such a view is, as a matter of empirical fact, untenable. (In fact, in practice, such a belief can cause untold suffering, perhaps even more than the suffering imposed by slavery. One need only look at the sufferings of those under Communism. Wasn't it Gilles Dauvé who said, "Communism believes in equality through force"? Slavery is inequality through force. Communism is equality through force. Both are social and moral evils.) What St. Thomas suggests is that though slavery is not a natural institution, it is natural that some men should be subordinate, but not enslaved, to others, namely, the wiser.

This view is confirmed in another part of the Summa (dealing with the relationship between man and wife). Here, St. Thomas distinguishes between the subordination which is only for the advantage of the master (slavery), and subordination which is for the benefit of the subject (right order):

Subjection is of two kinds; one is that of slavery, in which the ruler manages the subject for his own advantage, and this sort of subjection came in after sin. But the other kind of subjection is domestic or civil, in which the ruler manages his subjects for their advantage and benefit. And this sort of subjection would have obtained even before sin. For the human group would have lacked the benefit of order had some of its members not been governed by others who were wiser.

Ad secundum dicendum quod duplex est subiectio. Una servilis, secundum quam praesidens utitur subiecto ad sui ipsius utilitatem et talis subiectio introducta est post peccatum. Est autem alia subiectio oeconomica vel civilis, secundum quam praesidens utitur subiectis ad eorum utilitatem et bonum. Et ista subiectio fuisset etiam ante peccatum, defuisset enim bonum ordinis in humana multitudine, si quidam per alios sapientiores gubernati non fuissent. . . .

S.T., Ia q. 92 a. 1 ad 3. Slavery, though perhaps prevalent among men, is not a natural institution. It entered the world by reason of man's original sin, and, where it becomes institutionalized, as it did in Ancient Greece, or as it did in Africa, Islam (Islam has the added problem that slavery is justified in the Qur'an and the Sunnah, Mohammed having participated, nay, benefited, nay even relished in orgasmic shudder in the institution, as he had sex with his women slaves. Thus it would appear that slavery, which is against the natural law, has the sanction of Allah, if Muhammad and his Qur'an is to be believed.), or the West during the era of the slave trade and chattel slavery, it is the product of sin: indeed, it is a punishment for having sinned. Slavery does not insinuate itself into a society unless it has compromised the natural moral law:

The difference between a slave and a free man is that a free man is because of himself, as it says at the beginning of the Metaphysics; whereas a slave is geared to the benefit of another. So someone lords over another as a slave when he simply uses him for his own, that is the lord's purposes. And because everyone naturally values his own good, and consequently finds it grievous to surrender entirely to another the good that ought to be his own, it follows that lordship of this kind cannot but be punitive to those subjected to it. For this reason man cannot have lorded over man in the sate of innocence in that sort of way.

Cuius ratio est, quia servus in hoc differt a libero, quod liber est causa sui, ut dicitur in principio Metaphys.; servus autem ordinatur ad alium. Tunc ergo aliquis dominatur alicui ut servo, quando eum cui dominatur ad propriam utilitatem sui, scilicet dominantis, refert. Et quia unicuique est appetibile proprium bonum, et per consequens contristabile est unicuique quod illud bonum quod deberet esse suum, cedat alteri tantum; ideo tale dominium non potest esse sine poena subiectorum. Propter quod, in statu innocentiae non fuisset tale dominium hominis ad hominem.

Ia q. 96 a. 4 ad arg. There is a predisposition in man toward slavery. This is the result not only of the Fall, but also of the natural convenience, the pragmatic benefits to the master from this institution. It is sometimes so entrenched that the removal of it can cause more harm than the tolerance of it. Analogously, it is sometimes better to live, at least for a time, with a tumor, if to remove it would result in certain death. Thus, slavery is something that, though not in accord with nature, is frequently found among human societies. This is because something can be said to be natural in two ways, actively, because nature requires it, and passively, because nature does not appear to forbid the contrary.

