Cardinal Mercier and the Natural Law, Part 19: Rights of the State

THE TERM RIGHTS OF THE STATE has an unfamiliar ring to it, but it is shorthand for the ensemble of "juridical [legal] relations which unite the governed to the governing power in the civil society." [325(106)] Within this division, and under the guidance of a natural law philosophy, Mercier explores the nature, origin, and end of the State. He asks what the functions of public authority ought to be, and in what form those functions ought be assumed and exercised. Mercier addresses the rights and duties of citizens to the State, the principles that ought to govern international relations, and the relationship between the civil society and the religious society. "All these questions . . . belong to the sphere of the philosophy of Natural Law." [325(106)] The answers to those questions are all predicated upon the theory of the State that one adopts.

The first matter addressed by Mercier is the various theories of the existence of the State. He reviews some of the main theories that are outside the classical natural law tradition: (1) a pantheistic view of the State (Plato, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte); (2) the view of the State as an institution of positive divine right (such as that advanced by Filmer or Bodin); (3) the view that the State is a creature of social contract alone (Hobbes, Rousseau); and (4) the view of the State as a social organism (Lilienfeld, Schäffle, Spencer). Finally, as against all these other theories, he discusses the rival Christian, that is natural law, conception of the State.

The pantheistic theory of the State is probably not much held modernly, and it is difficult to conceive that it was ever advocated in earnest. But it was. In some sense, Plato may be viewed as being its originator. In our day, we can trace this view largely to the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).

Plato's philosophy, specifically his ontology, had the "germ of pantheism." He saw the entirety of the cosmos informed by "a kind of psychic principle," of which individual's soul was "but an emanation." This view, coupled with the notion that universal ideas correspond to universal essences in the divine wrap up all things in a pantheistic blanket. These underlying metaphysical presuppositions inform his ideal state in his Republic. After all, the state is viewed as the cosmos writ large, and the state as the soul of man writ large. Thus they are all intimately joined and linked in one pantheistic chain of being. For Plato, justice was tied to harmony and unity. "Liberty and the traditional philosophy of man's spiritual nature stand or fall together."
--Cardinal MercierAccordingly, the role of reason was to harmonize and unify the various human faculties. Similarly, the role of the city state was to harmonize and unify its citizens into one body corporate of the City-State. This required a subordination of the individual to the City-State. Anything that could present itself as a threat to the unification was suspect, and so intermediate institutions such as the family, private property, and idiosyncratic activities such as poetry and so forth had to be banned from Plato's ideal state. (It is this tendency in Plato, noted by Mercier, that led Karl Popper to identify Plato (along with Hegel and Marx) as one of the traditional enemies of the "open society".) But even Plato, in his extremity, cannot be said to have "identif[ied] the State with the deity of the universe," though he came awful close. [326(107)] The same cannot be said for Hegel.

Portrait of Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger (1792-1855)

"With Hegel, who here follows Schelling and Fichte, the case is otherwise. . . .[I]n his later writings he professed the completest pantheism." [326-27(107)]

'The State', he says, 'is the social substance that has arrived at self-consciousness . . . . It is the rationnel* of itself and for itself . . . it is a terrestrial divinity.' Here we find the State has become an aspect of the Absolute which, according to Hegel, is the common substrate of all things, the universal substance, of which individual beings are but so many modes or determinations.

[327(107)] (quoting Hegel's Philosophy of Right) For Hegel, the State, being in essence divine, lives for its own ends, and not for the common good. "Hegel's answer is that the State must be viewed as an organic and living unity having its own subsistence as its one end." [327(107)] Similarly, the State is the source of all right:

[S]ince [the State] is the divine being, its will must be the sovereign law, the source of all rights and all duties. Therefore against its decisions no individual right founded on nature can be of any avail.

[327(107)] This divinization of the State is a serious lapse into paganism because it absolutizes the State. One of the boons of Christianity was to force a separation between the secular State and the religious life of man (the Church). Christianity thus demoted the pretensions of an absolute State, and it would seem that the State, like a man with a heart darkened by the bitterest desire for vengeance, has been unforgiving since that time, biding its time and nursing its wounds until it could destroy the Church and re-assume the powers that Satan would give it.

