Is there a Natural Law?

Alan M. Suggate

This article first appeared in Dialogue magazine.  Permission to reproduce this article has been applied for.

Definition

The term `natural law’ denotes that there are certain fundamental moral requirements built into the structure of the world, and that they can and should be observed by all human beings in the light of reason.

Introduction

Natural law antedates Christianity. A good example from the ancient Greek world is Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone’s uncle Creon issues an edict as ruler of Thebes that her brother Polyneices is not to be buried because he has marched against his own city. Antigone defies the edict on the grounds that it must be overridden by the unwritten [natural] `law’ that the dead must be buried. The issue of the reality and scope of a natural law continued to be discussed for centuries in the Graeco-Roman world.

The Bible is concerned mainly with the special revelation* of God, yet there are signs that there was an implicit belief in natural law. For example, Amos asserts that God will not revoke the punishment of Israel’s neighbours, since they ripped up women with child (1:13) and burned to lime the bones of the King of Edom (2:1). Such attrocities are intrinsically wrong. In the New Testament, when Paul discusses the relative positions of Jew and Gentile in Romans 2:14f., he affirms that when the Gentiles do by nature what the law requires they show that it is written on their hearts.

Natural Law was firmly incorporated into Christianity by Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). He made a synthesis in two tiers of the natural and the supernatural (reason and revelation), finding their unity in the one God who both creates the world and reveals himself. Aquinas distinguished between those truths about the nature of the world which can be determined by reason and other truths which cannot be apprehended unless they are revealed by God.

The Reformation produced a rupture in Christian ideas on natural law as in so much else.The Catholic Church continued to promote it, and indeed in the late nineteenth century Pope Leo XIII decreed that the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas was to be taught as the Catholic philosophy in all seminaries. Catholic philosophers like Jacques Maritain loyally did their best to adapt Aquinas to the modern world. An important turning point was the Second Vatican Council (1962-5). Though the Council did not discuss natural lawdirectly, it did put it in a different light which was not so closely tied to Aquinas. In the last thirty years there has been much discussion on how natural law may legitimately bereformulated. The latest key document is Pope John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor (1993), which is a powerful restatement of a more traditional view of natural law. Protestants have in varying degrees dissented from natural law, on two basic grounds.

First, many of them hold that natural law, and especially that of Aquinas, is out of touch with the modern world and that integrity requires its abandonment, or at any rate drastic reformulation. Secondly, many have held that the very idea of a natural law discernable by human reason constitutes a threat to the sovereignty of God and the paramountcy of revelation – human reason is corrupt and in need of God’s revelation.

Another important feature of the history of the West since Aquinas is theEnlightenment* and the secularisation* of Western culture. It is not surprising,especially in view of the wars of religion, that many rejected revelation and looked for a worldview and morality based purely on reason. If God remained, he was conceived of in a deistic* manner. This is evident in the American Constitution and the thinking ofThomas Paine at the time of the French Revolution. In more recent times moral principles worked out on a basis of common reason, or natural law, have lain at the basis of international law and the United Nations Charter. A good example of natural law thinking is seen in the Nuremberg trials of 1945. The surviving Nazi leaders were tried on the grounds of `crimes against humanity’. The Nazis pleaded that they had done nothing against Nazi law, but the prosecutors rested their case on the conviction that persons as persons shall not be exterminated, and that this was open to all to see in the light of reason.

Natural Law has therefore had a long history and a chequered career. At no time has it been completely clear what it was supposed to mean, and for many centuries it has been highly contested.

 

The Hallmarks of Natural Law

For the hallmarks of natural law one could turn to Aquinas himself, but I am taking the work of Heinrich Rommen. He was a German Catholic lawyer and layman, who found in natural law a firm defence against the dogmas of Nazism. Since it is often said that natural law is abstract or even arbitrary, it seems worth taking the description of one who found it an invaluable support. I shall also draw on the French philosopher Jacques Maritain.

In the narrower sense there are only two norms of the natural law: `What is just is to bedone and injustice avoided’, and `To each person his due’. These are very general principles. But the content of the natural law is supplied by rational reflection on the nature of the world and persons. Content is bound up with epistemology, and to this we turn.

