Eternal Law, Revealed Law, and ‘Natural’ Law: Grasping the ‘Natural’ on the Margins of Creation
Thomas A. Price, DPhil Oxon.
I. Theological Ethics and Natural Law
Natural law approaches have been fashionably on the increase in the field of theological ethics over the past few decades after a significant time of being ‘on holiday.’ During their ‘long vacation,’ figures such as Karl Barth and Stanley Hauerwas among others (especially in the modern Protestant and Reformed worlds) had hoped that such approaches would have not merely gone on a long holiday but rather on a ‘permanent vacation.’ Many Christian ethicists today, especially in the Reformed world, agree with Barth and others about rejecting natural law approaches, doing so for a wide variety of theological reasons. They have no interest in finding a place for such approaches to moral life at all, as they deem them simply unable to address substantively the moral complexities of late modernity in a robustly Christian way.
Further complicating the matter is that natural law comes in a host of varieties, in some cases incommensurable with each other. Whilst such varieties might in some sense derive from a shared tradition of natural law, such a tradition itself, like all intellectual traditions, is ‘long, rich, varied, and subtle.’[1] Within this span of richness, variety, and subtlety, there is no one approach or set of definitive characteristics that represent everything that goes under the name of natural law.[2] Furthermore, natural law approaches take on differing shapes and contours as they are remapped to address the contextual challenges within which each sets out to make its contribution. This variety only adds to what is often seen as ‘the ambiguities and problematics of the natural law tradition’.[3]
I will not pursue here the encyclopedic endeavor of detailing the variety among the natural law claimants. My aim is more modest. I show, first, that many of the criticisms made by theologians about modern natural law thinking are well founded. ‘In the modern era,’ notes Russell Hittinger, ‘the theology of natural law was moved to the periphery and was usually eclipsed altogether.’[4] Unmooring natural law thinking from its biblical and theological roots and embedding it within the metaphysical assumptions of modernity has radically recast its fundamental character. Its heavy investment in the modern conceptual world with its secular reasoning is theologically problematic. Especially problematic is the notion of ‘natural’ which is severed from the classical metaphysics of creation and recast into a quasi-autonomous tier that is assumed to be independent of God and self-standing. Theological ethics properly rejects natural law thinking invested in such radically altered notions of the natural.
But my second aim in this essay is to show that classic natural law approaches are not guilty of the modern errors mentioned above, nor guilty of other errors for which many Barthians and some Reformed have indicted them. Indeed, classic natural law approaches incorporate well into a comprehensive moral theology because they are biblically and theologically embedded and richly anchored in a Christian metaphysics of creation. The ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ in classical understandings are not about ‘independent’ self-standing realities autonomously grasped, but are fundamentally about creatures dependent upon and directed by God in deeply participatory ways. Such a ‘participatory theonomy’ is basic to natural law ethics and worthy of retrieval today. Particularly so because it allows human reasoning (and imagination) to grasp truth about creaturely natures and purposes. Such truth contributes to a comprehensive vision of the Christian moral life, discerning how divine wisdom displays itself within the created and moral order. Hence, there is a place for classic natural law reasoning in a comprehensive moral theology and its contributions should be embraced by theological ethicists.