Charles I by Unknown Artist Receiving His
Divine Right to Rule Immediately from God
(National Portrait Gallery, London)

Another theory of the State is what may be called the "divine right" theory. Stemming from 17th century jurisprudence, it held the monarchy to be appointed by God himself in an office of divine right. Thus the prince was responsible not to his subjects, but to God alone. As if by divine election, the monarch was chosen from the mass of men and given special authority by God. Not only was he given authority directly from God, but apparently as part of it the power to cure his subjects of scrofula, known thereby by the moniker "the King's evil."**

The political interest of the monarch, namely, the consolidation and extension of his power, dominates all other interests. He is known as the 'raison d'Etat' Before his superior claims the rights of the individual must yield.

[328(108)] Such a theory of government is largely Eastern in inspiration. "Its origin is not Christian." [328(108)] Obviously, such a theory is not held by anyone modernly. One need only read the work of Sir Robert Filmer (1588-1653) to see the risibility of such a theory. Another advocate of the theory was Jean Bodin (1530-1596). It is of merely historical interest currently.

The social contract theory of the State is probably the view held by a majority of political theorists currently since it is at the heart of political liberalism. Although there is great variety among advocates of this theory, the essential kernel shared among all of them is that "civil society owes its rights to a contract, either expressed or tacit, that has been freely entered into by its members." [328(109)]

Hobbes is an early advocate of the concept, but his theory has a decided monarchical slant, although his theory may be translated and mutated to the power of an absolute State of other stripes.

Portrait of Jean Jacques Rousseau in Armenian Dress

Rousseau was the theory's great popularizer and democratizer. Rousseau's writings, however, resulted in a dichotomous interpretation. On the one hand, Rousseau gave birth to an individualistic notion of the social contract theory, where the State's role was by common agreement or contract stipulated to be one that would allow men to express their autonomy, free of any extrinsic influence. What was originally the fruit of rationalism in thought (philosophy) and morality and religion (i.e., autonomy), found its expression in political theory. "There it fostered liberalism, and drew conclusions from the theory of the social contract which were directly opposed to those of Hobbes." [329(111)]

Essentially, any social contract theory of the State makes the institution's origin entirely human. It is formed by consent of men, and God has nothing to do with it. The social contract theory is the basis for the modern school of political liberalism, as from this theory it has borrowed two fundamental tenets. The first principle liberalism has borrowed is the legal basis of public authority. The second principle borrowed from the social contract theory relates to the purpose of the State.

Liberalism, along with the social contract theory, believes that the "free consent of individuals is the one and only source of all lawful authority." Thus the State and law finds its ultimately source in human consent, human contract, and it is therefore independent of any divine law. Public authority is viewed as limited by agreement or compact. Its role is to assure the greatest possible freedom among its citizens, without regard to morality or to nature.

As it is contrary to the principle of rationalism to accept any guidance from constituted authority alike in matters intellectual as well as moral, so it is consistent to assert that the function of the State is not in any way to direct the action of individuals as regards any ideal whatever, but simply to safeguard them from all obstacles that would hinder their free development. Accordingly the function of the State is not to civilize, but only to guarantee that the rights and liberty of the citizens shall be protected.

[330(111)] This is the path that Kant took: "As an advocate of the principle of the autonomy of reason, he gives us the conception of the State as the mere guardian of the rights of the individual." [330-31(111)] All this liberalism, shunning the World's enchantment, ignores God's Grandeur. But:

The world is charge with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights of the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.***

Liberalism has trod, and trod, and trod, and has lost its sense of truth and freedom. It wallows in self-indulgence, and revels in pollution of all sorts, especially social pollution like pornography, homosexuality, dead babies, ruined families, and ruined marriages, the empty shells of which are found anywhere it has had some say. Its expression in classical liberalism, of the laissez faire type, has not been particularly edifying either. The waste, the disregard for the world's resources, the disrespect for nature and the environment, the social and chemical dross left behind by Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is disheartening. How much beauty been have the grasping industrialists destroyed by careless exploitation of the world's resources?

