Virtue and its Substitutes: Rousseau and Natural Impulse

“THE NATURAL LAW IS THE ORIGIN and principle of all virtues and their acts," says William of Auxerrre in his Summa aurea. For the next various blog postings we will focus on the concept of virtue, relying on the French philosopher Yves R. Simon's The Definition of Moral Virtue (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). This slim book was edited by Vukan Kuic, and its basis is a series of lectures given by Professor Simon at the University of Chicago in 1957. As William of Auxerre suggests, virtue ethics and the natural law are closely aligned; indeed, traditionally, it was impossible to conceive of one without the other. Modernly, virtues--like the natural moral law--remain largely out of favor, although they have some signs of resurgence, spurred by the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, especially since the publication of his works After Virtue and his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Their modern rebirth in secular Academia may be laid at the feet of two women: one a Catholic and the other an atheist: G. E. M. Anscombe (in particular her 1958 essay, "Modern Moral Philosophy" (originally published in the journal Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 124 (January 1958)), and Philippa Foot, who published a collection of essays entitled Virtues and Vices in 1978 (recently republished by Oxford University Press). Virtue was also popularized by William Bennett, U. S. Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan who wrote his bestselling book, The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (1993). Of course, within the moral tradition of the Catholic Church, and within cultural conservatives, the notion of virtue, which is fundamentally human, never lost favor.

Simon identifies virtue with one of its fundamental indicia: dependability or a lack of conditionality. Virtue has staying power, a staying power which human nature as we find it, with its impulses, its foibles, its emotional flux does not. Virtues, are, of course, also part of human nature and support it, but in a manner of speaking they are imposed over those predispositions or tendencies in us which tug against moral right, sort of like a muzzle over a biting dog. They are acquired; they are obtained a posteriori, by habitually learning and doing right, as it were, not a priori, as if innate and spontaneous. Viewed positively, virtues may be considered a sort of dampener which resists the downward dug or bad and temporary impulses. Viewed negatively, the virtues may be considered as a sort of insulating boundary between an errant impulse and objective right. But before we look at virtue, we begin by focusing on modern replacements for virtue, for just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the absence of virtue create a vacuum in the moral man. Something, a substitute, sometimes one which shares at least superficially in some of the qualities of virtues, but which is yet a counterfeit, will step in. Simon identifies three such substitutes or rival versions of what is required to perfect man and take him to happiness: the theory of natural goodness, social engineering, and what he calls psycho-technology.

Traditional virtue found an enemy in the romantic naturalists such as Rousseau (1712-1778). This may be confusing and hard to believe because, especially with respect to Rousseau, the word virtue was never far from his lips or his pen, though, understood in any traditional sense, the notion of virtue seemed to be far from his heart. The traditional notions of virtue for the likes of the Rousseauians appeared to them to be conventional strictures that squelched the natural and spontaneous good that was within man. The dogma of original sin or a realistic anthropology or assessment of the human condition was not part of their thinking; instead, they adopted a highly-optimistic view of man that stressed natural spontaneity. This is, of course, fatal to the traditional notion of virtues as acquired qualities of the mind or of character. Though natural, virtues must be built into us; they are sort of a secondary nature.

Now spontaneity is not, in itself, an evil thing. There is not much attractive in those who are conventional for convention's sake any more than there is anything attractive in those who are spontaneous for spontaneity's sake. But spontaneity (like convention) has no measure of right and wrong, no ratio ordinis, by which it is internally measured. Spontaneity (like convention) must be measured by something extrinsic to it. To suggest that spontaneity in itself is the measure of good, and that any habitus of virtue that resists or inhibits such impulses in any particular case must needs be a restriction on man's freedom and happiness is the kernel of Rousseauian error.

Rousseau, the "Cartesian" Moralist
What the "light of natural reason" was to Descartes in intellectual knowledge,
"natural spontaneity" was to Rousseau in the moral realm.

There is, to be sure, a distinction between the habitus of virtue and social convention. It may be that a social convention, one leastwise that is not directly tied to the habitus of virtue, improperly restricts a perfectly good spontaneous desire. Perhaps a conventional notion that one must raise a family suppresses the spontaneous vocation toward the monastic, celibate life. This is perhaps the truth that Rousseau seized upon and exploited. However, it is an error to equate, to make coterminous, virtue with convention. It is also an error to say that convention and virtue are always and everywhere opposites. Even where virtue and convention overlap (and that seems to be less the case modernly), to squelch spontaneity because convention demands it is hugely different from squelching spontaneity because virtue demands it. Virtue is perennial, and perennially human and good; convention is contingent, and conditionally human and good. Virtues, in other words, are built upon the foundation of the natural moral law. Conventions may or may not be, since they are conventionally-based on customs or the positive law, and not naturally-based on natural law. Yet they both govern or influence behavior and so are found playing on the same field, as it were, the field of morality. To confuse convention and virtue is to confuse team players; it is to neglect the difference between the jerseys of the home team with the jerseys of the visiting team. That blindness will make you a very bad player on the field of morality.

Rousseau's moral teachings are, in Simon's view, analogous to Descartes's intellectual teachings. What Descartes did in the area of speculative reason, Rousseau did in the area of practical reason. Descartes desired to free the human intellect from what he saw as the shackles of tradition, specifically the natural, Aristotelian scholastic philosophy of the time. The construct of the philosophers had to be scrapped in Descartes's view, and one had to seize the "natural light of reason," la lumière naturelle, a natural light which, unconstrained by the accouterments of the schools, would once again allow man to gain true knowledge. As Descartes expressed it in a letter to R. P. Mersenne dated October 16, 1639: "pour moi, je n'ai pour règle des miennes [i.e., de mes vérités] que la lumière naturelle," as for me, I have no other rules [in regard to truth] other than the natural light [of reason]."* Intellectual tradition or patrimony of thought, then, was to be disdained not because it was untrue, but simply because it was traditional. Rousseau applied that very same form of thinking to the matter of morals.

