The Natural Moral Law

The Law of Nature

WHAT ARE the main principles on which the Christian conception of social order is bound? In the first place there is the principle of the dependence of human life and human society on the Divine order: the idea of a Law of Nature by which all reasonable beings participate in the eternal Reason, the source and bond of the whole cosmic order.

This is a very old idea—so old that it has been treated as a universally accepted principle by lawyers and philosophers and theologians since the beginnings of our civilization. Nevertheless, it is challenged today in a very direct and radical fashion, and it may well be argued that this challenge is the fundamental moral issue of the present war. For the whole Nazi system with its exaltation of lawlessness and successful aggression, its assertion of the rights of the strong at the expense of the weak, and its cynical contempt for international law and treaties, is the denial of the traditional Western conception of Natural Law and is the expression of a diametrically opposite theory.

According to this view law is a political act which merely expresses the will of the community or the state. The state’s will is law, and since the state wills its own self-preservation and its own advantage, the law is not based on “justice” but on the will to power and the will to live. And so we get another “law of nature,” a law which is non-moral because it is the expression of the same irrational life force which makes the wild beasts devour one another and insects thrive on the suffering and destruction of higher organisms.

Everything therefore depends on whether we believe in the existence of a spiritual order of which man is naturally conscious by his knowledge of good and evil, or whether the world runs blind, driven by irrational forces which man must serve if he is to survive.

According to the first alternative it is clear that states and nations no less than individuals are bound by a higher law than self-interest and self-preservation. There is an eternal law that governs all things and is, as it were, the reason of the universe. In this order man participates consciously in so far as he is a rational and moral being, and it is the source from which all human laws derive their ultimate sanction. As St. Augustine says in a famous passage in “The City of God,” “Since God from Whom is all being, form and order has left neither Heaven nor Earth, nor angel nor man, nor the lowest creatures, neither the bird’s feather, nor the flower of the grass nor the leaf of the tree without its due harmony of parts, and without, as it were, a certain peace, it cannot be believed that He should have willed the Kingdoms of men and their government and subjection to be outside the laws of His Providence.”

It is true that St. Augustine recognized only too clearly that man’s history is a black record, and that even the relative peace and order that had been conferred on the ancient world by the Roman Empire had been purchased only by a vast expenditure of blood and human suffering. The empire was, in fact, not the creation of justice, but of the will to power. Nevertheless, in so far as it was not satisfied with power alone, but aspired to rule by law, it recognized the principle of justice which implies the existence of moral principles and of the eternal laws on which they are based.

This is the meaning of Natural Law in the traditional Catholic sense. It is a very simple doctrine since it merely asserts—to use the words of St. Thomas—that “there is in men a certain natural law, which is a participation of the eternal law by which men discern good and evil.” Without this power of moral discernment man would not be a reasonable being. But this does not mean that it provides a ready-made code of rules which everyone everywhere admits. The moral sense varies according to the measure of the understanding, and differences of education and culture and character affect the one no less than the other. Hence St. Thomas admits that the Natural Law may be obscured or perverted by social causes; as an example he quotes Caesar on the Germans who did not “regard robbery as unjust so long as it was carried on outside the frontiers of the State, but rather as a laudable form of youth activity.” (Caesar De Bello Gallico, VI. 25.) But although man’s moral consciousness is limited and conditioned by social factors it is never entirely extinguished; just as man remains a rational being even in a state of barbarism which seems to the civilized man to be little higher than that of an animal. And as every man by his reason has some knowledge of truth, so every man by nature has some knowledge of good and evil, which makes it possible for him to adhere to or deviate from the universal order.

As I said in the beginning, this idea of Natural Law is so fundamental that it was accepted as a self-evident truth by theologians and lawyers alike from the period of the Roman Empire down to modern times. Thus Cicero bases his whole theory of law on the doctrine that human law is nothing but the application of a law which is founded on nature and on the eternal law of God, and which is no more affected by the will of the rulers, the decisions of judges, the will of the people, than is the course of nature. In the same way, 1800 years later Blackstone, the embodiment of English legal traditionalism and commonsense, declares that the “law of nature being coeval with mankind and dictated by God Himself is, of course, superior in obligation to any other. It is binding all over the globe in all countries and at all times; no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this.” (Introduction to the Commentaries)