You speak of something being according to natural right in two ways. The first is because nature is set that way; thus the command that no harm should be done another. The second is because nature does not bid the contrary; thus we might say that it is of the natural law for man to be naked, for nature does not give him clothes; these he has to make by art. In this way common ownership and universal liberty are said to be of natural law, because private property and slavery existence by human contrivance for the convenience of social life, and not by natural law. . . .

[Q]uod aliquid dicitur esse de iure naturali dupliciter. Uno modo, quia ad hoc natura inclinat, sicut non esse iniuriam alteri faciendam. Alio modo, quia natura non induxit contrarium, sicut possemus dicere quod hominem esse nudum est de iure naturali, quia natura non dedit ei vestitum, sed ars adinvenit. Et hoc modo communis omnium possessio, et omnium una libertas, dicitur esse de iure naturali, quia scilicet distinctio possessionum et servitus non sunt inductae a natura, sed per hominum rationem, ad utilitatem humanae vitae.

IaIIae q. 94 a. 5 ad 3. Thus, slavery was not a natural institution, but one of human origin. It has no divine or natural pedigree. It is one imposed by positive law, by custom, and has entered the world as a result of sin. Though men are, by accidents of birth, culture, education, inheritance unequal, all men are by nature equal, omnes homines natura sunt pares. S.T., IIaIIae q. 104 a. 5 co.

And so it is that this chapter turns to a close:

The philosophical debate concerning the nature of the native peoples of the New World was an important component in the controversy surrounding the legitimacy of the wars of conquest. The legal theory that grew out of this controversy would have a long history. The juridical treatises produced by the members of the School of Salamanca were primary sources for Hugo Grotius and, as such, had a major impact on the development of modern international law. More importantly, the participants in the debate reveal two distinctly different views concerning the dignity of the human person. One one hand, the [strict] Aristotelians (lead by Sepúlveda) defended a hierarchical notion of human worth . . . On the other hand, the strict Thomists defended the idea that no one is a natural slave; all people are children of God and thus, foreign peoples, even if they believe in different gods, are human beings created by God who live in legitimate societies.

Cortest, 47.

From here, Cortest turns to the philosophy of natural right. Specifically, Cortest traces its origin to the 16th century, and, after exploring the origin of modern human rights, will compare it to the classic, specifically Thomist, theory of natural law.

The Disfigured Face: Thomistic Ontology: Existence Distinct from Essence

METAPHYSICS AFFECTS ETHICS perhaps is the conclusion of Professor Cortest's first chapter in his The Disfigured Face: Traditional Natural Law and Its Encounter with Modernity. The science of being affects the science of doing. Who we think we are, and what we think of reality, affects how we act. Modern man does not know how to act, largely because he does not know who he is or even what is (that, or he thinks he can make himself whatever he wants to be and has not stable, informing nature that ought to guide him). St. Thomas Aquinas did not suffer from the modern malaise which has deracinated or uprooted man.

At the heart of the natural law theory of St. Thomas Aquinas is his ontology. Ontology, a word which comes from Greek ontos (ὄντος = of being) and logia (λογία = study, science, theory), is the science of being. Since at least the time of Christian Wolff (1679-1754), "ontology" has been distinguished from "metaphysics" generally, and now is regarded as part of "metaphysics," along with its other components "psychology" and "cosmology." At the center of St. Thomas's ontology was the proposition that essence is really distinct from existence, that existence was the preeminent ground for the discovery of truth, and that existence was for every thing other than God, whose essence is existence, a sharing in existence as a gift of God. God it is "who properly causes existence in creatures, just as it is fire itself that sets other things on fire. And God is causing this effect in things not just when they begin to exist, but all the time they are maintained in existence, just as the sun is lighting up the atmosphere all the time the atmosphere remains lit." (Cortest, 12, quoting S.T. Ia, q. 8, art. 1)

"Thomas considered 'being' the first and most fundamental object known by reason." Cortest, 1. Being is, in fact, at the heart of the thought of St. Thomas and the one he referred to as "the Philosopher," Aristotle. "There is," Aristotle says in his book Metaphysics, "a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature," ἔστιν ἐπιστήμη τις ἣ θεωρεῖ τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν καὶ τὰ τούτῳ ὑπάρχοντα καθ᾽ αὑτό. Arist., Met., 1003. To on hē on. Being as being.