According to Descartes, therefore, the main problem in the progress of knowledge is how to get rid of and stay away from false ideas that not only come from bad teaching, and from old wives' tales, but are generated by our imagination running wild in childhood. . . . For the understanding of Descartes, this is a crucial point. . . . What [the mind] really needs is to recover somehow the natural, native power and light of reason, impaired by bad education, by vulgar opinions, and perhaps most of all by childhood fantasies.

Simon, 3. What Descartes tried to do with regard to the intellectual knowledge, Rousseau tried to do with respect to moral knowledge. In a sense, the Cartesian intellectual optimism was recruited to the moral realm, and there became the Rousseauian natural optimism, a natural optimism which is so attractive to the lazy, to those with moral acedia.

True, Rousseau and his followers never stop talking about 'virtues.' But if we go beyond mere words, we quickly realize that what they are after is not to work for it but rather to tap in the individual a natural spontaneity toward goodness, which they take to be antecedent to both rationality and social order.

Simon, 4.

Thus, though Descartes and Rousseau had different material interests (intellectual knowledge versus moral knowledge), their formal interests were the same (extracting their underlying subject matter from any restrictions, conventional, traditional, dogmatic, etc.) The problem is, of course, that one does not want to throw out the baby with the bath water. Why throw out the virtues in the name of getting rid of convention?

In a manner of speaking, if the notion of virtue is thought of as expansive, in the manner of Aristotle, then Rousseau and Descartes were battling the same thing: virtue. "Aristotle . . . attributes both moral and scientific progress to acquired qualities which he calls virtues." Simon, 3-4. Viewed in this manner, Descartes and Rousseau were battling the same thing: virtue. One did this by hailing back to the supposed "light of natural reason," the other by hailing back to supposed unspoiled "natural spontaneity."

Rousseau's thinking continues on its vicious path. He is read with great avidity or perhaps cupidity today: Rousseau's thought "continues to operate in our society at a deep, mostly unconscious level as a substitute for a genuine theory of virtues." Simon, 4. In summary, however, we must not forget that "rather than an acquired quality of mind or character, 'virtue' for Rousseau means nothing more than 'natural spontaneity.'" Simon, 4.

In other words, if we want to begin learning about virtue, one of our first virtuous acts would be to throw away any reliance upon Rousseau. There is too much of the devil that smolders within his pages.

______________________________
*Ouvres Philosophiques De Descartes (Paris: August Desrez, 1838), 562.

Being and Natural Law: Tarantulas and other Nightmares

WE CANNOT POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND THOMISTIC ETHICS without understanding the metaphysical basis for it, in particular, the basis or foundation of human knowledge. According to Dr. Knasas, our sense of moral obligation comes to us because we are "intellectors of being" and "willers of good." But before we can talk about "intellection," we must talk about "sensation." In the Thomistic realist epistemology, "intellection presupposes sensation." All knowledge comes a posteriori, that is, it follows from contact with reality, and the first contact with reality is sensory.

Since at least the Enlightenment, and Descartes' dream, Locke's empiricism, Hume's skepticism, and the Kantian critique, realistic epistemologies such as St. Thomas's have been much deprecated. The Thomistic epistemology remains that of the "man-on-the-street," but in the minds of modern philosophical faculty, it is without question the minority view, perhaps even largely considered in disrepute. But Dr. Knasas is not so quick on dismissing St. Thomas's "immediate, or direct, realism." He tackled the two principle objections to philosophical realism, the Cartesian "hallucinatory" or "dream" objection and the objections of the Empiricists which are based upon the lack of reliability of the senses, especially the "relativity of perception."

Is what is in my mind reality, or a dream or hallucination? How am I to know? Perhaps we are dreaming of being before Dr. Knasas, a figment or phantasm produced entirely within the confines of the mind, and bearing no relationship, no link with anything real.

Real Tarantulas and Imaginary Tarantulas

Knasas's response to the Cartesian suggestion that we cannot affirmatively establish that we are not in a dream-like state begins with the notion of "image," for it is through the cognitional device of "images" that we "imagine" hallucinations, dreams or conscious imaginings. Cognitional devices such as "images," Dr. Knasas suggests, have within them an "'intentional' charge," which is a sort of built-in capacity that allows us to step back or "reflect" on these images or ideas and "uncover" or discern them as images. We see them as being a step away from reality, at least when we compare them with reality. Ideas do not have the immediacy of immediate perception, of immediate contact with the real world. Thus, we can "imagine" tarantulas crawling on our back and we shudder in fright, but at the same time this "image" of tarantulas crawling on our back has within it this "'intentional' charge" that allows us to reflect and uncover the image of tarantulas on our back as an image, and not as something immediately tied to the real. In a similar way, an act of remembering, which elicits a "memory," brings forth a similar cognitional device to an image, and this "memory" also has this "'intentional' charge." We are able to distinguish memories from reality. Those cognitional devices, such as memory and images, that come packed with this "'intentional' charge," this ability to "reflect and uncover" them as being something other than an immediate contact with the real, are called by Dr. Knasas (who follows Yves Simon in this regard) "ideas."