How did this sacred and secular tradition come to be abandoned—by the modern world? Its enemies come from very different camps, yet their agreement on this issue is something more than an accident and corresponds to a very deep cleavage in European thought. On the one hand, it had its origin in one element of Protestant and specifically Lutheran thought, i.e. the doctrine of the total depravity of human nature and the dualism, or, rather, contradiction of Nature and Grace which leaves the former a helpless prey to the powers of evil, until it is rescued by the violent irruption of divine grace. The effect of this dualism is to divorce the moral law from religion, so that it possesses a purely temporal value. As Luther puts it, the law belongs to the earth, the Gospel belongs to heaven, and they are to be kept as far separate as possible. “In civil government we must most rigidly exact and observe obedience to the law, and in that department we must know nothing either of gospel or conscience or grace or forgiveness of sins, or even of Christ himself; but we must know only how to speak of Moses, the law and works. Thus both things, to wit, the Law and the Gospel are to be severed as far as possible one from the other and each is to remain in the separate place to which it appertains. The Law is to remain out of heaven, that is to say, out of the heart and the conscience; on the other hand, the freedom of the Gospel is to remain out of the world, that is to say, out of the body and its members.” (Commentary on Galatians)

The profound pessimism of Luther saw in Nature nothing but the kingdom of death and the Law of Nature as a law of wrath and punishment, and thus his extreme supernaturalism prepared the way for the secularization of the world and the abolition of objective standards.

But the revolt against Natural Law did not only spring from the otherworldliness of Luther and the Reformers. It found an even more powerful support in the worldliness of the Renaissance statesmen and thinkers. Already before the Reformation Machiavelli had produced his Intelligent Man’s Guide to Politics which studies the art of government as a non-moral technique for the acquisition of maintenance of power, thus depriving the state of its religious character as the temporal organ of divine justice and making the interests of the state the supreme law by which all political acts must be judged. This is the source of the “new jurisprudence” which took the place of the common law of Christendom and which as Leo XIII explained in his political encyclicals (e.g. Immortale Dei, and Libertas Praestantissimum)  undermined the moral foundations of Western civilization.

It leaves no room for the consecration of the state to God which is so solemnly and sacramentally expressed by the traditional rite of the coronation of Christian kings. On the contrary, it involved the secularization of the state and the desecration of law and authority. By emancipating the prince from subordination to a higher order, it destroyed both the principle of order and the principle of freedom in the state itself.

This false political realism which denies or ignores spiritual realities is no less fatal to the Christian tradition and no less destructive of Christendom as a social reality than was the false spiritualism of Luther. Indeed, its influence has been wider and deeper, since it has not been restricted to certain countries and peoples, but has influenced the thought of Catholics and Protestants alike, and has grown stronger with the progressive secularizing of our civilization. The thought of Luther belongs to a different world from that in which we live; he was still a man of the Middle Ages, though he was in revolt against medieval Catholicism. But the thought of Machiavelli is still alive in the modern world and finds expression in the words and deeds of modern politicians and dictators. As Pius XII writes in his Encyclical “Darkness over the Earth,” “Today the false views held in earlier times have been amalgamated with new invention and misconception of the human mind. And this perverse process has been pushed so far that nothing is left but confusion and disorder. One leading mistake we may single out as the fountain head, deeply hidden, from which the evils of the modern State itself and, moreover, in the mutual relations of State with State and country with country, the one universal standard of morality is set aside, by which we mean the Natural Law, now buried away under a mass of destructive criticism and neglect.”

~Christopher Dawson: in The Judgment of the Nations.

Western Christendom and the new learning

WE have seen how, during the Dark Ages, the Western Mediterranean had been separated from Christian Europe and had been the centre of a brilliant cultural development derived from the Islamic East. And it was here, rather than in the crusading state of Syria and the Latin Empire of Constantinople, that the East and West came into contact with one another, and the vital process of cultural transmission and adaptation took place.

The process began in Southern Italy, where in the second half of the eleventh century an African monk of Monte Cassino, Constantine, initiated the work of translation, and the school of Salerno became a meeting-place of reek, Arabic and Jewish influences, at least in medical studies. But it was in Spain that the main work of translation took place, above all at Toledo, where the Archbishop, Raymond of Sauvetat (1126-51) established a school of translators which continued its activity through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so that Toledo for a time became equal to Paris and Bologna as a factor in medieval culture. The scholars of Toledo not only translated into Latin the whole Aristotelian corpus in its Arabic form, they also produced versions of the principal works of the great Moslem and Jewish philosophers and men of science: Al Kindi, Al Farabi, Al Battani, Avicenna Ibn Gebirol and Al Ghazali. Finally there were the original thinkers, like Domingo Gonzalez, the Archdeacon of Segovia, who first attempted to make a new synthesis between the philosophy of Avicenna (itself a synthesis of the Aristotelian and Neo-platonic traditions), with the Augustinian tradition of Latin Christianity.