Certainly since the Enlightenment, and even spottily before in the Renaissance, the underlying philosophical views of both Aristotle and St. Thomas, who relied on Aristotle, have been increasingly rejected. The French positivist Auguste Comte saw metaphysics as a passing stage, sort of as like an intellectual teenager (theology being the infant), in the development of human intellectual knowledge. In his lectures on metaphysics, Theodor Adorno, who was no fan of metaphysics (or ontology), noted, probably accurately enough, that "metaphysics is used in almost the entire non-German-speaking world as a term of abuse, a synonym for idle speculation, mere nonsense and heaven knows what other intellectual vices." Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1. Before Adorno, Nietzsche called those who dabbled in metaphysics "Hinterweltler," "backworldsmen," perhaps an allusionary word play, in that Nietzsche's term sounds strangely like "Hinterwäldler," or "backwoodsmen." (Ontology or metaphysics is not the only area that has suffered abuse by moderns. The notion of natural law has been equally the subject of deprecation. One need only think of the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, who called natural law "nonsense on stilts," or Associate Supreme Court Justice Holmes, who all his life "sneered at the natural rights of man." )

The rejection of the Thomistic ontology is unfortunate because it rejects the particular contribution of St. Thomas to metaphysics, specifically, his emphasis on existence (esse, "to be," that a thing is) as really (and not only mentally) distinct from essence (essentia--the "what" of a thing; its quiddity) in his metaphysics of being. For St. Thomas, both "essence" and "existence" were important concepts to distinguish in thinking about reality because, other than God in which they were identical, in created things they were really distinct things. Further, St. Thomas taught that truth is more principally grounded in the existence (esse) of a thing, rather than in its essence, veritas fundatur in esse rei magis quam in ipsa quidditate. St. Thomas, I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a. 1. Unfortunately, at least initially, St. Thomas's views on ontology faced stiff competition from the nominalism that had infected the brains of scholars. More popular in the 13th [correction, 14th century] century seemingly was the thought of Ockham, and Ockham rejected the extra-mental distinction between essence and existence as meaningless, in fact non-existent, therefore equating both of these concepts. Cortest, 5. Ockham could not put it any plainer:

We have to say, therefore, that essence (entitas) and existence (existentia) are not two things. On the contrary, the words "thing" (res) and "to be" (esse) signify one and the same thing.

Ideo dicendum est, quod entitas et existentia non sunt duae res. Sed ista duo vocabula 'res' et 'esse' idem et eadem significant.

Ockham, Summa Totius Logicae, 3, 2, 27. Ockham also emphasized the particular, and did not believe in abstract essences as having any sort of reality; in short, he was a nominalist. (Though unrelated to the issue of ontology, Ockham also was a voluntarist in morality, believing the will to be preeminent over reason in law.)

As Cortest notes, if "essence" is studied without regard to "existence," then one loses contact with reality and ventures into a world of mere abstraction, of concepts, of the mere possible or potential. On the other hand, if "being" is considered a sophomoric abstraction, a verbal flatus, and all thought is focused on the particular existence, then we are unable to grasp universal realities or the concept of "nature." St. Thomas, like a clever helmsman, steers us between the Charybdis of a Kantian or Hegelian idealism, and a Scylla of a Humean or Lockean empirical superficialism.

