"Petit pan de mur jaune"--Proust, Vermeer, the Color Yellow, and the Natural Law

The French writer Marcel Proust, in his À la recherche du temps perdu, contains a well-known passage which relates to the notion of the natural moral law and the natural dispositions or tendencies hidden in man. From time to time, these are felt particularly strongly. Often, these moments are called "epiphanies" or "revelations" by those who experience them. These point to a Beyond as the source of standards by which man ought to conform his life. In this instance, Proust, drawing upon a personal experience, has one of his protagonists, the elderly writer Bergotte, visit a Dutch art exhibition. While examining the detail of Vermeer's View of Delft, the old writer falls ill and dies. The seeming innocuous element that triggers Bergotte's last-minute musings is the small piece of yellow wall, a petit pan de mur jaune.

The Death of Bergotte

by Marcel Proust

The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer's `View of Delft' (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. "That's how I ought to have written," he said. "My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of color, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. "All the same," he said to himself, "I shouldn't like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers." He repeated to himself: "Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: "It's nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked." A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self- sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there – those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only – if then! – to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable.

They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

Un petit pan de mur jaune! a little patch of yellow wall! As Christians, we must overlook the Proustian reference to Platonic metempsychosis, as we must reject Proust's empirically-based nihilism and the decadence which infects his work as a whole. But a Catholic will spot the good within the bad, the true within the false, the Christ among the thieves. Perhaps it is best to invoke the guidance of the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel on the meaning of this epiphany.

[W]hat is here strongly asserted, and what should certainly be retained, is the transcendent character (in the exact and non-theological senses of the word) of the standards to which the true man, together with the artist, recognizes that he must conform his life; but it is also the refusal, implicit at least, to be satisfied with a purely abstract set of rules, it is consequently the rehabilitation of what in the last analysis we must agree to call the Beyond. . . . [I]t seems to me admirable that the writer who has perhaps gone further than any other in micro-psychological investigation should have been able to recognize, at least in certain great moments, the existence of fixed stars in the heaven of the soul. . . .

The reflections of Proust and Marcel bear a striking similarity to those of the Indian philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore:

When the fruit has served its full term, drawing its juice from the branch as it dances with the wind and matures in the sun, then it finds in its core the call of the beyond and become ready for its career of a wider life.

The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (Atlantic Publisher, 2007), IV, 375.

All this is quite classical. The color yellow is linked with the interlaced nature of time, and of life, and of that time when life is at the end of its stages, when life is drying out, and the hope of a beyond is what begins to motivate us. The typical memento mori, or a mediation on death enjoined on us by all spiritual writers, is an effort to place us in an artificial yellow mood, as it were, where we contemplate life as if we are in the throes of death. But the specter of death is universal. So in Pseudo-Aristotle, in the treatise on colors (de Coloribus), this understanding of the color yellow makes its appearance. Leaves of trees yellow at the end, when nourishment fails and dessication follows, but before all color departs. Similarly fruits will fall off a tree and yellow because of the failure of nutrition. We ought to learn from the plants, and from their fruit.


Following the Frenchman Proust, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges also links the color yellow, in this case a yellow rose, to an epiphany relating to the "Beyond." These are the dying thoughts of the illustrious Giambattista Marina:

Ni aquella tarde ni la otra murió el ilustre Giambattista Marino, que las bocas unánimes de la Fama (para usar una imagen que le fue cara) proclamaron el nuevo Homero y el nuevo Dante, pero el hecho inmóvil y silencioso que entonces ocurrió fue en verdad el último de su vida. Colmado de años y de gloria, el hombre se moría en un vasto lecho español de columnas labradas. Nada cuesta imaginar a unos pasos del sereno balcón que mira al poniente y, más abajo, mármoles y laureles y un jardín que duplica sus graderías en un agua rectangular. Una mujer ha puesto en una copa una rosa amarilla; el hombre murmura los versos inevitables que a él mismo, para hablar con sinceridad, ya lo hastían un poco:

Púrpura del jardín, pompo del prado,
Gema de primavera, ojo de abril...