First, traditional Catholic natural law has a realist* epistemology* – that is, it maintains that we do apprehend a world `out there’. It is, therefore, poles apart from, say, Kant, who maintained that we cannot see the world as it is, but only as our mind presents it to us.

Most people are common-sense realists, but the form of realism adopted by Aquinas is not so readily acceptable today. For Rommen presents the traditional Thomist*distinction, going back to the Greeks, between essences and particulars. The senses grasp only particular objects. To make that object intelligible the intellect has to grasp the essence of it. This means in effect that it has to classify the object as an instance of some genus. Thus, to apprehend a table we need not only the sense impression of a table, but also the concept of table in order to recognise a particular table as a table.

The status of these essences was problematical. It was commonly held that they were eternally immutable.* Plato invoked the idea of eternal forms existing independently of concrete instances. Aristotle, followed by Aquinas, said that a given essence is present objectively in all concrete objects of the same kind. Whilst one can grasp the point about how one recognises a table, nevertheless the peculiar Aristotelian way of expressing the matter is foreign to us. For Aquinas, too, the essence was immutable. The problem for us is that we are very conscious of living in a world of change and we have become both scientifically and historically conscious in a way which marks us off from antiquity. Does the idea of immutable esences fit our modern understanding of the world, and especially of persons?

 

An objective view of moral truth

We have already seen that Thomism (nb useful to use this technical term for Aquinas’ theory, ed.) takes a strongly objectivist* view of truth. The same is true of value, or moral truth. The world of fact and the world of value are ultimately one. To apprehend a person in particular is not only to apprehend a fact; it is to apprehend the intrinsic worth of that human being. To many in the modern world this too is a problem. For example, logical positivism* has maintained that, though there are publicly agreed criteria for scientific and mathematical statements, there are none for ethical and religious statements. They accuse the natural law of ignoring the distinction between statements of fact and statements of value, or, alternatively, of trying to pass off moral statements as if they carried certainty like mathematical axioms of thought.

Again the form of expression of Thomist natural law is problematic.Aristotle was a biologist, and Aquinas took over the idea that, just as acorns naturally develop into oak trees, all living things naturally move to fulfil their potentiality. Human beings in particular are called to fulfil their essential being, acting in accordance with reason. But can we rationally read off from biology what we ought to do? Is development in the world mainly a matter of the unfolding of essences?

For Aquinas the essences are grounded in God. They are ideas creatively conceived in the mind of God in wisdom, and imprinted on the world. And since God is the goal of every created being, then for rational creatures the highest end is the glory of God and the eternal union of human beings with God. This raises the question about how rational ethical principles are to be related to talk of God, and so to revelation.

 

The nature of persons

Natural law also offers further basic ideas on the nature of persons. It asserts the freedom and dignity of each and every individual, grounded ultimately in the eternal destiny of each person, but also the inescapably communal nature of human life, which is just as integral as individuality. Jacques Maritain made much of this bipolarity of human beings, against both the marked individualism of the West and the twin forms of collectivism in his day, Communism and Nazism. Persons have a dignity independently of society, and this dignity is absolute because it is in direct contact with the Absolute. Yet each person is also an open whole, not only because it needs to satisfy certain basic requirements in the political community, but also because of its capacity for love. Human beings are therefore both personalist and communal. Societies rightly exhibit many institutional forms of life. Rommen mentions the family, occupational groups, nationality and the state. All these social units exist simply because persons are inherently social.

It is clear that natural law is not afraid to speak in terms of fundamental human rights. These are centrally the right to life and liberty. Another right is to the possession of property. For ownership of property guarantees security of material conditions, and is a defence of personal freedom. He who has no property easily becomes the property of another, a mere means in the hands of the propertied.

 

Importance of rationality

The implication throughout is that the apprehension of what is due to human beings and their societies is a matter of rational reflection. Any law framed by the state should therefore be rationally based. Law is not primarily an expression of the will of the legislator, but of reason concerning the truth about and the good of individuals and civil society. This of course is a major line of criticism by Rommen of the Nazi state, which was an expression of the will of the Fuhrer and despised rationality.