We dream, hallucinate, and imagine through these ideas, and the "'intentional' charge" that is part and parcel of them allows us, at least if we are not mentally ill, to reflect and uncover the fact that they are ideas, and not real. More importantly, we can also be aware that we are not having such ideas. We can reflect and uncover the fact that, in experiencing the real, there are no such ideas--such as images of dreams or memories in acts of remembering--going on. We can therefore distinguish between awareness of real things directly and immediately, and an awareness of things that come to us through ideas such as memory and images.

Dr. Knasas believes that an error indulged in by many neo-Thomists is their insistence that sensation also works through "ideas," that reality is mediated to the mind through "ideas," just like imagining, dreams, hallucinations, and acts of memory. "Fortunately," Dr. Knasas notes, "the reflexively ascertainable truth is that sensation does not include ideas," at least not as defined by Dr. Knasas as those cognitive devices that have this "'intentional' charge." Though there may be a superficial similarity, there is in fact a huge difference between "ideas," and the Thomistic doctrine of sensory cognitional liknesses, "the 'sensible impressed species," the species impressa, which is man's sensory and cognitive contact with reality. "The sensible impressed species is the very form of the real thing as it is in the knower." Unlike ideas, the species impressa requires the presence of the object before the knower. We are able to distinguish between the species impressa and the idea, whether the idea be the result of the images of dreams, hallucinations, or imagination, or the result of memory elicited by an act of remembering.

It is in a manner such as this that a Thomist can respond to the Cartesian suggestion that we cannot distinguish between reality and a dream.

There is No Morality in Mathematics and Machines

ARISTOTLE FAMOUSLY DISTINGUISHED BETWEEN WHAT IS JUST by nature and what is just by convention or human law. Aristotle does this most notably in his Nicomachean Ethics (1134b), where he distinguishes between τὸ δίκαιον φυσικόν (to dikaion physikon) and τὸ δίκαιον νομικόν (to dikaion nomikon), natural justice and legal or conventional justice. With this Aristotelian distinction, we are introduced to the notion of "nature," physis, and what it all might mean in the context of natural justice and natural law. For Aristotle, the notion of justice broadly extends itself across both moral and non-moral spheres: it is a sense of fittingness or adjustment to a norm, both in what we today would call the physical order and in the moral order. Simon, 42. The Aristotelian and Thomistic notion of nature also encompasses both moral and non-moral spheres. It is a mistake to rend the Aristotelian "nature" into two separate worlds or orders: moral and physical. Though these may be distinguishable, they are not entirely separate in Aristotle's or for that matter St. Thomas Aquinas's mind. Separating these two worlds was, in large part, the error of Descartes and the result was the dualism he introduced between mind, the place where morals govern, and matter, the place where physical laws govern. And that dualism between mind and matter, soul and body, has only been intensified by the idealism of Kant because the latter stressed the noumenal over the phenomenal world, even suggesting we are incapable of knowing the phenomenal world. Aristotle's notion of nature is encompassing:

Nature, in the physics of Aristotle, signifies entity, essence, whatness, quiddity with a constitutional relation to action, operation, movement, growth, development. A nature is a way of being which does not possess its state of accomplishment instantly but which is designed to reach it through a progression.

Simon, 42-43 (citing Phys. 192b and Met. 1014b).

There are no natures in mathematics or geometry. "[I]n the modern as well as the ancient conception, a mathematical entity is not a nature." Simon, 43. Entirely absent from mathematical concepts is the notion of growth: The mathematical concept, whatever it is called, "does not grow; it is what it is by definition, by construction, instantly." Without growth, without development, without potentiality striving to actuality, imperfection or inchoateness striving toward perfection or completion, there is no nature in the Aristotelian sense. Where there is no nature in the Aristotelian sense, there is no morality, for morality, at a minimum, requires a becoming, even if that becoming is governed our reason and our freely-willed choices. This becoming is not a becoming without sense, toward an arbitrary or subjective goal, but a becoming toward a perfection that is one's own by virtue of his nature, his essence. Plant a mathematical point in soil, and it will not yield a line. Water a line all you want, and you will never get a triangle. But plant an acorn in soil and water it, and you will likely get an oak tree. Fertilize a human ovum and you will have a man. The acorn, like man, like everything in between, has a nature; the line or the point does not. This is even true for God who has a nature, although his nature, being immaterial, does not develop, as his being is his own existence, and he has no potentiality requiring any development, but is all act, all perfection. But even with regard to God, his nature is beyond mathematics. ∞ ≠ אהיה אשר אהיה.


In Yves Simon's view, three qualities distinguish the Aristotelian notion of created nature: plurality or diversity, teleology, and a certain relation between beginning and end. Simon, 45.

Plurality. Created nature is not one, but many. This is the notion of plurality. The nature of Aristotle rejects the Parmenidian notion that variety and plurality in the world are illusions, and that all things are, in reality, one. We are all not one big organism; the cosmos is made up of a plurality of organisms, each with its own particular nature. Aristotle would reject the Cartesian notion that there are, in reality, but two natures: one of extension, being physical, mechanistic, unconscious, governed by mathematical laws, and one (which is not really in any sense a nature in a traditional sense) without extension, being intellectual, conscious, governed by moral, or at least intellectual, laws. To deny the plurality of natures leads to absurdity as Aristotle pointed out in his Physics: it leads to the conclusion that there is no real difference between the good and the not good. In fact, the view that "all things are one," is really the same as saying that "they are nothing." Simon, 46 (quoting Phys. 185b19).