Entonces ocurrió la revelación. Marino vio la rosa, como Adán pudo verla en el Paraíso, y sintió que ella estaba en su eternidad y no en sus palabras y que podemos mencionar o aludir pero no expresar y que los altos y soberbios volúmenes que formaban un ángulo de la sala en la penumbra de oro no eran (como su vanidad soñó) un espejo del mundo, sino una cosa más agregada al mundo.

Esta iluminación alcanzó Marino en la víspera de su muerte, y Homero y Dante acaso la alcanzaron también.

Neither that afternoon nor the next did the illustrious Giambattista Marino die, he whom the unanimous mouths of Fame — to use an image dear to him — proclaimed as the new Homer and the new Dante. But still, the noiseless fact that took place then was in reality the last event of his life. Laden with years and with glory, he lay dying in a huge Spanish bed with carved bedposts. It is not hard to imagine a serene balcony a few steps away, facing the west, and, below, marble and laurels and a garden whose various levels are duplicated in a rectangle of water. A woman has placed in a goblet a yellow rose. The man murmurs the inevitable lines that now, to tell the truth, bore even him a little:

Purple of the garden, pomp of the meadow,
Gem of the spring, April’s eye . . .

Then the revelation occured: Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise, and he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not — as his vanity had dreamed — a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.

Marino achieved this illumination on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well.

Through the yellow rose, Marino was brought back "to the beginning," in principio, at the creation of heaven and earth, as the yet-unfaulted Adam may have seen it. For those with eyes, or touched by grace, the entirety of the eternal law can be seen in the petal of a yellow rose! A world within a world, a world invisible superadded to the world visible. And we need not wait 'til death to see it if we open ourselves to it.

The color yellow is an intermediate color, between a vital green and the color beyond. It thus partakes in both life and death, and informs us of both life's end, its terminus ad quem, and its lasting in time, its temporality. It is a desiccating, though not dessicated, color, the color of the humours of the blood evaporating, but not yet fully evaporated, through the passage of time and heat of life. It is a color of late life, not a color of death, though it points to death's closeness. It is a color that looks both toward the past, and towards the future. Wistful, on the one hand, and either hopeful (if one hopes for a life in the time beyond) or full of despair (if one does not), on the other hand. It is a color interim, a color in flux, a Heraclitean color, and so suffers from a certain temporal ambiguity.

For Proust and for Borges, therefore, the color yellow is the color that serves to remind us of the "call of the Beyond," Plato's ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, C. S. Lewis's "deep Magic," the Thomistic "Eternal Law," Marcel's "fixed stars in the heaven of the soul," the Hindu Dharma, or Lao Tze's Dao. Call it what you will with the lights that God has given you, it is the Word of God in the order of things. Ultimately, though you may not recognize it, though you may be ignorant of it, though you may even disbelieve it, it is the voice of the Logos, the one who became man for us, Jesus, who is our Law. Perhaps that is the wisdom behind Tertullian's observation: anima naturaliter Christiana, the soul is naturally Christian.

This is also the reason--perhaps--why Gauguin painted his yellow Christ, his Le Christ jaune, a Christ that speaks of life's shortness, and life's eternity. A Christ that beckons us to the beyond. A Christ crucified in the fields of Breton, yet a Christ crucified for all times. A Christ dead before the pious wives of Breton peasants, yet a Christ dead before all mankind. In autumn, yet for all seasons.

V. Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi.
R. Quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum.

"Lex Christianorum crux est sancta Christi, filii Dei vivi."
--Pseudo-Cyprian, De duobus montibus Sina et Sion

Lex Aeterna: In Church, Scripture, and the Pagan

WHEN HE STATED in his compilation of the Saxon laws that "God is himself law" (see prior post), Eike von Repgow was referring to the notion of Eternal Law. The Eternal Law is the belief that God, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, has a master plan or ratio that is found in His Creation and is enforced in His Providence. The existence of the Eternal Law is part of that assurance that there is a Reason behind God's Creation and its continued sustaining through His Providence. This plan or ratio goes beyond the material world. It includes the rational creation, and in particular mankind, for whom God has great solicitude. This solicitude, this love that God has for mankind, extends itself, in what has been called the "scandal of particularity," to reach each man and every woman, even every sparrow's fall. It is the firm hope that human life, my and my loved ones' lives, my neighbor's life, even my enemy's life, by God's design, has a purpose or end. Life is not, as Macbeth would have it,

. . . but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon a stage,
And then is heard no more.

