A Quick Reflection on Natural Law
Natural law has an important place in Catholic tradition. Nonetheless, as with much of Catholic tradition, it has often been misunderstood and even abused. Many who have suggested that we abandon the notion of natural law have done so mostly because of such misunderstandings — what they want to dismiss often is something which should be rejected. What is needed is an understanding of what natural law is, its applicability, and its limits. What is offered here can only serve as a brief outline of these concerns.
Natural law is founded upon the idea that what God created is good, and that if what God created follows its nature, because its nature is good, it will be good. Each part of creation has its own essence, and its proper place in the order of being. For those who are alive and therefore, have some sort of self-movement, this place is not limited; rather, it is meant to be open-ended. Not only does their potential determine a possible range of activity, there is also the possibility of God’s grace giving them an even greater range of potentiality than they would have of themselves.
This leads us to the first way people misunderstand natural law: when discussing what a thing is and its potentiality, they ignore the relationship between grace and nature, and assume nature is some sort of closed-in-itself entity. But that error closes off creation from God — and therefore what is natural could not be said to be good for God is the source and end of every good. In this way, their view of natural law could never lead to what is good, and this explains why rigid legalistic notions of natural law, which seek to define things in a static way, end up far from good in execution, because it cuts out grace from the order of activity.
But this leads us to the second, and perhaps, more difficult problem. The world as it was created was closed off to grace by the power of sin. While the nature of everything remains good, their potentiality is less than their nature, because of their fallen mode of existence. We see a world cut up in struggle with itself. Whether or not one wants to explain the corruption of nature as being at the hands of humanity alone, or if one thinks it is a shared fall, in either case, the world is fallen, and what appears to us in nature is not what is natural, but what is sub-natural. Defining what is good based upon this fallen, graceless way of life can only end up in disaster. In describing the possible errors one can have with nature, John Burkman describes this error as the divinization of nature:
The second error – the divinization of nature –is typical of theologies which idealize old-growth forests or other untouched nature. Such theologies usually wind up affirming the ‘naturalness’ of predation and parasitism in nature. For if ‘untouched’ or ‘pristine’ nature is what we consider to be the ideal, then we would seem to have to affirm the continuous cycles of predation, death, and decay as necessary and good.[1]
In other words, in the fallen world, what should be natural and good is corrupted. We cannot rely upon the world as it is for our moral theology, otherwise we would find justification for all kinds of evils, because such evils exist all around us. This points out the difficulty which exists when trying to posit natural law: we posit it according to what we see in the world around us. What we see, however, isn’t natural. We have to extrapolate from the sub-natural mode of existence. Mistakes can, and do happen. The brutality of the fallen world is the brutality of sin, the brutality of death. The law of the jungle is the necessity of sin. We should understand it, and even understand how humanity itself remains affected by this law because of its sin, but we should also understand how we are not limited to it, and that our foundation for morality cannot be based upon it (for if we did, we would call that which is corrupt, good).
When we discuss natural law, perhaps the greatest problem lies in the fact that it is an intellectual exercise trying to discern what one is to do — in other words, we try to establish natural law for the sake of deliberation. But nature does not need to deliberate in order to act — the will, in its pure form, acts according to its good desires; but because of the fall, our mode of willing is unnatural, and we desire what we should not. Therefore, we must deliberative to discern if our desire is right or wrong. In other words, even discussing morality and ethical standards shows we are interacting with a sub-natural realm of discourse. And this shows it is something less than the good, even before it becomes rigid and closed in on itself (becoming even further from the good). Natural law discussion by this fact must not be confused with the natural law itself. If it were really natural, we would not have to discern what is contained in it, but would know it without such discernment. Indeed, if our mode of willing were natural, we would will what is good without having any moral question as to what we should do; we would just act and it would be good.[2]
[1] John Burkman, “Is the Consistent Ethic of Life Consistent without a Concern for Animals?” Animals on the Agenda. Ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yomamoto (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1998), 241.
[2] St Maximus the Confessor makes this point quite well in his debate with Patriarch Pyrrhus. See The Disputation with Pyrrhus Of Our Father Among the Saints Maximus the Confessor. Trans. Joseph P. Farrell (Yonkers, NY: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1990).
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Interesting thoughts. If you have the time I have a few questions. You write, “when discussing what a thing is and its potentiality, they ignore the relationship between grace and nature, and assume nature is some sort of closed-in-itself entity.”
(1) Who is “they”, and can you provide some examples?
(2) Is not unbaptized humanity in some significant way separated from God’s grace? How does baptism fit into this understanding? (clarification: surely God can act outside of the Sacraments and grace is in a certain way omnipresent to anyone open to receive it, but surely baptism is in some way necessary and efficacious?)
Some more general comments: most natural lawyers, I think, would agree with you that we “know the natural law without discernment”. This is why natural law in it’s traditional and modern incarnations is very limited; natural lawyers do not attempt to describe the full extent of the moral law or even all of the things we would think of as basic moral truths. It is an attempt to highlight “what we can’t not know” and establish a basic moral grammar that has disappeared from our democratic and relativistic culture.
It’s also would note that it’s not true that “nature does not need to deliberate in order to act”. Augustine says somewhere, where you have a human being, you have reason. Reason and in a real way deliberation informs all of our actions, and that this deliberation is part of our nature. It’s not simply that unfallen humanity acted according to its good desires – it also acted according to its good intentions, and intentions entail deliberation. It sounds like you have removed reason from unfallen humanity.
Zach
A few very quick answers.
1) well, I think most people look at the world in a pure nature conception, because it is easier to do so, but this is truer post-Enlightenment; rationalists, deists, etc follow through with this very clearly, but even theologians who follow “pure nature” do. I would recommend Lubac’s works on this topic.
2) The fall puts people further away from grace and closed to themselves; sin is a kind of closure onto the self. Thus, baptism seeks to open us up beyond ourselves. Of course, as you said, God does work and move people beyond the sacraments. But remember, things get more complicated and there are discussions on invincible ignorance, baptism of desire, and also things like St Gregory the Great’s Moralia (which suggest various means of contact with lesser forms of grace) that also need to be brought into the picture.
3) If nature needs to deliberate, this causes problems in Jesus’ willing as a human. I highly recommend St Maximus the Confessor’s works, especially his debate with Pyrrhus here. St Augustine is good, but he is still often talking about a fallen mode of willing. St Maximus talks about the will as such — and points out how our mode is fallen, so we deliberate, but in the unfallen will, what is natural and so what is good is not a question.