The Roman Stoic jurist Cicero gave Natural Law its classic pagan formulation. The Natural Law must needs be the law of right or sane reason. He wrote:
True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.
Cicero held that Natural Law was really only discerned by the intelligent man. This is because he understood “nature” as related to reason in the human instance. Natural Law is not inscribed on nature per se, but is available to the human intellect.
This notion was baptised by Justin Martyr in the second century:
In the beginning He made the human race with the power of thought and of choosing the truth and doing right, so that all men are without excuse before God; for they have been born rational and contemplative.
However, the first systematic articulation of Christianised Natural Law theory was in the Summa Theologiae, that “great Gothic cathedral of human thought” (O'Connor) (and other works) of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Aquinas’ doctrine of Natural Law is not held in isolation from the rest of his thought; nor even the rest of his ethics. Rather, as Jean Porter insists, his thinking is continually informed by his Christian convictions and concerns. As Leo Strauss has explained, Thomas’ doctrine of Natural Law differs from the classical theory in that whereas the classical ethicists begin with everyday notions of justice and ascend to the sublime truth by a dialectical process, Thomas begins with God and His Eternal Law. He distinguishes the lex aeterna from the lex naturalis. These are but two of five types of law that Aquinas recognises. The Eternal Law is defined as the providence of God which regulates the universe proceeding from the intellect and will of God. Natural Law is the aspect of Eternal Law which applies to human beings alone and is in accordance with human nature, thus:
...Natural Law is nothing other than the participation of eternal law in rational creatures.
As O’Connor explains:
...Natural Law may be regarded as eternal law in so far as it is intuitively and innately knowable.
Aquinas here provides a corrective to Ulpian’s version of the doctrine , which allowed Natural Law as belonging to all creatures. Thomistic Natural Law applies only to rational human beings.
3 comments:
I think I’d like to reread Cicero for myself as an inheritor or interlocutor of Plato’s idealism. Rather than take Leo Strauss as my guide about Cicero’s start in the everyday phenomenal world. Not that it makes any difference for Thomas. Except that I’d like to learn whether Cicero and Thomas converge on the horizon of ignorance, that is, whether they converge in agreement about what substance of natural law cannot naturally be known. And what Ideal remains shrouded in a cave of shadow hidden from rational discernment. Natural law has operational problems up (in abstracting generals from particulars) and down (in casuistic applications). And I’m not sure Strauss is the best guide for positing differences between Thomas moving downward and Cicero (with pagans in tow) upward. If it really was with Thomas “all straw” at the end, then Strauss may go too far. To leave an edifice in place.
Cheers,
Jim
Enjoying this series so far. I'd be curious to see where in this regard you consider Marsilius of Padua ought be placed.
could i ask how you see this series in the light of the last one on canon? (finding both helpful)
plato, aristotle, cicero, aquinas, ockham, scotus...
Could the doctrine of natural law, seeking to be universal, ever be formulated in anything like those terms among tribal pigmes?
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