It is not, a

. . . tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, sc. v.)

Embracing the reality of the Eternal Law encompasses a rejection of metaphysical pessimism. The doctrine insists that there is a purpose, plan, archetype, or design under which Creation and Providence are governed. This is what is called the Eternal Law.

We must start with this notion of the Eternal Law to understand the classical and traditional doctrine of the Natural Law, in both its Graeco-Roman and Christian roots. The notion of an Eternal Law is a truth that modernly has been disbelieved, discarded, and forgotten, and it must be relearned. In his book Creative Fidelity, the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel speaks of the duty of the believer to become aware of the non-believer that is within him. This is also true with respect to our life in common. We have a duty to try to recognize where our society disbelieves, and where it ambles without guidance in the sloughs of practical atheism. Both individually and as a civil society, we are to have the same attitude as the man in the Gospels: Credo, Domine; adjuva incredulitatem meam! "Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24). This should be our approach, our earnest prayer, in engaging with the doctrine of Eternal Law. For many--to accept it in its full implications--it will require a conversion of the mind and the heart.

In Article 1 to Question 91 of the first part of the second part (Prima Secundae Partis) of his Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas asks whether there is an Eternal Law, a question he answers affirmatively. In answering the question he has posed, St. Thomas refers back to his definition of law as a "dictate of practical reason emanating from the ruler who governs a perfect community." ST IaIIae Q. 91, art.1, resp.; see also ST IaIIae Q. 90, art.4, resp. If God's existence and role as Creator and divine Provider are granted (and Thomas had treated those matters in a prior part of his Summa), St. Thomas observes that it follows, "the whole community of the universe is governed by Divine Reason." This governance by God "has the nature of a law," and since God's Reason is eternal, it is evident that this law must likewise be eternal. ST IaIIae Q. 91, art.1, resp. (As an aside, it may be observed that the Declaration of Independence, invokes a "firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence," which implicitly invokes the notion of an Eternal Law. So it is we that ought to look incredulously at the professorate of our law schools mentioned in our earlier post.)

In trying to understand the Eternal Law, however, man suffers from an intrinsic limitation. We have no direct knowledge of the Eternal Law. It is not seen in written form like a human statute; it is not announced in the public square; it is not obviously enforced by a league of visible policemen and judges. There are no angels handing out tickets or pursuing indictments. But this is not a cause for despair, nor, as the skeptics would have it, a matter for ridicule (one thinks of Jeremy Bentham in this regard). For the believer, it is a truth revealed in Scripture and propounded by the Teaching Church that there is an Eternal Law. It is a truth that is graspable through reason, though through a glass darkly. Therefore, it is a belief that may be found among the best of the pagans. It is a belief which may be shared with men and women of good will.

In Dignitatis Humanae (No. 3), for example, the Second Vatican Council points out that the

supreme rule of life is the divine law itself, the 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. God has enabled man to share in this divine law, and hence man is able under the gentle guidance of God's providence increasingly to recognize the unchanging truth.

The Church's teaching rests soundly upon Scripture and Tradition, in particular, St. Augustine's and St. Thomas's classic teaching of the Eternal Law.

In his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II quoted this specific part of Dignitatis Humanae, and then commented (Nos. 43-44):

The Council refers back to the classic teaching on God's eternal law. Saint Augustine defines this as "the reason or the will of God, who commands us to respect the natural order and forbids us to disturb it." Saint Thomas identifies it with "the type 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 (cf. Wis 7:22; 8:11). But God provides for man differently from the way in which he provides for beings which are not persons. He cares for man not "from without," through the laws of physical nature, but "from within," 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. In this way God calls man to participate in his own providence, since he desires to guide the world--not only the world of nature but also the world of human persons--through man himself, through man's reasonable and responsible care. The natural law enters here as the human expression of God's eternal law. Saint Thomas writes: "Among all others, the rational creature is subject to divine providence in the most excellent way, insofar as it partakes of a share of providence, being provident both for itself and for others. Thus it has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and end. This participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called natural law."