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene****.

The other prong of Rousseau's thought took a decidedly less liberal path, and expressed itself in the notion of the "General Will" and the absolutism of a democratic state. Rousseau attributes to the general will qualities of absolute sovereignty, indefectibility, and infallibility, and by a sleight of hand, though it is but the will of the majority, makes it by transference the will of each individual. As it turns out, under this branch of Rousseauism, it is "law or, more accurately, the will of the majority, that creates rights, and especially the right of property." [331(112)] The seeds of collectivity are already present:

By becoming a citizen a man has even lost his own individual existence. For Rousseau informs us that 'the mission of the legislator is to transform each individual, who by himself is a solitary unit, into a part of a larger whole from which this individual in a certain measure receives his life and being.' . . . Christianity in asserting the independence of religious from civil authority had liberated the human conscience form the yoke of the State. Rousseau would replace that yoke.

[332(112)] Like a dog, it would seem, man left Christ and then returned to his own earlier pagan vomit. This is in keeping with proverbial wisdom: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so is the fool that repeateth his folly." Sicut canis qui revertitur ad vomitum suum sic inprudens qui iterat stultitiam suam. (Proverbs 26:11).

Herbert Spencer by John McClure Hamilton (1853-1936)

The last theory addressed by Mercier before launching in the natural law way of things is the theory of the "social organism" or organicism. Though it has some Platonic roots, and was present in the teachings of the Physiocrats, and even in a form in Hegel and his disciples, this now-forgotten theory was advanced by the likes of Paul (Pavel) von Lilienfeld (1829-1903), Albert Eberhard Friedrich Schäffle (1831-1903), and the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer (1820-19

We are told by Spencer that all phenomena are governed by a law of evolution. . . . Now under this same law of evolution individuals are brought together to form social organisms. . . . For he viewed the life of society as not essentially different from the organic life of man . . . .

[333-34(113)]. Mercier cuts to the quick: this theory "is simply a restatement of the old-world materialism." Like all materialism it denies the human personality. [334(113)] Ultimately, the question revolves around whether "the individual, who is also the social unit, is not something more than a mere aggregation of cells, such as materialists would have us believe." Their denial of any further principle other than atomism or cell-aggregation, "when applied to political science," leads to "the most radical absolutism." [335(113)]

"Liberty and the traditional philosophy of man's spiritual nature stand or fall together." [335(114)] And it is to that conception of man and to the State, that Mercier directs his attention and ends his foray in the natural law in his A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy. That will be the subject matter of our next, and also last, posting on Cardinal Mercier and the natural law.

___________________________
*Rationnel (adjective) is French for rational.
**The "King's Evil" (le mal du roy) or Scrofula (Tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis) is essentially tuberculosis of the neck. Popular belief held that the "royal touch" of the monarch of France or England could cure the unfortunate subject of the disease. It was viewed as a power collateral to his right of rule. Apparently, the power respected the Salic law in France, but not in England, where Queens apparently claimed it.
***Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur."
****Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Binsey Poplars."

The Disfigured Face: The Unholy Trinity: G. W. F. Hegel

IF KANT IS A DIFFICULT READ, HEGEL IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE without an investment of years and tears and the loss of hair. But one cannot ignore Hegel in the ushering in of modernity. Cortest makes him the last of the unholy trinity of moralists that have helped fashion the ethics of modernity and conspired to disfigure the face of the natural moral law by robbing morality of its ontological basis. According to moderns that follow Locke and Kant instead of Aristotle and St. Thomas, morality is no longer based upon being, upon existence, upon the nature of things. It is based upon autonomous choice, under a universal and unyielding regime of external imperatives that cut through human flesh in their razor-like steel of mathematical certainty. Ethics is a matter for the brain; to hell with the heart. Kantian ethics is sort of like making love to a robot. There ain't nothing human in that.

Hegel, Cortest argues, takes the modernist abandonment of ontological ethics to an entire new level, a sublime or spiritual one. If Kant's ethics may be likened to having sex with a robot, Hegel's ethics may be likened to having sex with a disembodied spirit, a sucubus. Not just any sucubus. Hegel's sucubus has a vagina dentata.