Teleology. "Wherever there is nature," in the Aristotelian sense, "there is direction toward a state of accomplishment," there is a teleology. Simon, 47. There is what Aristotle calls a final cause. Mathematical concepts are denuded of any nature. They have no final cause. What is the purpose of a circle? What is the circle's reason for existence? What does a circle do to obtain fulfillment? This is where the Cartesian world, which displaced the Aristotelian world, has had such significant effect on the natural law and on moral thinking. It represents the great philosophical vowel shift, the epistemological turn, virtually an intellectual and moral fall. "I do not accept in my physics [i.e., understanding of an already separated nature] any principles that are not accepted in mathematics." Simon, 48 (quoting Descartes, Meditations VI, Principles).

It is no coincidence that Descartes was unable to come up with anything other than a provisional ethic.

Nature, from Descartes forward, was to be largely considered something of extension, matter operating with Cartesian space and its three dimensions--x, y, z--governed by mathematical laws. And where mathematics takes precedence, there is no real Aristotelian nature, and it follows there is no final cause or end, and without an end, there is no manner of saying whether one is conforming to it or not conforming to it. In short, Cartesian nature is amoral.

The reason why teleological notions are held suspicious by the scientific mind are numerous. One of the most profound is . . . there are no natures and no final causes in mathematics. . . . It goes without saying that there cannot be such a thing as natural law in a thoroughly mechanistic universe.

Simon, 49-50.

Since morality cannot be found in the modern notion of mechanistic nature, it has to be found in the mind. And so morality becomes a matter of ideals, of values, of will or of pure and disembodied reason, and not of natural law. All of a sudden, morality is not really part of who we are, that is our nature, but is imposed upon us by some extrinsic, perhaps even arbitrary, command or some distilled reason. Descartes made the material stuff of which we are made subject to mathematical law. Kant, as we have seen, later made our mind subject to an ethic as unwavering as a mathematical law. Between Descartes and Kant, both our bodies and our souls have been entrapped in mathematical cages. Descartes first trapped our body. Kant then trapped our souls. It is time for rebellion. The natural law will once again set us free.

What a world is this that Descartes wrought! Philosophically speaking, there is no difference in the brain of Descartes between an oak tree and a corn plant; indeed, there is no difference between either of these two, and the physical body of man. All is extension governed by ineluctable, amoral mathematical laws.

For Descartes, to say that the oak tree and the oak plant are natures different from each other is philosophically nonsensical. Such language is adequate in the art of farming and in the art of forestry but not in philosophy. An oak tree is an arrangement of extension, and a corn plant is another arrangement also of extension. And one-half of man--though not the better one--belongs to space just as certainly as a corn plant or an oak tree.

Simon, 49. In Descartes' view, consciousness and extension are parallel worlds, with different laws. We are dealing with two alternative realities. Man is therefore split into two. For Descartes, a theology or philosophy of the body is nonsense. Since the body is but extension, only mathematics or geometry is necessary for an understanding of the body, and this whether the body we are dealing with is corn, an oak tree, a dog, or a human body.

Now, what happens when you divide man into two, one part governed by the mathematical laws that govern machines, and another part, the mind, independent of the former? One falls from philosophical realism to a form of idealism, and ideals and not law begin to govern the life of the mind. So moral law turns ever-so-subtly into moral value. "When mechanism is associated with idealism, as it is in Descartes and most modern philosophers--again, whether outspokenly or not--we have values instead of natural laws." Simon, 50. Values are products of mind trapped in body, not products of a unified man of body and soul.

[W]hen we hear today of moral values, esthetic values, social values, political values, spiritual values, etc., we know where these come from. They come from the mind, they come from outside the things, they are not embodied in entities, in nature.

Simon, 51.

Beginning, Middle, End. "The opposition of beginning and end is relevant in all consideration of nature," Yves Simon states. Simon, 51. What does this mean? It means that when we are dealing with nature we are dealing with something that develops, that has a beginning, a terminus a quo, and an end, a terminus ad quem, and a continuum of development in between the two points. Thus nature may refer to the beginning, in opposition to the end. Or it may refer to the end, in opposition to the beginning. Or it may mean the process between beginning and end, ab ovo usque ad mala, from the egg of the to the apples, from the apéritif to the digestif. Thus the natural law may be considerably affected by this opposition of beginning and end.

In the case of a creature as complex as man, who develops not only individually but also within society, the natural law is operative in a primitive society with primitive social institutions, and is also present in the civilized society with developed conventions and institutions, the latter of which have their basis in this developmental aspect of man's nature. That is to say, the natural law recognizes that, in man, the state of primitive, incipient nature will be supplemented by man's arts and crafts, his sciences and technique, his traditions and his customs, his institutions and beliefs. Thus, at least in man, the "the condition that nature is striving toward is not brought about by nature alone but requires such causes as understanding, crafts, sciences, and above all good will and wisdom." In some sense, there is opposition between nature and convention. In another sense, nature expects to be supplemented by convention, since it is part of man's nature to make for himself conventions. Does this create a certain ambiguity in the use of "nature" in the context of man? Sure it does.

All the dynamism of nature would be missed if our language did not remind us of the relation between the initial and the terminal, the rudimentary and the accomplished, the natural in the sense of that which is just given by nature antecedently to knowledge, craft, and wisdom, and the natural as that which implies the works of intelligence, experience, good will, wisdom, society.

Simon, 53. The primitive of Rousseau is not any more "natural," than the periwigged gentleman of 17th century France. It is expected that man will develop, and developed man is no less in his "natural" state than undeveloped man. Nature anticipates and encompasses this development. What is native, most primitive, most savage is not necessarily any more natural than that which is developed, more complex, or most refined. Man in his alleged "state of nature" should not be pitted against man in his "state of civilization," because it is part of man's nature to live in a civilized state.

