Malforming the Law of Nature

In one of his earliest, shortest, and simplest dialogues, the Euthyphro, Plato (through the voice of Socrates) forces the reader to ask the question (and I’m simplifying a bit here): Is a command from the gods good because it is commanded by the gods, or does God command it because it is inherently good? 

Take, for example, the tenth commandment, contained on the second tablet of the decalogue: not to covet the property of your neighbor. Is this commandment good because God commands it based on his will, or does God command/will it because it is inherently good, in and of itself?

I have found that, when I ask this question of both modern secular people and equally of evangelical types, they answer, almost always, in favor of the former: X is good because God commands it, because God wills it.

Why, then, does Plato not “land” on this horn/side of the dilemma? Is Plato wrong? Hardly: honest inquiry in that case would naturally lead to the suspicion that the command is, in the final analysis, arbitrary. Indeed, one meaning of the Latin arbitrium is, in fact, “will.” If something is rooted in God’s will alone, then how can it be shown to be anything other than arbitrary?

I would argue that this dilemma posed in the Euthephro remains unresolved until the thirteenth century, in the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas. There the Angelic Doctor shows us that the dilemma is really a false dichotomy: it is neither the inherent goodness of the thing/command that dignifies it, nor simply the fact that God wills it. Rather, the key factor is the goodness and being of God himself.

For Thomas, the eternal law, which—given God’s absolute simplicity—is identical to God’s very being (as well as his reason/rationality, his will, his “essence,” his goodness, his beauty, etc.) is the ultimate explanans of the goodness of divine commands, of God’s law. Not to covet—or for that matter, to do unto others as you’d have them do unto you—is good because all law—including both the moral law, and importantly for my purposes here, the natural law—is ultimately rooted in God’s eternal law, which again is identical to God’s being itself. Nothing could be less arbitrary than God’s very being: love, freedom, beauty, pure act, goodness, etc.

More to the point, what Thomas teaches about the natural law is that it is a participation, on the part of the rational creature, in God’s eternal law. In other words, the Latin term natura here does not refer primarily to the mineralia, flora, and fauna which remain untouched by human activity and which we hence call “wild.” Rather, it refers to the nature—a term which in certain Thomistic contexts is synonymous with “essence”—of the human being. The “natural law” for Thomas is the law pertaining to and deriving from the “essence,” the ontological character of, the human person. It is, he thinks, in man’s very nature to seek the good as his highest purpose.

However, when the 16th-century Reformer John Calvin speaks of natural law, he never—not once—roots it in the eternal law of God’s own being. One of the deep flaws of Simon P. Kennedy’s new study Reforming Nature is that he fails to see that this decadent shift in the flow of Western thought is far more important, far more detrimental, than any of the others he locates within the stream of the Reformed tradition stretching from Calvin to John Locke.

But wait. Does the shift actually take place with Calvin? Is it Calvin who thinks he can talk about the natural law in isolation from the eternal law?

No, actually, it is not. This move is performed roughly three centuries before Calvin’s work by the thirteenth-century Franciscan Duns Scotus, who, for the first time in intellectual history, untethers the natural law from its metaphysical connection in God’s being itself. For Scotus, this move is part and parcel with his denial of the simplicity of God in favor of theological voluntarism, the view that sees God’s will as determinative.

This leads to a second fatal weakness of Kennedy’s book. Several times he affirms a continuity between the natural law of Calvin (and Hooker and Althusius) on the one hand, and that of medieval, scholastic thinkers on the other. But which medieval scholastic? If the answer is “Scotus,” then the farm has already been given away, and Kennedy has proven too much, given what he wants to argue.

What he wants to argue, alas, is that the early Reformed thinkers Calvin, Hooker, and Althusius are not responsible for the sinister slide into “desacralization” that we see in the later work of Hobbes and (despite his own hat tip to Hooker) Locke. Kennedy wants to say that it is only with the advent of the two later thinkers that politics becomes a matter of convention, mainly because natural law has, in their minds, devolved into mere self-preservation.

So Kennedy’s Calvin, Hooker, and Althusius all affirm what he calls “theistic political naturalism.” Why is the view of these early Reformers considered natural?

This leads to a third critique of this book. Kennedy’s answer is that it is natural because it originates with God. On this view it is God, and not the human being, who establishes political community. But if this—the non-human—is what we mean by “natural,” then what do we make of Aristotle’s dictum that the human being by nature is a political animal?

Apparently Kennedy thinks that if man does something, it is not natural but artificial or conventional. I find this overly simplistic. For Aristotle politics is natural, but this by no means implies that it is “founded by God.” After all, it is, in Aristotle’s rendition, man who is the political animal, not God. I think that what Kennedy fails to appreciate is the paradox—already in Aristotle—that in the activity of the human person we see that which is at once both natural and artificial/conventional. You might put it this way: man is by nature a fabricator of culture. To use John Milbank’s term, deployed in Beyond Secular Order, the human being is homo faber. Here the difference between nature and culture is deconstructed, as is the difference between nature and grace/“supernature” in adjacent theological debates. One way of dealing with this ambiguity/paradox is by recourse to the medieval doctrine of divine concurrence, but Kennedy does not mention this concept until the end of the book.

Indeed, of all the problems I have with Kennedy’s book, the most pernicious is his political Nestorianism: he thinks that if politics is conventional or humanly constructed, it cannot be sacral or divine. Would he say the same thing about Christian liturgy? What about the Bible?

For all its faults, however, I must say that I did benefit from this book, although that has more to do with my own relative ignorance of political philosophy. Kennedy has reminded me, he has helped me more clearly to see, that for early modern thinkers like Hobbes (whom I read in grad school) and Locke (whose political thought I have, to this day, never actually read), natural rights are native to the “state of nature.” The state of nature, in turn, is ruled by the so-called natural law or law of nature (now reduced drastically from Thomas’ version to little more than self-preservation), which unfortunately is neither observed nor enforced.

This, for these early modern thinkers, is what leads to the need for civil government. As Locke says and Kennedy quotes: “Civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of nature.”

So the book was helpful and is valuable. Yet, in light of the three disagreements registered above, I cannot really endorse it.

Duns Scotus, in his voluminous and impenetrable Ordinatio, suggests that if God wanted to revise or reverse any of his commands in the moral law—say, the command not to covet the possessions of one’s neighbor—he would be absolutely free to do this. God could do that, apparently, and in fact for Scotus he just might.

In a similar vein, some four centuries later, John Locke teaches (as Kennedy points out) that God has an absolute right to destroy his own property, the human race.

For Thomas Aquinas, who roots the natural law (which includes the moral law) in God’s absolute being by way of the eternal law—and I note that of all the thinkers surveyed by Kennedy it is Richard Hooker who most closely follows Thomas in this, virtually perpetuating his views unchanged—these arbitrary acts on God’s part are unthinkable, impossible, and ludicrous.

Why? Not simply because of the falsehood of this or that this or that innovation in liberal political theory. Rather, it is because the moral and natural law are rooted firmly and necessarily not in God’s will simpliciter, but in God’s very being.

It is this fundamental axiom which is forgotten denied or undermined not just by Hobbes and Locke, but by Calvin before them, and by Scotus before him. When it comes to the modern perversion of theories of natural law, this is by far, pace Kennedy, the most critical issue.

Matt Boulter (Ph.D., medieval philosophy) is the rector of St. George's Episcopal Church in central East Austin. He sometimes thinks he's travelling down the right path, and loves reading, running, drinking, smoking, and hanging out with three brown-eyed Boulters. He tweets @mattboulter, blogs at religiocity.org, and also hosts the podcast Slain by Love.