I. The Background Problematic of Modern Variations of Natural Law
Natural law thinking morphed into problematic variations after it began reconceiving itself within the thought paradigms that took root in the fourteenth century. For our purposes here, three fundamental alterations are worth mentioning, along with their ramifications. These three alterations set the groundwork for a radically creature-centric and anthropocentric vision unmoored from the theocentric vision which preceded them. First, there was a shift towards a radical theological voluntarism. Second, there was a domestication of divine transcendence: from an understanding of the Creator/creature relationship which was analogous in character instead to one that was now univocally conceived. Thereby both God’s being and creaturely being were understood within the same ontological index. Third, metaphysical nominalism replaced a theologically underpinned realism, leading to a conception of creatures and nature as fundamentally self-standing and autonomous.[5]
The shifts toward voluntarism and metaphysical nominalism that took hold in Western theology around the fourteenth century shattered the former consensus. The radical theological voluntarism was a step backwards for Christianity, positing a view of divine transcendence more akin to pagan notions than Christian. God here was viewed as transcendent in a quantitative rather than a qualitative way. Divine being and creaturely being were therefore placed on the same plane of being, with God merely at the top of this plane in terms of power and agency. Here God is not infinite existence itself as classical theology understood the divine, but is viewed as one more kind of being that may or may not be. He thus is no longer the transcendent source of being encompassing everything. Most problematically, it radicalized divine will and pitted it over against the other attributes of God so that divine wisdom and goodness were understood as instruments of the will rather than the will being an expression of the full divine nature and wisdom. God here was viewed as absolute will whose sovereignty is deemed preserved only if it is not constrained by other aspects of His nature, like divine wisdom and goodness. Ripped from the divine will was divine reason. Ripped from the creation was its participation in forms of divine reason known by the two forms of divine illumination: one discerned in the intelligibilities in-forming the created order, and the other discerned in the primary revelation of Holy Scripture. Reason and Revelation after this shift are pitted against each other rather than the former purified and perfected by the latter.
The result of this shift spawned a revolution in the West which continues to upend the riches of the Christian past, radically redefining God, humanity, nature, history, reason and logic, language and reality, morality and law, and all else. This shift too created the conditions for the contradictions, conflicts, and incoherences of the visions of human being and purpose that make up our contemporary world.
Nominalism was the metaphysical result of this shift that cut the cord of intelligible creation as teleologically ordered. Creation was no longer the result of divine wisdom at the core of God’s willing but was seen as the imposition of form ungoverned by anything other than arbitrary divine choice. Consequently, creation becomes understood as radically individual. Whatever similarities we might find from one creature to the next, even from one human to the next, these are not grounded in the nature of a reality analogous to divine wisdom. Also because of this shift, our language is redefined. It no longer refers to universal natures intelligibly formed and sustained by God, but becomes a subjective way of generalizing things, a mere convention or fashion. In this shift, no ‘natural’ norms or laws can encompass radically individual things. Each individual human, for example, does not share in a common human nature with a common teleology. So no ‘norms’ or ‘laws’ which pertain to humans in general could ever be more than mental constructs.
This radical shift also entailed that God, humans, nature, and history are considered and distinguished within the same matrix of being. At the root of the modern world is a competition for who or what shall have primacy. Note the disharmony. God’s being and action, now on a shared plane with everything else, does not occur in a realm wholly transcendent and thus immanent to all things, supplying being and form and direction even as it allows creation to unfold in accord with its endowment. It instead occurs on the same order, being distinguished by its relative power. This deity thus needs cooperation for its will to be done. This deity too can be hindered by creaturely opposition because this god, however powerful, is not the only agent on the playing field. This conflictual order between divinity, humanity, nature, and history sets the agenda for the various proposals that make up the modern project.