The Four Requirements of a Classical Natural Law Theory

FROM BOTH A CLASSICAL AND CHRISTIAN perspective, a Natural Law theory will require a combination of four elements. It will require an epistemology (a theory of knowledge) that is "realist," that is, one which maintains that objective reality is communicated or translated from the object to the subject in a manner that is both reliable and true. Unlike the Kantian critique, it insists we are able to know the "ding an sich," the thing in itself. It will require a metaphysical understanding of nature that sees nature as have an "end," a reason, a blueprint in it. It will suppose a natural theology. In other words, it will acknowledge a Divine Creator and Orderer of the natural world. It will suppose that man is free and rational, and must use these faculties, and not only impulse, in knowing and doing good. Simply put, it will require that man (i) know (ii) himself and his nature, (iii) that that nature has a purpose or end, placed there by God, which informs him of the good, and (iv) that he is free, both in his reason and will, to do that good. Without these, any theory of law and morality, even one given the title natural law, will, at best, limp or falter. These requirements of a classical natural law are well-summarized by John Courtney Murray, S.J.

Natural law supposes a realist epistemology, that asserts the real to be the measure of knowledge, and also asserts the possibility of intelligence reaching the real, i.e., the nature of things--in the case, the nature of man as a unitary and constant concept beneath all individual differences. Secondly, it supposes a metaphysic of nature, especially the idea that nature is a teleological concept, that the "form" of the thing is its "final cause," the goal of its becoming; in the case, that there is a natural inclination in man to become what in nature and destination he is--to achieve the fullness of his own being. Thirdly, it supposes a natural theology, asserting that there is a God, Who is eternal Reason, Nous, at the summit of the order of being, Who is the author of all nature, and Who wills that the order of nature be fulfilled in all its purposes, as these are inherent in the natures found in the order. Finally, it supposes a morality, especially the principle that for man, a rational being, the order of nature is not an order of necessity, to be fulfilled blindly, but an order of reason and therefore of freedom. The order of being that confronts his intelligence is an order of "oughtness" for his will; the moral order is a prolongation of the metaphysical order into the dimensions of human freedom.

John Courtney Murray, S.J., We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Lanham: Sheed & Ward, 1960), 327-28.

The philosopher Kant denied the first. In different ways, René Descartes and David Hume denied the second. Nietzsche denied the third. Calvin denied the fourth. These are some of the enemies of the Natural Law.

Ecstasis and Telos: Immanuel Kant and Selflaw

FOR A MAN THAT NEVER TRAVELED more than 100 miles from his home town of Köningsberg, the philosopher Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) effect on the world of ideas was massive. With his publication of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, he effected what has been called the "Copernican Revolution" of philosophy. His contributions in the field of moral philosophy and law have likewise been immense. As Rommen puts it in his book The Natural Law, Kant was "the watershed from which flow so many and such varied streams of modern thought." Rommen, 83. If Kant's moral and legal philosophy found in such complex texts such as The Philosophy of Law, the Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals, and his Critique of Practical Reason could be boiled down to a small kernel without serious injustice to the thought, it would be "autonomy," selflaw. Kant "exhibits in his philosophy the individualist natural law in its final, highest form,"Rommen, 88, but this law is so distilled of any notion of ecstasis and telos that it is no longer recognizable as law. It is the law one gives to oneself. It is absolutely autonomous, nay, more, it is anti-heteronomous, as it positively excludes any outside source of the law--even to the point of excluding Nature and Nature's God. Kant's morality is, in a way, the complete antithesis of Natural Law.


To understand Kant, one must recall Descartes's mechanistic view of nature and the Baconian rejection of a final and formal cause in nature. This is because, as Levering says, "Kant returns firmly to Descartes's project, which he advances." Levering, 117. Informed by philosophical nominalism, Bacon insisted that the notion of a final cause (or telos) in nature was a muzzle on true science that had to be discarded "The final cause rather corrupts than advances the sciences." Bacon, Novum Organon, aph. 3. Similarly, the notion of a formal cause, or an understanding of the "form" or "nature" of a thing, was useless. To exercise power over nature, man had to limit his analysis of nature to material causes only. "Matter rather than forms should be the object of our attention . . . ." Nature, as it were, had to be put to torture and put on the rack. Similarly, Descartes rejected the notion of a final cause. "The entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing's 'end,' I judge to be utterly useless in Physics." Descartes, Meditation 4. Matter was "dead," it had no principle of life outside mechanics that could be perfectly transcribed into mathematical equations. Coupled with this mechanistic view of nature was Descartes's extreme dualistic view of man, where man was a detached spiritual mind almost jailed in his material body. As a result of this deprecation of the body and the body/soul union, Descartes viewed the will and not reason as the preeminent human good. As he stated in a letter to Christina of Sweden:"Now freewill is in itself the noblest thing we can have because it makes us in a certain manner equal to God . . ." It was an apotheosis of will that proved regnant in Cartesian philosophy. So on the one side was a mechanical cosmos with no purpose, the res extensae, the extended order of things. On the other was the human mind or soul, the thinking thing or res cogitans.