Whilst Rommen stresses the immutabilty of these principles, when it comes to giving them practical expression he is fairly pragmatic. He lays much stress on the limits of natural law. It is not a set of principles from which one can deduce absolute practice. The right to freedom does not imply the right to absolute freedom, nor is there an absolute right to property. For both of these need to be seen in the context of the social life of persons. The absoluteness of natural law is to be seen most clearly in what is forbidden: the denial of the fundamental dignity and rights of the person. As regards the positive working out of practical action, one needs practical experience, and a sense of moderation, recognising the difficulty of arriving at certainty in the complexities of human life.

 

Problem of deductive reasoning

Deductive reasoning moves from observation to general principle, eg from observation of the natural tendencies of rational beings to the primary precept of self-preservation. Inductive reasoning, the approach taken by Kant in his a priori synthetic, moves from reason to principle without reference to experience.

It has, however, been a common complaint against natural law practitioners that they have tended towards a deductive* approach, reading off from nature what persons ought to do, with an insensitivity to changing circumstances. Another form of this complaint is that the Church has tended to present as absolute norms which are in fact culturally and historically relative. Reinhold Niebuhr once remarked that in a real sense natural law was a reflection of the social outlook of the era of Aquinas.

It is impossible to deal with all the complaints against natural law. It seems reasonable to say briefly that a purely subjectivist* approach to morality is very difficult to sustain. Even its supporters can be found loudly demanding justice, as if the situation `out there’ presented moral demands to us. Genocide is plain wrong. If any state legalises genocide, then that law must be declared no law and disregarded by all citizens. Thus the teaching of the natural law about the person, the community and the state seems particularly valuable against individualism, collectivism and subjectivism.

Major questions remain: How, for example, do we arrive at the right thing to do in situations, and in this process what is the role of objective and subjective factors? Are there principles, even essences, which are immutable and absolute, or does absoluteness lie in the requirement to do conscientiously what we decide to be right in the circumstances.

 

The Second Vatican Council

The Second Vatican Council marked the official recognition by the Roman Catholic Church of new ways of thought which had long been fermenting, including thought on natural law. This is most evident in the document The Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes).

http://www.papalencyclicals.net

First, there is a determination in the document to listen to what the world has to say, to learn from it and to perceive the signs of the times. This entails careful analysis of modern society and culture. There is the frank recognition that `the human race has passed from a rather static state of reality to a more dynamic evolutionary one’. This throws the accent on an empirical*, inductive, experiential and historical approach to the world, which in turn implies attention to disciplines other than theology, especially the social sciences.

The document does not in any way repudiate natural law, but it is striking that it is rarely referred to, and the implication of the new accent is that there are serious problems in trying to start out from immutable essences and work towards the empirical world.

 

Pluralism in modern Catholicism

Charles Curran notes that contemporary Catholic theology recognises the need for a pluralism of philosophical approaches in the Christian’s quest for a better understanding of persons and their reality. `There is no longer one Catholic philosophy.’ He welcomes the eclipse of the classicist worldview which emphasises the static and the unchanging, and sees movement only as the unfolding of the essence from within. For the world as we know it is full of ceaseless interaction between beings.

Moreover, Curran observes that before modern times people knew they could not control nature, and therefore they thought principally of conforming to it. Reason then became identified with the order of nature. By contrast we live in a scientific and technological society. We know of the endless process of change in the natural world. And we know that human beings can in many ways intervene in natural processes and shape the world for greater human happiness.

 

From dualism to holism

These points are closely related to another feature of The Church in the Modern World: the account given of human beings. There is an intense personalism* in the document which throws the accent on the unity of the human person over against a dualistic reading which sharply distinguishes body and soul. Curran notes that within natural law there has been a tendency to identify the demands of natural law with physical or biological processes. The function of reason was then to read off the requirements of thenatural law by inspecting such processes. But this is to conceive of the person as consisting of two layers, a bottom layer of animality, and a top layer of rationality.