The path to modernity can be seen as a host of conflicts and struggles over which competing participant within reality would be central to it. The debates between the Renaissance Humanists and certain Reformation and Catholic theologies were often struggles over whether the will of God or of individual humans are at center stage. Once that contest failed to resolve itself, it splintered into contradictory anthropologies. One emerging theme was to make ‘nature’ the dominant center to which God and humanity had to be understood in relation, a proposal inconceivable to the earlier Christian consensus. But the new model viewed the creaturely and natural as autonomous, self-standing, individual, and secular—i.e., with its own this-worldly ends. Nature becomes increasingly understood as ‘a center of properties and source of activity strictly delimited and enclosed within its own’ mundane order. Louis Duprè sums up the history and result:
At the end of the Middle Ages . . . nominalist theology effectively removed God from creation. Ineffable in being and inscrutable in his designs, God withdrew from the original synthesis altogether. The divine became relegated to a supernatural sphere separate from nature, with which it retained no more than causal, external link. This removal of transcendence fundamentally affected the conveyance of meaning. Whereas previously meaning had been established in the very act of creation by a wise God, it now fell upon the human mind to interpret a cosmos, the structure of which had ceased to be given as intelligible. Instead of being an integral part of the cosmos, the person became its source of meaning. Mental life separated from cosmic being: as meaning-giving ‘subject,’ the mind became the spiritual substratum of all reality. Only what it objectively constituted would count as real. Thus reality split into two separate spheres: that of mind, which contained all intellectual determinations, and that of all other being, which received them.[6]
As a result of these fundamental alterations, the biblical and theological vision that originally underpinned natural law ‘was moved to the periphery and was usually eclipsed altogether.’[7] Thus, as Russel Hittinger notes, ‘the epistemological and natural foci became architectonic.’[8] Increasingly, the epistemological posited an ‘autonomous reason’ grounded in the thinking or experiencing human self as the ‘foundation’ of knowledge and the ‘natural’ was understood as ‘autonomous, individual, self-standing- and dominated by merely this-worldly ends. Natural law, therefore, if it was appealed to at all, was now one more doctrine being fundamentally altered and redefined.
The varieties of modern natural law theories that resulted from the shifted theology and metaphysics of the West are largely marked by the egocentric or anthropocentric turn that the shifts eventually produced. Here, the anthropological emphasis is read within a material order largely defined by secular, this worldly-ends. Even within strands of Neo-Thomist natural law theory, where classic divinity is assumed and the supernatural is affirmed, there is an altered understanding of nature and human nature as pure, relatively autonomous, and self-standing enough to posit a reserve of territory buffered from the supernatural.
Late medieval and early modern natural law approaches remapped themselves within the anthropocentric turn. Although there were a wide variety of approaches to natural law that developed within this remapping, they shared this fundamental alteration. Duprè sums up a much more narrow and constricted vision of the doctrine:
Once the human self becomes detached from its cosmic and transcendent moorings, the good can hardly be more than what Hobbes calls it: ‘the object of any man’s appetite or desire’....What previously had given meaning to human life precisely because it surpassed individual aspirations, now came to be conceived in terms of personal need or fulfillment. Isolated from the totality from which it drew its very content, the self had nowhere to turn but to itself.[9]
This could only happen when the new starting point of the natural human was reconceived within a territory independent from God, now called the ‘state of nature’ (the secular substitute of the story of Genesis). What developed was a notion that human reason, nature, meaning, and purpose were all ‘pure’; that is, self-standing items which did not depend on a higher reality to make them intelligible and meaningful. They were ‘solid’ realities such that they could ground and supply everything necessary for their flourishing and fulfillment individually, socially, politically. One’s own natural and rational endowments, directed by one’s appetites and will, become a sufficient authority replacing the divine wisdom economy of classic natural law theory.