Kant then stood on the shoulders of Bacon and Descartes. And there he was confronted with Hume's skepticism. It was Hume and his skepticism which "interrupted" Kant's "dogmatic slumbers." (Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics) Kant sought a means around the Humean skeptic fence that barred reason from knowing the good, and made reason slave to his passions. Kant's efforts at preserving the Cartesian mechanistic view of nature while yet overcoming Hume's radical skepticism required a severe restraint on reason, both theoretical and practical. Reason could not know the things in themselves (ding an sich), it only knew the appearances of the things in the mind as informed by sense data. "I had to do away with knowledge," Kant said in his Critique of Pure Reason, "to make room for faith." Kant may have better said "emasculate" or "amputate" Reason. And what kind of faith did he allow for?


In the area of morality, three notions were placed outside of pure reason's grasp by Kant: freedom, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God who will reward the good and punish the evil. Kant maintained that none of these could be proved by reason (as they could also be disproved), and in his famous antinomies, Kant both proves and disproves the existence and non-existence of these three truths. So Kant shows with equal rigor that the world had a beginning in time, and no beginning in time. Through reason, Kant shows that it can be argued that the world is both made of composite substances made of simple substances, and that no composite substance is made of simple substances. He shows that there is free will, and that there is not free will, but all things are fastly determined. Kant argues that there must be a necessary Being, and then again that no such Being exists. Kant's point in his antinomies is not that these things don't exist, but that they are beyond the pale of reason. To accept them required faith. We had to act "as if" the soul was free and immortal, and there was a God who rewarded good and punished evil (als ob ein Gott sei), as if there were a reason or an end though, in fact, we must disabuse ourselves of the belief that these can be gleaned by reason. The God of Kant's faith was safely insulated from Reason's and the World's assault, and from Hume's skepticism, but that meant that God had only a presence in human consciousness and not in the worlds of Nature and Reason. For Kant, the cosmos is without God, and God is without being, an emasculated God. God is only in our minds. This is not the God to which we pray, "I believe, help Thou my unbelief!" It is a God that is marginalized, compartamentalized, housed in a Ghetto. (Unfortunately, once confined to our minds, this God in our minds becomes very pliable, as we shall see.)

So God deftly out of the way: "What is to be done, if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world?" asks Kant. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason). The answer is given in Kant's moral philosophy, and Kant here applies as radical a critique as he did in regards to theoretical reason. First, Kant rejected any role of human nature in determining good and evil. Kant rejected the role of natural inclinations or desire for happiness as containing anything of importance to the question of the good. In fact, these inclinations and desires worked against the preeminent determinant of good: a good will informed by duty alone. In an effort to overcome Hume's guillotine (his "is"-"ought" argument), Kant jettisoned Nature like he did Reason. For Kant, a good will is most pure when it goes against inclinations or desires. It is most pure when it follows a categorical imperative: "Do this!" and not a conditional imperative, "If you want to be good or be happy, do this!" (Kant, Groundwork of Morals)

For Kant, therefore, (and like any good Cartesian) morality is solely within, in the will. In Kant's view, the human will has two main components. First, it is a self-caused movement. Second, it is a rational power that uses universal concepts. Accordingly, the purity with which the will moves itself (outside of any inclination or desire) and the universality of the rational imperative is what makes the will good. For Kant, the chiefest universal law is what he called the "categorical imperative." "Act only according to the maxim by which you can will at the same time that it becomes a universal law." (Kant, Groundwork of Morals) The categorical imperative is the highest law because it is pure command and most universal. It references no matter, no nature, no happiness, not even God; it is pure and uncorrupted.

When the will acts in accordance with the categorical imperative, the human will will reject any other law outside of the imperative. Duty is solipsistic. It looks towards itself, it never looks outside itself, it judges for itself. Therefore, the will legislates for itself. We have the law of one. The will, to be free and good, must become autonomous. "The will is not simply subject to the law, but subject in such a way that it must also be considered as self-legislative and for this reason, at the very first, subject to the law whose author it can consider itself to be." (Kant, Groundwork of Morals) Therefore the person is autonomous, not heteronomous. A person must be like a greek city--a polis--that issues its own laws out of its own sovereignty (auto-nomos), and not a city that relies on another city with jurisdiction to issue laws (hetero-nomos). The person must act in accordance with the imperative (autonomy) unmoved, uninfluenced by any desire or inclination for good or evil encountered in external experience (heteronomy). As Michael Waldstein summarizes it:

I am autonomous when I will what I will without being motivated by any good or evil, that is, when I move myself according to the categorical imperative. I fall into heteronomy when I will something because it is good. In heteronomy, I degrade my will and make it a servant of my internal desires. I reach autonomy and freedom only when my will is completely independent from the whole sphere of appearances based on received sense-data, 'for, independence of the determining causes of the world of sens (and independence which reason must always claim for itself) is freedom.'

Waldstein, 50 (quoting Kant, Groundwork of Morals).

Well that certainly takes care of Hume. But at what expense?

As Pierre Manent summarizes it: "At last [man] can think what until that time he could only will: he can now think that he is neither a creature of God nor a part of Nature, that he is in short born of himself, the child of his own liberty." (Manent, The City of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 189 (quoted in Levering, 119 n. 178). According to Kant, a rational being achieves greatest dignity when it "obeys no law except the law which it simultaneously gives to itself." Kant, Groundwork of Morals. Autonomy and freedom are the highest goods, not obedience to a law that is wise or good or that may lead us to happiness or union with God. Thus in a masterful sophistry, Kant baptizes as the good autonomy and its necessary concomitant: disobedience to any externally-imposed law. More, because each person is completely autonomous, each deserves dignity, and each becomes his own law, and his own end:

For what end (quem in finem) does [man] exist? His existence has the highest purpose in itself . . . It is only in man, and in man only as the subject of morality, that an unconditioned legislation concerning purposes can be found, which thus enables him alone to be a final purpose to which the whole of nature is teleologically subordinated.