Rationality cannot infringe the independence of the physical processes. This is to set up a morality which ignores the context of the total human person and the total human community. The personal is not something added on to the physical, but embraces every aspect in a unity. One must therefore start with what is proper for humans, and rationality must guide the whole person. Thus thinking on marriage should not be guided principally by the physical capacities of the couple for procreation, but should be seen in the contextof the total life together of two persons. Richard McCormick points out that the human sciences have shown that the sexual act is an engagement of the whole person, and this must be reflected in moral theology.

 

Second Vatican Council and reformulation of natural law

The Second Vatican Council also set its face against another dualism: the dualism of a two-tier division of the natural and the supernatural. Natural law argument had normally proceeded independently of reference to the Christian revelation. However, a major feature of the Council is its renewed interest in the Bible, and The Church in the Modern World strikingly reaches out for an integration of natural law and the Bible.

The Second Vatican Council thus inspired a wealth of exploration into the reformulation of natural law in a manner more consonant both with our knowledge of the modern world and of the Bible. It did therefore come as a surprise that in the encyclical of Paul VI Humanae Vitae (1967)

http://www.papalencyclicals.net

the traditional teaching of the Church condemning artificial means of contraception was reaffirmed. For the argumentation had a pre-Vatican II air. It started out from a reading of the biological nature of human beings and directly inferred the absolute inadmissibility of artificial means of contraception. It did not set that reading in the context of the whole person. Furthermore the appeal is solely to reason; there is no attempt to relate the thinking to the context of the biblical witness. Many Catholics found acceptance of the argumentation very difficult, and in practice the papal ruling was widely ignored. Some teachers of Catholic moral theology, such as Charles Curran, publicly dissented from the magisterium.

Veritatis Splendor

The most authoritative recent treatment of natural law is in the encyclical of Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor.

http://www.papalencyclicals.net

Indeed, the phrase `natural law’ occurs frequently – much more frequently than in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. There are, he affirms, objective moral commandments, given by God through human nature. They are absolute, admitting of no exception. They are universal, and they are immutable – valid for all people at all times. This is especially true of certain moral commandments which prohibit intrinsically evil acts. He cites as examples genocide, homicide, abortion and euthanasia, among others.

However, though there are moral absolutes, especially of a negative kind, there is still the question whether the way the Pope expresses himself is the only one, or necessarily the most helpful or truest to life. The Pope writes with great certainty, yet one wonders whether the certainty is warranted. Has the Catholic tradition been as unitary and clear cut as the Pope supposes? It never was entirely clear what the natural law was, and what human nature is in particular. And all the considerations which have persuaded Catholic theologians to revise natural law still need to be faced and point in the direction of complexity. In particular, the Pope not only affirms the traditional teaching on contraception, but sees no need to rehearse the arguments. Contraception simply sets freedom and nature at odds. It contradicts the moral order and is therefore unworthy of human beings, even if the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family, or of society in general. This begs the question of the context of the conjugal act in the relationship between husband and wife as an end of marriage.

 

Jesus’ ethic and natural law compared

A further question is whether moral theology is best conceived as a movement from high level generalities to the particular. This is the traditional approach. The Pope seems to envisage himself as being specially responsible for upholding universal immutable truths, whilst his flock wrestles with the questionable applications. This movement from the general to the particulars is not in fact so common either in real life or in the New Testament. The ethic of Jesus does not seem to be framed in this way.

Quite the reverse. He gives sketches of concrete actions which a disciple might fulfil (`Turn your left cheek also’, `Leave your gift at the altar’, and think too of the parables..) or portraits of the kind of attitude he looks for (`Blessed are the peacemakers’, `Be merciful’). Jesus’ approach is much suggestive and concrete. It is no surprise therefore that recent Christian ethics has explored the importance of narrative and story, and the task of Christian communities to conform their lives to following Jesus Christ. Little of that comes across in the encyclical. This is one of the differences of approach between the Vatican and Liberation Theology, which holds that good theology is to be done within the real situations which confront human beings. It is a matter of doing theology as a response to the joys and sorrows of actual people and through analysis of their situation in the light of the Christian faith. Liberation theologians are sceptical of the sort of theology which claims first to get its thought right and then to apply it to situations. That, they say, is a Eurocentric approach, and it may be an obstacle to accurate perception and sensitive involvement.