The Church has often made reference to the Thomistic doctrine of natural law, including it in her own teaching on morality. Thus my Venerable Predecessor Leo XIII emphasized the essential subordination of reason and human law to the Wisdom of God and to his law. After stating that "the natural law is written and engraved in the heart of each and every man, since it is none other than human reason itself which commands us to do good and counsels us not to sin," Leo XIII appealed to the "higher reason" of the divine Lawgiver: "But this prescription of human reason could not have the force of law unless it were the voice and the interpreter of some higher reason to which our spirit and our freedom must be subject." Indeed, the force of law consists in its authority to impose duties, to confer rights and to sanction certain behaviour: "Now all of this, clearly, could not exist in man if, as his own supreme legislator, he gave himself the rule of his own actions." And he concluded: "It follows that the natural law is itself the eternal law, implanted in beings endowed with reason, and inclining them towards their right action and end, it is none other than the eternal reason of the Creator and Ruler of the universe."

(Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, Nos. 43-44 (citations omitted) (The encylical quoted by John Paul II is Leo XIII's Libertas Praestantissimum of June 20, 1888)).

The Scriptural references to the Eternal Law are legion. It is usually referred to under the personification of Divine Wisdom. Suffice us to point out Proverbs 8:15-16, and Proverbs 8:23-36.

By me kings reign, and lawgivers decree just things,
By me princes rule, and the mighty decree justice
I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made.
The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived. neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out:
The mountains with their huge bulk had not as yet been established: before the hills I was brought forth:
He had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of
the world.
When he prepared the heavens, I was present: when with a certain law
and compass he enclosed the depths:
When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters:
When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits:
When he balanced the foundations of the earth; I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times;
Playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men.
Now therefore, ye children, hear me: Blessed are they that keep my ways.
Hear instruction and be wise, and refuse it not.
Blessed is the man that heareth me, and that watcheth daily at my
gates, and waiteth at the posts of my doors.
He that shall find me, shall find life, and shall have salvation from the Lord:
But he that shall sin against me, shall hurt his own soul.
All that hate me love death.

The existence of an Eternal Law is not only a religious or revealed truth. There is a basis in reason for believing in the Eternal Law, and consequently one can find an understanding of the Eternal Law in the leading lights of Greece and Rome, such as the philosopher Plato or the Roman statesman Cicero. For example, in writing his book on the Natural Law, the English Protestant divine Nathanael Culverwell (1619-1651), generally associated with the Cambridge Platonists, relied on the Jesuit Francisco Suárez and the Dominican Thomas Aquinas. But he also accessed the writings of the pagans Plato and Cicero to show how even the pagans had a notion of a Law above all law, a law that governed the cosmos, and that was the archetype or model, of what human laws should be. Aggregating references to Plato's dialogues, including Cratylus and Laws, and Plotinus's Enneads , Culverwell summarizes:

This the Platonists would call ἰδέαντωννόμων [the ideal of laws], and would willingly heap such honourable titles as these upon it, ὁνόμοςἀρχηγὸς, πρωτουργὸς, αὐτοδίκαιος, αὐτόκαλος, αὐτοάγαθος, ὁὄντωςνόμος, ὁνόμοςσπερματικός [the archetypal law, primary, intrinsically just, beautiful and good, the essential law, the seminal law]. And the greatest happinesse the other Lawes can arrive unto, is this, that they be Νόμοιδουλεύοντες, καὶὑπηρετουντες, ministring and subservient Lawes; waiting upon this their Royal Law. Σκιαὶνόμων; Or as they would choose to stile them, Νομοειδεις, some shadows & appearances of this bright and glorious Law, or at the best, they would be esteemed by them but Νόμοιἔκγονοι, the noble off-spring and progeny of Lawes; blessing this womb that bare them, and this breast that gave them suck.