(Kant, Critique of Judgment) Waldstein summarizes what Kant has proposed: "Each and every person is the final end of the whole of nature. There are as many final ends as there are persons." Waldstein, 51-52. This principle of autonomy is also reflected in Kant's political philosophy, which views government's task not as promoting any good, but as protecting autonomous individual's rights. Government's role is not to promote the happiness of its citizens, but to promote the rights of its citizens. Government is no-wise to be paternal (imperium paternale); rather, it is to be patriotic (imperium non paternale, sed patrioticum). Pace George F. Will, Statecraft is not Soulcraft. Indeed, counterintuitively, the "greatest despotism imaginable" is a government that desires and promotes the good of its citizens, more despotic, presumably, that a government which does not intend the good of its citizens, but rules them for its own ends. Waldstein, 52-53.

The distance of Kant's moral philosophy from that of Natural Law and Scripture is at once apparent. Indeed, as Waldstein notes, Kant's notions of autonomism and disdain of any dependence contradict the very heart of The Lord's Prayer: Pater noster, qui est in caelis, . . . fiat voluntas tua . . . panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie . . . Our Father, who art in heaven . . . thy will be done . . . give us this day our daily bread . . . . The Lord's Prayer implies a heteronomous relationship with God in which we find freedom; we are not our own, but both our beginning and our in are in God. One wonders how sincerely Kant prayed the Vater Unser, one wonders if he could without wincing.

It is Kant to whom credit is given for separating law and morals, ethics and law, by separating law and its external compulsion from notions of the inner freedom or moral autonomy of the individual person. Rommen, 88-89. This separation was so severe, that for Kant "[t]he legal order is devoid of moral character." Rommen, 90. As Pierre Manent puts it:

[Man] flees the law that is given to him and seeks the law he gives himself. He flees the law given to him by nature, by God, or that he gave himself yesterday and that today weights on him like the law of another. He seeks the law he gives himself and without which he would be but the plaything of nature, of God, or of his own past. The law he seeks ceaselessly and continuously becomes the law he flees. In flight and in pursuit, with the difference of these two laws always before him, modern man proceeds in this way to the continual creation of what he calls History. In this enterprise, the nature of man is his principal enemy.

Manent, 204 quoted in Levering, 120, n. 178.

We could perhaps adapt Kipling's famous words in his "Ballad of East and West": Oh law is law, and morals is morals, and never the twain shall meet. The excessive separation between law and morals has led more than one person, even such redoubtable and diverse thinkers such as Ayn Rand and Hannah Arendt, to link Kant's ideas to Hitler and Eichmann. Whatever the link in factum esse, it is true that neither the evil and original Hitler or the evil and banal Eichmann would have been possible had German society held fast to a Natural Law jurisprudence. Ideas have consequences; and bad ideas have bad consequences.

We will close by quoting Kant. "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them," said Kant, "the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir.

Stars and duty, not God above or God within. John Paul II is supposed to have remarked about Kant in the context of his wrestling with Kant's thought: Kant! Mein Gott! Kant! Kant! My God! Kant! (Weigel, Witness to Hope (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 128). It was as if John Paul II, in an unguarded moment, were challenging Kant from his very grave to turn his gaze from the lesser deities of stars and of duty to his God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God that became Man in Christ Jesus and taught us to pray . . . .

Note: These reflections rely heavily on Michael Waldstein's masterful summary of Kant's moral philosophy in John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (Boston: Pauline Books, 2006), 34-54.

Ecstasis and Telos: Renè Descartes and His Dreams

"COGITO ERGO SUM," the Cartesian Coordinate System (x, y, z), methodological doubt, and the pineal gland as seat of the soul (if Homer nods, Descartes lapsed into a full coma with that one) are some of the first things that come into mind when Renè Descartes (1596-1650) is mentioned. Commonly regarded the "Father of Modern Philosophy," Descartes ushered in what has been called the "epistemological turn" (Wolff) or "epistemological crisis" (MacIntyre), making him the watershed so to speak, between modern philosophy with its focus on epistemology (how or even if we know) from the philosophy before that time which focused on ontology or metaphysics (what we know). Some philosophical wag (Whitehead) said that the history of philosophy is a footnote to Plato. We may fairly say that the history of modern philosophy is a footnote to Descartes. The proto-skeptic (or perhaps more accurately the proto-neo-skeptic) Descartes looms large in any history of philosophy.

This is obviously not the forum to discuss Descartes in any depth, nor do I have the competency to tackle that subject, but we ought to identify and summarize those parts of Descartes's philosophical system (loosely called Cartesianism) that contradict the classical or traditional (read Christian) theory of Natural Law. The most important of these relate to Descartes's notion of Nature and of Man. Specifically, his rejection of any teleology in Nature, which constituted a rejection of the notion of an Eternal Law. We may also point to his theory of body and soul (what has been called "angelism" or "mind in the machine").

Although there are exceptions and qualifications (there almost always are), generally speaking, before Descartes, man's nature or substance was generally perceived hylomorphically, that is, as a blended duality, both matter and form, body and soul. (Hylomorphism is a word formed from two Greek words, ύλη (hylo), meaning "wood," and by extension, "matter," and μορφή (morphē) meaning "form" or "shape"). That notion is particularly prevalent in Aristotle's philosophy. In his philosophical musings, Descartes vehemently rejected such a conception. Descartes viewed man's nature as a duality of natures that lived in an uneasy joinder. The soul was seen as a sort of angelic pilot, a spiritual humuncular, a mini-spirit, which piloted the ship of the body. For Descartes, the great unprejudiced one, this navigation was done through the pineal gland. Jacques Maritain called this Cartesian teaching "Angelism": "Cartesian dualism breaks man up into two complete substances, joined to another no one knows how: on the one hand, the body which is only geometric extension; on the other, the soul which is only thought—an angel inhabiting a machine and directing it by means of the pineal gland." (Maritain, The Dream of Descartes, 179).