II. Classical Christian Natural Law: Reconsiderations and Retrieval
Natural law approaches that are indebted to the legacy of radical voluntarism and metaphysical nominalism are incompatible with Christian theological ethics. Radical autonomy and voluntarism at their core are not only incoherent and heretical but lead us into moral chaos and even destruction. Reinhard Hütter put it thus:
After Kant, Fichte, and Nietzsche on the one hand and Marx, Darwin, and Freud on the other, we find ourselves as late moderns caught between a manic-depressive roller-coaster ride between the ghost of the Promethean daydream of freedom, by now turned desperate and therefore dreaming of auto creativity—that is, of designing our own bodies, choosing our own gender, our values, and our destinies freely according to our idiosyncratic likings and longing—and the Hades-like nightmare of endless victimization by ‘the system’—by anonymous economic, political, and cultural power structures, by our own genetic makeup, and by the will to power of everyone around us.[10]
The problems we discern in the modern forms of natural law, whether secular reworkings of natural law within the modern metaphysical constrictions (Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, and Hegel are examples) or religious variations expressed within the conditions set by the shifts we noted earlier (Scotus, Ockham, Baroque Scholastics, two-tier Thomism, some Reformers), were not present in classical Christian natural law proposals or others indebted to classical Christian theology, even when developed after the voluntarist turn.[11]
Classical Christian approaches to natural law were first anchored in biblical exegesis and theology proper. Scriptural reasoning supplies the groundwork from which Christian theological reflection unpacked classical notions of natural law. Take, for example, the theological setting of natural law in the 12th and 13th centuries, as Jean Porter has expounded.[12] At the center of natural law reflection during this time, the central source of unpacking its nature and meaning was the Ordinary Gloss, that is, running commentaries on Holy Scripture compiled over generations. Immersed in biblical exegesis and reasoning, such thinking supplied the authoritative reality-vision which incubated robust thinking on natural law as a theological ethics with a universal applicability. At the heart of this reality-vision were the biblical doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. From these biblical teachings sprouted a notion of ontological transcendence that radically altered the existing Hellenic and Hebraic understandings, however much it borrowed grammar from each. This ontological transcendence illumined the metaphysical implications of the biblical doctrine of creation.
From this grounding, the universality of natural law thinking, its appeal to the creaturely endowments of reason and intuition and innate sense, was anchored in theology proper. This provided an economy of illumination from within a sapiential context, whereby all sound reasoning is a creaturely participation in divine wisdom. The very exercise of natural law reasoning represents a human reflection on the divine image, and it provided, as Porter notes, both a benchmark for identifying human sin and a basis for human restoration.[13]
In contrast to some modern natural law approaches, which appeal to unaided reason as the ground of illumination of the natural law, classical natural lawyers were reliant on the divine revelatory economy and therefore authoritative texts. Supremely authoritative was Holy Scripture in the context of the Church’s history of engaging that text as divine revelation. There was also a range of lesser but still significant authorities. Various teachers of the Church as well as some non-Christian sources were deemed sound contributors understanding creaturely life and moral wisdom. In all cases, the human mind and its grasping of the moral law is not first in the causal order. Nor is the moral law in nature first in the causal order. Of the three foci that make up natural law discourse classically (the natural law grasped by the human mind, the law in nature, and the Eternal law in the mind of God) only the Eternal law in the mind of God has causal precedence in the order of knowing as well as in the order of being. Aquinas, for example, ‘defines the law from the standpoint of its cause origin (in God), not in terms of a secondary order of causality through which it is discovered (the human intellect).’[14] Here, natural law is nothing other than sharing in the eternal law by intelligent creatures. The eternal law illumines ‘the rational order of creation in the divine mind which human reason then participates in and mediates through acts of the will and through particular actions.’[15] To be sure, because of human sinfulness this illumination is eclipsed, distorted, and of limited value on its own. But divine law was given as a remedial aid for that condition, and ‘also as a new form of participation in the eternal law.’[16] It is a revelation of God’s governing of all things, including the arena of moral matters. Finally, in Christ ‘the light of grace’ heals and ‘illumines the created intellect such that the creature’ becomes conformed to the eternal law in the deepest way a creature can participate in it.[17] The new law of Christ supplies the greatest participation in the eternal law because He is One with it in His divinity. This ‘theonomous participation’ allows our fallen minds back into the light that illumines all things and allows even our human reasonings to grasp again the inherent meaning and order stamped on the creation by its participation in the Eternal Logos. This, at least, is how the Anglican divine Richard Hooker explicated the classic doctrine.
III. Concluding Reflections
My modest aim in this essay was to show that Karl Barth and other Reformed critics of natural law were often on target in their criticisms of certain strands of natural law thinking. For example, they correctly challenged the anthropocentrism of many modern approaches. They also rejected the radical autonomy that undergirded their understanding of human reason or experience. As I noted, these free-standing elements owed their conceptual roots to the shifts in theology and metaphysics beginning in the 14th Century. Most radical was the development of a notion of nature as self-standing and able to ground and explain itself. This hyper-focus on autonomy led, furthermore, to an embrace of wholly this-wordly ends as of chief significance in the moral life. Each of these modern emphases are fundamentally at odds with classical Christianity and natural law.