Culverwell also draws from Cicero's book De Legibus II.4.8 to show that this notion was carried over and adopted by the Romans. As he freely translated it:

Wise men did ever look upon a Law, not as on a spark struck from human intellectuals, not blown up or kindled with popular breath, but they thought it an eternal light shining from God himself irradiating, guiding, and ruling the whole Universe; most sweetly and powerfully discovering what wayes were to be chosen, and what to be refused. And the minde of God himself is the centre of Lawes, from which they were drawn, and into which they must return.

(NathanielCulverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum, eds.) (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 36-37.)

The notion of the Eternal Law is thus part of our cultural and religious heritage. In our next post, we will address in a little greater detail St. Thomas Aquinas's teachings about the Eternal Law, a teaching which the Church has adopted as her own.

Exigency Toward Order

WITHIN HIMSELF, MAN FINDS a desire, an internal exigency, to discover Order in the cosmos. The desire is born of a primordial wonder, wonder at both the sheer ebullience of the created world about him, and how amidst the sheer variety and discordance, there appears withal to be a fundamental order, a harmony. Engaged thus with the world about him and the mystery it bespeaks, man asks whether there is meaning to all this, whether the natural world about him has a purpose, an end, in Greek, a telos. Like God, whose image he is, man looks about and sees that it is good, though he also is aware that this good bears within it an admixture of bad.

Of all creatures, Man has a unique and uncanny ability to peer within himself. He is not only able to admire the stars above him, but a law, an order within himself that hints also of good and bad. He finds within himself an internal world, a hidden cosmos as deep and as expansive as the universe above him. He finds within himself desires that want fulfillment; he finds in himself the ability to plan, to reason, to fulfill those desires; he finds within his inner landscape dark places, as well as light places, dark valleys and resplendant peaks in the crags of his mind.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

(G. M. Hopkins, "No Worst, There is None. Pitched Past Pitch of Grief.")

There is a law written down in there, in what the Scriptures call his "heart." He also discovers, like St. Paul did, that he often does the things he does not wish to do, or things he feels he ought not do. Though he perceives the good, he fails in doing it, and he feels guilt. He violates the rules of his heart. Does all this bespeak a reason for being here, a goal in life, a purpose, and end?

But there is more. Man also observes about him fellow creatures such as himself, and is able to recognize that these, though they are distinct from him, are yet in great part the same as he, they share in his nature. And he must learn to live with them, preferably in peace. They present both a threat to his existence, and a boon to it.

Man also knows also that he must die, but he also knows that he yearns to live forever. He had nothing to do with his coming into this world, and into his consciousness of it; he accepts it as a given, ultimately a gift, though he may be unsure about its source. This man may or may not be a Christian, but it makes no difference, because he is a man, and these observations and these questions are universal, and cross all boundaries of history, culture, and religion.

In the words of C.S. Lewis, man wonders whether there is a "Deep Magic" behind it all.

What should he think? How should he act? Where is he to learn whether there is an Order, a Law behind it all? Upon what path shall he tread, and whom should he follow, in answering these questions? In his The Mystery of Being, the philosopher Gabriel Marcel puts forth what appears to be a sound road map to use in answering our question to find the Order:

On this point it is of prime importance to rejoin the path marked out by the highest philosophic thought since Socrates and Plato on the one hand, and the highest religious preaching on the other; we have the right, and even the obligation, without falling to a rash syncretism, to keep in mind the implications of certain reevealing points of agreement between the higher religions.

(Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being: Volume II: Faith and Reality (South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2001), 90.)

Given this roadmap, we shall turn to the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He combines within himself the "highest philosophic thought" and the "highest religious preaching." And he strove to "keep in mind the implications of certain revealing points of agreement between the higher religions," relying on Aristotle, on the Jewish Maimonides, and on the Muslim Averroes (ibn Rushd). In the next series of posts, therefore, we will look at St. Thomas's teaching of the Order. In his synopsis of the Order, the "Deep Magic" underlying it all, St. Thomas distinguishes between the Eternal Law, the Divine Law, the Natural Law, and Human Law. We will address them in that order.