Like the poet Mallarme's aged dying patient in the hospital who was unwilling to accept the human condition, Descartes may be said to have exclaimed:

Je me mire et me vois ange!
I admire myself, and see myself angelic!

(Stéphane Mallarmé, Les fenêtres, "The Windows")

Matthew Levering views Descartes's thoughts on the relationship between body and soul as being of great significance (Levering, pp. 86 ff.) Among other places, Descartes's efforts in trying to derive a new philosophy is reflected in his Meditations. In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes addresses the relationship between body and soul.

It is manifest that Descartes distinguishes his "I" from his body, viewing his body as something wholly separate, though very closely engaged to or "mingled" with his "I." Levering, 90. Though his senses play well-enough the role of informing the body reliably of its needs, the senses are unreliable in the area of truth. Descartes views the body as a complex organic machine, "so built and composed of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin," and responsive to laws that are independent of the mind. He repeated his fascination with the body as a "machine" both his Discourse on Method as well as his in his Treatise of Man, where he stated: “I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us.” The "I" is uncoupled and independent of the body. For Descartes, "it is not necessary to the 'I' that it have bodiliness, since even were bodiliness proven to be an illusion, the 'I' would be real." Levering, 89. It is this "I" alone, and not the "I with the body," which thinks. It is this "I" alone, and not this "I with the body," which certainly exists. Descartes is as far as can be from John Paul II's "theology of the body."

Descartes arrived at his views through intensive introspection in a series of meditations and the application of a methodology of radical doubt. Although Descartes's "looking within" for answers is not particularly novel or objectionable, what was new and what has turned out to be significant was his notion, as Charles Taylor in his Source of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) puts it, that the moral sources are within us exclusively, and bear no relationship to any external reference, such as our body or the cosmos at large. Descartes brought about "a transposition by which we no longer see ourselves as related to moral sources outside of us, or at least not at all in the same way." (Taylor, Sources of the Self, 143.)

Descartes abandoned the notion of an Eternal Law, at least to the degree that it manifested itself in God's created world, the cosmos, including the body and mind of man. As Charles Taylor succinctly puts it: "Descartes utterly rejected [the] teleological mode of thinking and abandoned any theory of ontic logos." Sources of the Self, 144. And Levering concludes: For Descartes "Neither the 'I' nor the machine-body are identified by teleological ends." Levering, 90.

Descartes clearly had no patience for the philosophers and theologians before him. Convinced that he was fated to derive a true philosophy, Descartes jettisoned the past, and tried to start the philosophical journey afresh. There is thus another spirit in Descartes of which we should be aware. His distrust of received teaching, of tradition, of inherited culture was notable. He may have considered himself enlightened and unburdened by what he viewed as unreasonable prejudices of the past. But what blinded him was that he himself suffered from a prejudice perhaps more vicious. Descartes suffered from what Hans-George Gadamer would call "das Vorurteil gegen die Vorurteile," the prejudice against prejudices, which, of course, is a prejudice in itself. This impatience with the past simply because it is the past is something that the Enlightenment seems to have foisted upon us, and it carries particular weight in our country. Too often, this dissatisfaction with the past leads to a state of unrootedness, restlessness, a thirst for novelty, and frequently banality. The theory with the best press is the "newest" theory, the theory that claims to debunk an "old" theory, the titilating theory, and not necessarily the best theory.

Though there is obviously room for critical thought, and blind enslavement to the past simply because it is the past is never to be fostered, there has to be room for a prudent and intelligent reserve against change in favor of the inherited traditions of our culture. The critical intellect has to recognize the validity of St. Paul's injunction to "stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us." (2 Thess. 2:15) Else we run the risk of flailing in the winds of novelty.

There are few who can build a philosophy of life from scratch within their lifetimes. And Descartes's effort was audacious. Even if we have the talent, the honesty, and the grace, we will not have the time to think all things anew. With respect to the American penchant for rejecting the past, and embracing some progressive future, de Tocqueville observed: "Of all the countries in the world, America is the one in which the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed." (Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America (Geroge Lawrence, trans.) (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), 429.) This spirit is markedly different from that embraced by G. K. Chesterton, who, in his Orthodoxy, noted that "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

Foundations once destroyed, what can the just man do? (Cf. Ps. 11 [10]:3). Though it was easy enough to pursue his methodological doubt, and reject a teleology in nature and the unity of body and soul, Descartes seems to have been at a loss in deriving a substitute basis for morality. While he nursed his doubts in his Discourse, Descartes advanced a "provisional morality" (une morale par provision) composed of four maxims. Though this provisional morality is one of outward conformity and practical conservatism, it is cowardly prudent, and not particularly edifying. It is hardly persuasive as a recipe for the good life that God calls us to live. In a way, Descartes is a type of the modern ethics which, in light of its inability to know the universal good, also calls for a highly dissatisfying "provisional morality," one largely based upon secular presumptions, and process not substance.

About 2,000 years ago, between Christ and Barabbas, we chose Barabbas. About 400 years ago, between Christ and Descartes, we chose Descartes. Perhaps its time for a reassessement? Perhaps its time for a turn?

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.