Hegel accepted the notion of a free, self-conscious individual (the contribution of Locke) and the notion of the rational and universal (the contribution of Kant). But, in Hegel's view, the self-conscious individual and the universal had to be developed, had to evolve. Self-consciousness and self-direction under the regime of the universal was just the starting point. For Hegel, life was not being, existence; life was becoming. Hegel clearly rejected an ontological ethic, an ethic based upon being. Rather, one might say that Hegel advanced an ethic of becoming, a rheological* ethic. "The human being, in his immediate existence [Existenz] in himself, is a natural entity, external to his concept," Hegel says in his Elements on the Philosophy of Right. In other words, man's existence is untrue, he must aim at something else, his "concept" which is distinct from his existence. He continues:

[I]t is only through the development [Ausbildung] of his own body and spirit, essentially by means of his self-conscious comprehending itself as free, that he takes possession of himself and becomes his own property as distinct from others. Or to put it the other way around, this taking possession of oneself consists also in translating into actuality what one is in terms of one's concept.

Cortest, 59 (quoting Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right). This is autonomy in its fullness. Man "becomes his own property as distinct from others," only if he becomes self-consciously aware of himself as free. That would suppose that man is not distinct from other men unless he becomes self-consciously aware of his freedom, and this would appear to be consistent with Hegel's pantheistic tendencies. What this means is that one translates himself by a process of development into an actual realization of one's concept. What is the "concept" to which this self-consciously free man strives for? This concept of the human being is that the human being is spirit:

[It is] something free in itself, and is one-sided inasmuch as it regards the human being as by nature free, or (and this amounts to the same thing) takes the concept as such as its immediacy, not the Idea, as the truth. . . . The free spirit consists precisely in not have its being as mere concept or in itself, but in overcoming [aufheben] this formal phase of its being and hence also its immediate natural existence, and in giving itself an existence which is purely its own and free.

Cortest, 60 (quoting Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right). Thus, one is to reject the notion that one has his being as a mere concept or in himself (ontology); rather, this free spirit is exactly in not having its being as mere concept or not having its being in itself. One has to overcome, lift oneself out of being and out of one's immediate natural existence. One thereby translates himself then into a unbounded existence which is purely of its own manufacture and is completely free of any links to nature or being. We are free when we join in the grand dance of becoming, when we leave, through the recognition of our own radical freedom of spirit, the notion that we are being. We are not free in being. We are free only in becoming.

In Hegel's view, we are not born free as human beings. We become free only through our own rationality. The human person has no ontological dignity that necessarily and absolutely requires that all men be born free. Our natural existence is of lesser importance for Hegel, for whom the rational is preeminent. No human being is born free in this system, he or she acquires freedom through rational self-consciousness.

Cortest, 60. But in all this becoming, where is it exactly we are going? Here, Hegel, who has cast off the supposed shackles of natural being and existence, and led us to the freedom and the spirit of becoming, leads us back into an ominous, dehumanizing prison: the State. It is as if Hegel were an SS guard, persuading the Jew that to be free he had to leave his hearth and home in old Warsaw, be shipped in the cold of winter to Auschwitz in a Reichsbahn Güterwagen, assuring him that, now that he has been released from hearth and home, the freedom he experienced in the cold box car will translate itself into the ultimate freedom of the concentration camp. It is no coincidence that some, whether fairly or unfairly we will leave others to figure out, have traced the horrors of World War I (L. T. Hobhouse in his The Metaphysical Theory of the State) and World War II and the Nazi totalitarianism and atrocities (Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies) at least in part the foot of Hegel.

Hegel's Recipe for Freedom?

Whatever the final verdict on the contribution of Hegel's philosophy to one of the bloodiest and most brutal half-centuries in the history of man, one at least on to pay attention to the following words of Hegel. They lend probable cause for Hegel's indictment by Hobhouse and Popper:

The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom requires that personal individuality [Einzelheit] and its particular interests should reach their full development and gain recognition of their right for itself (within the system of the family and of civil society), and also that they should, on the one hand, pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal, and on the other, knowingly and willingly acknowledge this universal interest even as their own substantial spirit, and actively pursue it as their ultimate end.