On that basis a revised natural law would then be practised in a process of Christian discipleship rooted in experience of the real-life situations in which they live day by day. They will often be uncertain what to do, which is why they should persistently share their experience with the rest of the Christian community, which through worship, reflection and practice attempts to grow in the sheer wisdom of discipleship. It is within this sharedconcrete process (and the sharing will need to be with non-Christians as well as Christians) that they will recognise imperatives which are universal and immutable. But they will be confirmed and understood better and better in and through these shared experiences. In this sense natural law would still have its rightful place in the life of the Christian Church.

 

Now test yourself – Try to expand the following points:

• Definition: There are certain moral requirements built into the structure of the world
  • Natural Law antedates Christianity
  • Natural Law implicit in parts of the Bible
  • Firmly incorporated into Christianity by Thomas Aquinas
  • Aquinas distinguishes between the natural law written into the world and discerned
  by reason, and revelation – but both are the result of God’s creative activity
  • At the Reformation Catholics continued to promote Natural Law, whilst Protestants
  tended to dissent from it and affirm the need to reflect on God’s revelation in scripture.
  • With the Enlightenment came a suspicion of revelation and a concern to base
  morality on reason
  • Good example of natural law – the Nuremberg trials of 1945
  • Thomist Natural Law holds a static view of human nature
  • Natural Law emphasises the fundamental human right to life and liberty
  • Natural Law a defence against individualism, subjectivism,
  totalitarianism
  • According to Rommen, Natural Law is not a set of principles from which one
  can deduce absolute practice
  • Second Vatican Council recognised new ways of thought
  • More traditional teaching of Roman Catholic Church re-affirmed in Humanae Vitae
  and Veritatis Splendor.

 

Glossary of Terms

Special Revelation – God’s word revealed to human beings through the Bible
The Enlightenment – 18th-century philosophy of reason and individualism
Secularisation – The decline of religious observance
Deistic/Deism – Usually taken to involve God’s leaving the Universe to its own lawful
devices, without any particular interventions, once the process of creation has been
completed.
Realist/ism – The view that universals have a real substantial existence, independently of being thought. The view that physical objects exist independently of being perceived.
Epistemology – Theories of knowledge
Thomist – The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
Immutable – Unchangeable
Objectivist – The belief that there are certain moral truths that would remain true
whatever anyone or everyone thought or desired
Logical Positivism – According to Logical Positivism (an influential movement
developed in the early part of this century), for a statement to be meaningful it must be verifiable by sense experience. On this basis moral statements are meaningless.
Deductive – An argument in which the conclusion follows necessarily from the premise
Subjectivist/ism – The view that all moral attitudes are merely a matter of personal taste
Empirical – based on sense experience
Personalism – A philosophical standpoint which takes as its starting-point human
Personality

 

Further Reading

http://www.papalencyclicals.net

F.C. Copleston, Aquinas, chapter 5 (Penguin, 1955)
C.E. Curran, Themes in Fundamental Moral Theology, esp. chapter 2 (Notre Dame
University Press, 1977)
A.P. d’Entreves, Natural Law (Hutchinson, 1970)
J. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford University Press, 1980)
J. Fuchs, Personal Responsibility and Christian Morality (Gill and Macmillan, 1980)
J. Macquarrie, 3 Issues in Ethics (SCM Press, 1970)
J. Maritain, The Social and Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain (Bles, 1956)
T.E. O’Connell, Principles for a Catholic Morality (Seabury Press, 1978)
`Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’, in W.M. Abbott and J.
Gallagher (eds.), The Documents of Vatican II (Chapman, 1966)
Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (Catholic Truth Society, 1993)
I.T. Ramsey, `Towards a Rehabilitation of Natural Law’, in I.T. Ramsey (ed.), Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, pp. 382-396 (SCM Press, 1966)
H.A. Rommen, The Natural Law (Herder, 1947).