The most striking thing about this movement was its cosmopolitan character. Jews and Arabs and Greeks co-operated with Spaniards and Italians and Englishmen. Already at the beginning of the twelfth century an English scholar, Adelard of Bath, who had been educated in the cathedral schools of Northern France, was travelling in Spain, Southern Italy and the Near East and translating the works of Euclid and the ninth-century mathematicians and astronomers of Central Asia such as Al Khwarizmi and Abu Ma’shar of Balkh. To Adelard and his successors—the Italians Plato of Tivoli and Gerard of Cremona, and the Englishmen Robert of Chester, Daniel of Morley and Alfred of Sereschel—this was like the discovery of a new world, and they called on their compatriots to leave their elementary studies and their barren arguments, and set themselves to school with the Arabs and the ancient Greeks who alone possessed the genuine tradition of scientific and philosophic knowledge.

One might well have supposed that the Mohammedan and pagan origins of the new learning would have prevented its acceptance by Western Christendom, but in spite of the opposition of conservatives and the suspicions of the guardians of orthodoxy the new teaching made its way with remarkable rapidity into the rising universities, so that by the middle of the thirteenth century the works of Aristotle were being studied and commented and discussed at Paris and Oxford and Toulouse and Cologne.

At Paris the main effort of the numerous summas and commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard was directed to the interpretation of theology in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics and their mutual integration. At Oxford, on the other hand, under the influence of Robert Grosseteste and the Franciscan school, it was the scientific and mathematical aspects of the new learning that were most studied and gave the school at Oxford its original character.

Finally, the Aristotelian tradition was represented  in its purest and most uncompromising form by the teaching of the Spanish Moslem Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 11-26-98), whose works were translated after 1217 by Michael Scot (d. 1232), the court astrologer of Frederick II, and found enthusiastic disciples in Siger of Brabant and his followers in the university of Paris from 1270 to 1280, and at Bologna and Padua in the fourteenth century.

The result if this great influx of new knowledge and new ideas was to provide the universities and the international society of scholars and teachers who frequented them with the materials from which to construct a new intellectual synthesis. The dialecticians were no longer compelled to masticate and remasticate the old scholastic commonplaces. They had at last something solid to get their teeth into. And for a hundred years there was, in consequence, such a development of philosophical studies as the world had not seen since the great age of ancient Greece. The effect on the general culture may be seen in a unique form in the Divina Commedia of Dante, the great literary achievement of the Middle Ages, in which every aspect of life and every facet of personal and historic experience is illuminated by a metaphysical vision of the universe as an intelligible unity. And behind the Divina Commedia there is the work of St. Thomas and St. Albert and a hundred lesser men, all of them devoted to the building up of a great structure of thought in which every aspect of knowledge is co-ordinated and subordinated to the divine science—Theologia—the final transcendent end of every created intelligence.

The great interest in this synthesis is not its logical completeness, for that was to be found already in a rudimentary form in the traditional curriculum of the earlier medieval schools, but rather the way in which the mind of Western Christendom reconquered the lost world of Hellenic science and annexed the alien world of the Moslem thought without losing its spiritual continuity or its specifically religious values. No doubt all this was questioned by later critics of scholasticism, like Luther and his contemporaries who maintained that medieval philosophy had abandoned evangelical truth to follow Aristotle and the vain deceits of human wisdom. But in order to maintain this view they were compelled to push their condemnation further, and to condemn the whole traditions of Western Catholicism right back to the age of the Fathers.

But if we look at the development of Western Christendom as a whole, it is clear that the intellectual synthesis if the thirteenth century was not a contradiction but the crown and completion of centuries of continuous effort to achieve an integration of the religious doctrine of the Christian Church with the intellectual tradition of ancient culture. This aim was already set out in a rudimentary form by the encyclopaedists of the sixth and seventh centuries like Cassiodorus and Boethius and Isidore of Seville, but it was not completely achieved until the thirteenth century with the recovery of the full inheritance of Greek philosophy and science, with the creation of the new intellectual organs of Christendom—the university corporations and the Orders of Friars.

~Christopher Dawson: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Chap. X. ‘The Medieval City: School and University.’

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