Francisco Vitoria

For a time, Ockham and his followers carried the day, perhaps finding ultimate expression in the Lutheran boil that burst open spewing forth all its puss when the recalcitrant, troubled, disobedient Augustinian friar nailed 95 theses on the Cathedral doors in Wittenberg, shattering Christian unity. But slowly, surely, largely as a result of the work of Cardinal Cajetan (Tomasso de Vio) (1468-1534) and Francisco de Vitoria (ca. 1492-1546), the Thomistic spirit was revitalized. Cajetan, the diminutive Dominican with a prodigious mind, is probably the most celebrated of all the Thomistic commentators. Francisco de Vitoria, commonly regarded as the father of Spanish Thomism, completely reformed the curriculum at the University of Salamanca, replacing the Sentences of Peter Lombard with the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas as the principal text for the study of theology.

Nobody could have foreseen the harvest that Vitoria's decision to sow Thomist seeds instead of Lombardian seeds into the furrows of the minds of his students. The names of those who came from, or have ties to, that school are profuse, and they ripened largely in Dominican and Jesuit habit, and fed the disciplines of moral theology, political philosophy, economics, and international law: Domingo de Soto (1495-1560), Martín de Azpilcueta (1491-1586), Domingo Bañez (1528-1604), Diego de Covarrubias y Leya (1512-1577), Tomás de Mercado (1525-1575), Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566), Luis de Molina (1535-1600), Juan de Mariana (ca. 1535-1624), Melchior Cano (1509-1560), and Francisco Suárez (1548-1617). From Spain, the Thomistic revival rooted itself into all Europe, affecting all manner of men and all manner of sciences.

Francisco Suárez

Cortest acknowledges that the last mentioned of the Salamancan greats: Francisco Suárez, the Doctor eximius, the exceptional Doctor, is "perhaps the greatest philosopher in the Thomistic tradition," and yet, "he differed profoundly from the Angelic Doctor [Thomas Aquinas] in his metaphysics." Cortest, 9. There is, in short, a school, distinct from Thomism, called Suarism. For Cortest, one of the fundamental distinctions between Aquinas and Suárez was precisely in the Thomistic distinction between essence and existence:

The primacy of existence, so fundamental for Aquinas, is lost with Suárez, for whom essence and existence can both be either potential or actual. . . . For Suárez, all being is reduced to essential being; existence is always subordinate to essence."

Cortest, 9. From the Thomist teaching that gave preeminence of existence over essence, Suárez went rogue. Suárez understood being primarily as essence, and this tended to deprecate the true character of being, of existing. "Therefore," Suárez concluded in his Disputationes Metaphysicae, XXXI, s. vi, 23, "it must be said that essence and existence are the same thing but that it is conceived of under the aspect of essence." Dicendum ergo est eamdem rem essse essentiam et existentiam, concipi autem sub ratione essentiam. Suárez had, in a way, come back full circle to Ockham.

From the point of view of the Thomist, this is a massive mistake. The mistake arises from seeing being as a noun rather than a participle. Cortest, 9. (One may recall that Ockham saw existence or being (esse) as a form of a verb, not a noun.) The mistake arises out of Suárez's taking for granted that his verbum mentis, the word in his mind, "corresponds exactly to what it represents, even when he uses it to conceptualize the principles of being itself." Cortest, 10 (quoting David M. Knight, SJ, "Suarez's Approach to Substantial Form," The Modern Schoolman 40 (1962): 238)

Is being, existence, esse, "to be," a verbal, nounal, or participial concept?

What difference, if any, does it make?

Taken as a participle, being signifies "the act of existing as exercised and is the same as the actual existent." Looked as a noun, it means "the essence of a thing which has or can have existence (esse) and it can be said to signify existence itself not as exercised in act but in potency or aptitude." Thus, taken as a noun, the objective concept of being is that which is or can be, that which has a real essence prescinding from actual existence without excluding or denying it.

Cortest, 9-10 (quoting John P. Doyle, "Suarez On the Reality of the Possible," The Modern Schoolman 45 (1967): 36-37) To view existence as a noun, rather than a participle, is to sort of fold the concept of existence into essence. And thus existence becomes, not an independent, extra-mental reality, but becomes the difference between essence potential and essence actual. According to Cortest, the result is to fragment being and take us somewhat out of reality. Metaphysics is the "science of possible being," and no longer the science of "actual or real being." We sort of walk out of the boundaries of authentic Thomistic ontology and its moderate realism. It sort of shatters the chain of being, in fact being itself, into virtually infinite shards.