Theological ethics today would be enriched by retrieving the wealth and wisdom of classical approaches. These approaches stand in contrast to the nihilism and radical voluntarism of our contemporary world, and have much to offer by way of Christian counter and alternative. Christian ethics today should be involved in retrieving their riches. This retrieval would include several key elements: a thorough immersion in the biblical reasoning that gave rise to Christian natural law; a deep investment in the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation which supplied classical visions of transcendence and metaphysics; and a renewed attention to Christian thinkers such as Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Hooker. After exposure to such riches, one may see that the Barthian and Reformed criticism of natural law does not apply to the classical visions. And furthermore, one would begin to see, I would hope, the much richer offering in the classical approaches than the voluntarism some today offer as the Christian alternative.
[1] David Bentley Hart, Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws in First Things. March 2013.
[2] Bruce Baugus, The Roots of Reformed Moral Theology. (Grand Rapids: Reformed Heritage Books, 2022).
[3] Jean Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapis: Wm. Eerdmans, 2005), 45.
[4] Russel Hittinger, Natural Law and Catholic Moral Theology in A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and Natural Law, ed. Michael Cromartie (Grand Rapids: Wm. Eerdmans, 1997), 9.
[5] This history of these shifts and their significance for modern understanding and culture has been told many times. Here three works are helpful in tracing out the core lines of theses shifts, even if some of their details are not as precise as they could be, or accurate on every detail. See Louis Duprè, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (Yale University Press, 1993), Michael Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and Nihilism before Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Each of these sources, as well as many of the interpretations of modernity which note this break and shift, are in many parts on track, but they often sell a vision in which Protestant theology was the product of and exemplification of the breakdown of the Classic Christian theological and metaphysical vision, embracing and contributing to the radical views of transcendence, voluntarism, and nominalism which characterized this fundamental break (known as the via moderna). The history is far more complex than this. But good historical and retrieval work has shown that neither the first generation nor their scholastic Protestant heirs embraced the via moderna of this sort. Rather they show a large-scale commitment to embracing, retrieving, and developing more richly the Classical Christian vision and its participatory view of creation and redemption. Further, they largely assumed and affirmed the rich analogy of being which defined the classical Christian vison. For a critique of those narratives of modernity which label Protestant theology nominalist and radically voluntarist see Seth Jacob Snyder, Protestant Nominalism: An Analysis of Post-Reformation (1555-1662 Protestant Philosophical Theology (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Cambridge, UK 2023).
[6] Dupré, Passage to Modernity, supra n. 2, at 3.
[7] Hittinger, Natural Law and Catholic Moral Theology, supra n. 4, at 9.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 143.
[10] Reinhard Hütter, Bound to be Free: Evangelical Catholic Engagements in Ecclesiology, Ethics, and Ecumenism. (Grand Rapids: Wm. Eerdmans, 2004) p. 123.
[11] My point here is not that moral theologians should avoid learning from any of these approaches, however constricted they are due to their theological and metaphysical limits (or even problems). Critical engagement is the key. Also, not all natural-law approaches indebted to the voluntarist and nominalist shifts are problematic to the same degree or in the same way. Neo-Thomism retains much more classical Christian insight than Hobbesian ‘state of nature,’ and so will have to take that into its consideration and engagement.
[12] Jean Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of Natural Law. (Grand Rapids: Wm. Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 7-24.
[13] Ibid., 16.
[14] Hittinger, Natural Law and Catholic Moral Theology, supra n. 4, p. 6.
[15] Paul Dominiak, Richard Hooker: The Architecture of Participation (London: T&T Clark, 2020), p. 40.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