Cortest, 60-61 (quoting Hegel's Philosophy of Right). Hegel also says that "[t]he state is the divine will as present spirit, unfolding as the actual shape and organization of a world." Cortest, 61. Concrete freedom is found in the State? The State is the "divine will as present spirit"? Did we read Hegel right? Cortest certainly thinks so:

Human dignity, for Hegel, must be acquired through a process of self-awareness in the state. The notion of the dignity of the human person as such, independent of the state, is a doctrine not defended by Hegel. If the "ultimate end" of human beings is only fully realized in the state, no individual human being can ever achieve this end outside of the state. The state is, therefore, the context within which human beings acquire dignity.

Cortest, 61. This is a long way down from the dignity St. Thomas Aquinas's ontological and eudaemonistic ethic gives us. As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord and his Church, and not Hegel and his State.

To close these postings on the unholy trinity of moralists, the liberal John Locke, the imperativist Immanuel Kant, and the statist/spiritualist G.W.F. Hegel, all of whom have contributed to the modern system and have disfigured the face of natural law which is upon ontological suppositions, we will allow Cortest to summarize for us:

Although Kant's doctrine may have differed from Hegel's in many fundamental ways, his emphasis on the universality of reason and moral autonomy prepared the way for Hegel's rational spirit. Locke, who most probably would have rejected much of what Hegel would later write, also prepared the way for Hegel with his emphasis on individual freedom. All three of these thinkers broke with the older tradition of ontological morality, that by Hegel's day had few intellectual defenders. Indeed, not since the time of the great Aristotelians of the seventeenth century had the old system found a strong enough advocate to defend it against the philosophical voices that now dominated European intellectual life.

Cortest, 64. What and who was going to draw us out of the vortex of confusion?

Enter Stage Right: Count Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci, more commonly known as Pope Leo XIII.

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*This is probably a neologism, at least in matters of morality. The word "rheos" comes from the statement attributed to Heraclitus, though not found in his extant writings, which encapsulates that reality is not being, but is becoming: Τα Πάντα ῥεῖ (ta panta rhei), meaning "everything flows."

The actual words attributed to Heraclitus are found in his cryptic utterances:

ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ.
Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.

Ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν, εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν.
We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.

Plato in his dialogue Cratylus [402a] gave his interpretation of the Heraclitean notion of the ever-flowingness, ever-changingness of life, the never-staying-the-sameness of life:

πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.
Everything changes and nothing remains still.

Instead of "to flow," rheos, Plato uses chōrei, from the word, χωρέω (chōreō), change, give way, or withdraw.

Though as far as I know the words rheology or rheological are not used in moral philosophy, the word rheology is used in physics to describe the study of the flow of matter.

Natural Law: Ecstasis and Telos

ETIAMSI DAREMUS . . . NON ESSE DEUM. These temerarious but still tenuously introduced words in the introduction (Prolegomena) of Hugo Grotius's treatise De iure belli ac pacis (1625) symbolize a historical phenomenon of which anyone who studies the Natural Law must be aware. In this treatise on international relations, Grotius (1583-1645), commonly called the "Father of International Law" (although the title could equally be claimed by the Spaniard and Catholic Vittoria), relied on the doctrine of the Natural Law. Though the Dutch Grotius was himself a Christian [of Protestant bent, he wrote an apologetic of Christianity in Dutch, Vewisjs van den waren Godsdienst (1622) which was translated into Latin as De veritate religionis Christianae (1627)], he argued that the Natural Law would bind us etiamsi daremus . . . non esse Deum, even if "we dare to say there is no God." It is true that the Natural Law binds all men, including the Atheist, and if understood in this manner, there is no controversy to what was said. But Grotius's etiamsi is indicative of something in the air a little more subtle, and a little more ominous. It is perhaps the first shoot, the first flowering of a Natural Law theory wholly unmoored from the notion of God, if such a theory is even tenable. It was the maturation of trend of turning away from God being the measure of all things to a Protagorean man is the measure of all things. In his classic The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), the historian of Natural Law, Henrich Rommen, identifies Grotius as the "turning point." The "turn," however, started much earlier than Grotius.