It also affects Suárez's view of individuation (i.e., what makes individuals individuals?). Traditionally, the individual expression of an essence (say, "Socrates," as an individuation of "man.") was the result of matter or particular existence of an essence. But for Suárez, "neither matter nor existence constitute the principle of the individual." Cortest, 11. For Suárez, "accidents contain within themselves their own principle of individuation," and this "leads logically to the conclusion that a being contains within itself a multiplicity of individuating principles." Cortest, 11. By looking at accidents and substance thus separately, Suárez "destroys the very unity that most characterizes the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of substance." Cortest, 11. Man was hacked up into many parts, and was no longer whole.

Why is this subtlety important? Is this just subtlecraft? Cortest answers:

On this foundation [of existence being really distinct from essence, and being the preeminent metaphysical principle for understanding reality], an epistemology and an ethics are developed. In fact, the Thomistic system [of knowledge and of morality] can be understood as a series of logical extensions from this premise.

Cortest, 11. The eventual effect was to divide the world of thought into two: either those who relied only on existence, focusing only in individual existent things, neglecting essence, or those who relied only on essence, neglecting existence. The former are the empiricists. The latter are the idealists. Both views have significant effect on ethics, that is, affect one's view of the natural law.

Universal Ethic-Convergences 7-Further Evolution

1.5. Further evolution

28. The modern story of the idea of natural law presents itself in certain aspects like a legitimate development of the teaching of medieval Scholasticism in a more complex cultural context, marked particularly with a greater sensitivity to subjective morality. Following these developments, we may point to the work of the 16th century Spanish theologians who, in the manner of the Dominican Francesco de Vitoria, resorted to the natural law to battle the imperialist ideology of some Christian States of Europe and to defend the rights of the non-Christian peoples of the Americas. In fact, such rights are inherent in human nature, and do not depend on any concrete circumstances or upon the Christian faith. The idea of natural law, moreover, concurred with the Spanish theologians’ efforts in finding the basis, that is, a universal norm, which regulated the relationship between peoples and States


29. But, from another perspective, in the modern period the idea of the natural law assumed an orientation which contributed to making it difficult to accept today. In the last centuries of the middle ages, there developed in the Scholasticism a voluntaristic current, whose cultural hegemony changed deeply the idea of the natural law. Voluntarism aimed at valuing the transcendent nature of the free subject in relation to all other contingencies. Against naturalism, which tended to tie God to the laws of nature, voluntarism sought to highlight the unilateral and absolute freedom of God, at the risk compromising His wisdom and of rendering His decisions arbitrary. In addition, against rationalism, suspected of subduing the human person to the order of the world, it exalted an understanding of liberty of pure indifference, one of pure power to choose the opposite, and thus risked detaching the person from his natural inclinations and the objective good.(34)

30. The results of the voluntarism on the doctrine of the natural law were numerous. First of all, while in St. Thomas of Aquinas the law was understood as a work of reason and an expression of a wisdom, voluntarism resulted in binding the law to the will alone, and to a will detached from its intrinsic ordination to the good. Following that reasoning, all the force of the law was seen to reside solely in the will of the lawgiver. So the law was expropriated of its intrinsic intelligibility. Under such conditions, morality was reduced to obedience to the commandments which disclosed the will of the legislator. Thomas Hobbes would therefore declare: "It is authority, not truth, that makes law” (auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem).(35) Modern man, in love with autonomy, could not rise up against a such vision of law. Thus, on the pretext of protecting the absolute sovereignty of God over nature, voluntarism lost any inner intelligibility. The thesis of the potentia Dei absoluta [absolute power of God], according to which God could work independently from his wisdom and goodness, relativized all existing intelligible structures and weakened the natural knowledge man was able to comprehend. Nature ceased to be a criterion in which one could recognize the wise will of God: man could receive such knowledge only from revelation.

31. From another angle, several factors led to the secularization of the notion of the natural law. Among these, one may mention the increasing divorce between Faith and Reason that characterized the end of the medieval age, and also some aspects of the Reformation, (36) but above all the desire to overcome the violent religious conflicts that bloodied Europe at the dawn of the modern age. There was a desire to find a source for the political unity of the human community, putting between parentheses so to speak, religious confessions. Now the doctrine of the natural law prescinds from any particular religious revelation, and therefore from every confessional theology. It claims to base itself only on the light of reason common to all of men and, presents itself as the ultimate norm in the secular field.

32. Additionally, modern rationalism made the existence of an absolute and normative order of intelligible essences accessible to reason, and entirely relativized their reference to God as the ultimate foundation of the natural law. The necessary order of essences, eternal and immutable, were certainly actualized by God, but, it was believed, they already possessed such coherence and rationality. The reference to God ought to be therefore optional. The natural law may be imposed upon all men "even if God did not exist (etsi Deus not daretur).”(37)

33. The modern rationalist model of the natural law is characterized by: (1) the existential belief in an unchanging and ahistoric human nature, of which reason can select perfectly the definition and the essential properties; (2) the placing between parentheses the concrete situation of the human persons in salvation history, marked by sin, and by grace, whose influence on the knowledge and on the practice of the natural law is however decisive; (3) the ideal that it is possible for reason to deduct a priori the precepts of the natural law from the essential definition of the human being; (4) from the expansive extension given to the principles so deduced, the natural law appears as if it were a code of laws already known, which rules govern almost the entirety of behavior. This tendency of extending the field of the determinations of the natural law existed at the origin of the serious crisis when, particularly with the progress of the human sciences, Western thought became much more conscious of the historicity of human institutions and of the cultural relativity of numerous behaviors that at times were justified by referring to the evidences of the natural law. This difference between a maximalist theory of natural law and the complexity of the empirical data explains in part the disaffection with the idea of a natural law. Because the notion of natural law can serve to elaborate a universal ethic in a secularized an pluralistic society like ours, it is necessary therefore to avoid presenting it in the rigid shape that it assumed, particularly in modern rationalism.

(34) Cf. Benedict XVI, Lecture at Regensburg on the Occasion of the Meeting with the Respresentatives of Science. (12 September 2006), in AAS 98 (2006) 733: "In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach . . . the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions."

(35) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part II, c. 26 “In the constituted state, the interpretation of the laws of nature do not depend on doctors, on the scribes who address issues of moral philosophy, but on the civil authority. In fact the only possible doctrine that is true is, that authority, not truth, is what makes law.” [Editor's note: the statement auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem is found only in Chapter 26 of Hobbe’s Latin version of Leviathan, not in the English]

(36) The position of the Reformers with regard to the natural law is not monolithic. Those like Martin Luther and John Calvin, being based on St. Paul, recognized the existence of the natural law as an ethical rule, even if is radically incapable of justifying man. "Nothing, indeed is more common, than for man to be sufficiently instructed in a right course of conduct by natural law, of which the Apostle here speaks. . . . .The end of the natural law, therefore, is to render man inexcusable, and may be not improperly defined--the judgment of conscience distinguishing sufficiently between just and unjust, and by convicting men on their own testimony depriving them of all pretext for ignorance." (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, c. 2, 22) (Henry Beveridge, trans.). In the three centuries following the Reformation, for the Protestants, the natural law served as the foundation of jurisprudence. Only with the secularization of the natural law in the 19th century, did Protestant theology keep a distance from it. From that time forward there arose an opposition between Protestant and Catholic opinions on the question of the natural law. But today, Protestant ethics seems to be displaying a new interest in the notion of natural law.

(37) This expression has its origin in Hugo Grotius, De iure belli et pacis, Prolegomena: "Haec quidem quae iam diximus locum aliquem haberent, etsi daremus, quod sine summo scelere dari nequit, non esse Deum."