In his excellent book Biblical Natural Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Matthew Levering, an Associate Professor of Theology at Ave Maria University, discusses this "turn" from a theocentric notion of Natural Law to an anthropocentric notion of Natural Law. According to Matthew Levering, two things are required for a wholesome (and also Biblical, i.e., consistent with Revelation) theory of Natural Law. The first he calls ecstasis. The second he calls teleology.

What do these words mean? Ecstasis is the transliteration of a Greek word ekstasis or ἔκστασις. It means to "extend outwards" to "stretch out." It is the word from which we derive the English word ecstasy. It is used here for the desire of union with the Divine. This ecstasis need not be religious in origin, though it most often is. For example, the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus, no Christian himself, in his Enneads speaks of his ecstasis, his virtual experience of union, with his philosophic notion of God which was based upon a natural theology. The term ecstasis was readily adopted by Christians to describe the union with the Trinity. Levering's point is that the Natural Law must recognize ecstasis, a desire for union with God, which means that our lives on earth are ordered to God.


The second requirement that Levering argues is required for an adequate theory of Natural Law is a teleology of nature. The word teleology is a technical word derived from a combination of two Greek words: telos (τέλος), which means "end", "purpose", or "goal," and logos (λόγος), a word which means "reason" or "word." For example, in the Gospel of Christ Christ is referred to as the Logos of God, the Word or Reason (logos) of God. John 1:1. In St. Paul's letter to the Romans, Christ is also referred to the end (telos) of the Law. Rom. 10:4. As applied to Nature, a teleological view would include the concept that God created nature, including the nature of man, and that He did so with a plan, a purpose, an end, a reason in view.

In short, requiring a theory of Natural Law to possess a notion of ecstasis and a notion of teleological nature means that God is both the origin and the end of things, including man. God is the alpha (A), He is the omega (Ω), the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and the first and last letters of the Natural Law. Put another way, the requirement that a theory of Natural Law include notions of ecstasis and notions of teleology in nature mean that a theory of Natural Law must presuppose Eternal Law.

The traditional or classical notion of Natural Law includes both notions of ecstasis and teleology in nature. This notion of Natural Law found its most mature expression among the Stoics, e.g., Cicero, and was advocated in modified form by the Church, e.g., in St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, as consonant with, and in fact revealed in, Scripture and Tradition. Many modern theories of the Natural Law shun notions of ecstasis. They turn not outward to God (ecstasis), but wholly inward (in what may be called an entasis) to man. Though a turning inward to man is not fatal to a theory of the Natural Law (in fact it would be part of our discovery of our nature), it is when this turning inward is exclusive or in opposition to the turning outward to God that it becomes a problematic to a theory of Natural Law.

The story of how the Natural Law came to be progressively emancipated from its theological roots is a long one, and there are many controversial points about it, for example who initiated the process, and whether the arguments made to justify such emancipation are valid or not. Regardless, Levering calls this disassociation from of the Natural Law from its original theological roots the "Anthropocentric Turn" or "Anthropocentric Shift." He wrests out eight individuals from history to make his point. And for the next series of reflection we will rely on his choices: Renè Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, George W. F. Hegel, and Friederich Nietzsche. There are many others Levering could have chosen (e.g., Ockham, Scotus, Machiavelli, or Luther). Though these may (or may not) have been believers in various shades, the "natural law" of Messrs. Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel is not the Natural Law. These gentlemen's ideas are already on the way out of the Porch (Stoa) or the Church (Ekklesia) , and in some instances completely out of the Porch or the Church into the Wilderness.

To a greater or lesser degree, each of these men rejected the notion of ecstasis and teleology in nature. In some cases, there was no apparent rejection, but some of their presuppositions would lead to or implied such rejection. Each played a part in the Western world's turning from God as the measure of all things, including Law, to Man as the measure of all things, in particular Law. Some of their notions have prevailed and are assumed in modern culture, and we have to be aware of them in order to understand better the Natural Law, to reject these ideas, or to respond to them.