This volume contains new translations of the essential philosophical writings of Thomas Aquinas, from the Summa Theologiae and The Principles of Nature. The included texts represent the breadth of Aquinas's thought, addressing: the fundamental principles of nature; causality; the existence of God; how God can be known; how language can be used to describe God; human nature (including the nature of the soul, free will, and epistemology); happiness; ethics; and natural law. The goal of these translations is twofold: (...) to allow Aquinas to speak for himself, but also to make his thought accessible to the contemporary reader without the burden of unnecessary adherence to convention. A thorough introduction to Aquinas and his ideas is included, as are a series of useful appendices connecting Aquinas's arguments to those of Anselm, Scotus, and others. (shrink)

The object of the moral act is a subject of some controversy in modern discussions of Christian ethics. Pope St. John Paul II, in the encyclical Veritatis splendor, speaks to the nature of the moral act with reference to Thomistic philosophy. This article discusses the foundational elements of Thomas Aquinas’s account of natural law and provides some important clarification of the nature of the moral act as addressed in the encyclical.

This article considers the relationship between the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suarez. It has been said that Suarez made significant departures from the natural law theory of Aquinas, by putting greater emphasis on divine command as the source of natural law precepts, and by replacing Aquinas’s focus on good and bad with a focus on right and wrong. Hence, Suarez appears to replace Aquinas’s eudaimonist account of ethics with one based in deontology. The article argues (...) that the differences separating Aquinas and Suarez are minimal, and that Suarez can be seen as upholding the central tenets of Aquinas’s doctrine of natural law. This has ramifications for our understanding not only of Suarez, but also of Aquinas himself. (shrink)

토마스 아퀴나스에 따르면 도덕적으로 올바른 행위의 목적은 욕구능력의 탁월성인 도덕적 덕에 의해 설정된다. 그리고 그것이 가능한 이유는 지성능력이 우선 무엇이 도덕적 덕의 목적들인지를 파악했기 때문이다. 그렇다면 정확히 지성의 어떤 부분이 그것을 파악하는가· 그런데 이 질문에 대한 토마스의 답변은 일견 비일관적으로 보인다. 왜냐하면 그는 한편으로 양지(synderesis)가 그것들을 직관적·무오류적으로 파악한다고 말하는 듯하지만, 다른 한편으로 현명(prudentia)이 숙고적 추론을 통해 그것을 파악하는 것처럼 서술하기 때문이다. 그렇다면 이 문제에 대한 토마스의 정확한 입장은 무엇인가· 이 질문은, 그것이 양지에 의해 파악된 것의 내용과 성격에 관련되는 한, 토마스에서 (...) 자연법의 일차적 계명들이 어떻게 파악되고 그것이 곧 도덕적 함의를 지니는지를 묻는 질문과 직결된다. 그리고 그런 한에서 그 중요성이 크다고 볼 수 있다. 본고는 바로 이 질문을 다룬다. 본고의 목적은 이 문제를 양지의 역할을 축소시키고 현명의 역할을 확대하여 해결하려는 해석을 비판하고, 목적 문제에서 양지와 현명의 역할을 다시 적절히 잡아주는 것이다. 본 연구에 따르면 양지는 형식적 목적들뿐만 아니라 구체적 목적들을 직관적을 파악한다. 그러나 양지에 의해 파악된 목적들(혹은 자연법의 일차적 계명들)은 도덕적으로 중립적이다. 도덕적으로 올바른 행위의 목적이 무엇인지를 판단하는 것은 사변지성 혹은 실천지성(즉 현명)이 추론을 통해 확립해야 할 몫으로 남아 있다. 특히 현명은 한 구체적 상황에서 올바른 목적을 판단하는 것으로 제한된다. (shrink)

This article seeks to justify the claim that Thomas Aquinas proposed a concept of natural law which is immune to the argument against the recognition of an objective grounding of the good formulated by a well-known representative of the liberal tradition, Isaiah Berlin, in his famous essay “Two Concepts of Freedom.” I argue that Aquinas’s concept of freedom takes into account the very same values and goals that Berlin set out to defend when he composed his critique of (...) natural law. In particular, the article suggests that Aquinas recognizes freedom as a greater perfection of man than rationality, and that this freedom is realized, among other things, through the co-construction of the good that gives a goal and a shape to human action and to the whole of a person’s life. I argue that the co-construction of such a good involves the co-construction of natural law in the strict sense of the term. Indeed, the content of natural law can be understood as a set of goods which are goals that inform human action. From a human perspective, natural law is not a pre-existing recipe which has merely to be “read.” Defining the concrete content of natural law is an ongoing process. The process of defining natural law’s content takes humanly knowable, objective elements into account, and so draws on knowledge. Yet free choice also plays an important part in this process. When speaking of the process of defining the content of natural law, therefore, and in determining what here-and-now is to be done, it is reasonable to describe man as a creator of the natural law, or as a legislator, just as the members of a parliament are the creators of civil law — bearing in mind that only a just law is truly law and therefore the creation of both civil and natural law reaches only as far is the scope of just actions directed by these laws. From the perspective of human action, we may speak of each person’s free choice to establish a given good as the end of a specific act, and in so doing to declare that action proper under natural law in the strict sense of the term (which differs from the rules of natural law). An appreciation of what is particular and individual (particulare et individuum), and an appreciation of free choice that goes hand-in-hand with this, is deeply embedded in Thomas’s system of thought. Particularity and individuality has its basis in an especially excellent way of human existence. (shrink)

The author offers, first, an account of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian-inspired understanding of the object of a moral act and of what morally that species contributes to the act of which it is a part. Then, with special (but not sole) attention to two passages in Aquinas cited frequently by the proponents of the new natural law theory—that is, Summa theologiae 2-2.64.7 and the commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences 2.40.1.2—the author argues that a close analysis of Aquinas’s remarks (...) on objects and intentions does not support the claim that the new natural law theory is Thomistic. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (Spring 2013): 79–104. (shrink)

It is usual to classify the moral thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas as a theory of natural law. The purpose of the present article is to challenge such a classification. While the notion of natural law does play a part in Aquinas’s teaching on morality, this does not seem to me to be a central role. Indeed there are many reasons why it might be better, today, to stop talking about natural moral law, both in the (...) context of Thomistic philosophy and in the broader context of contemporary ethics. What I now advocate is the position that right reason is the key theme in the ethics of Aquinas. (shrink)

Abstract.Traditional Darwinian theory presents two difficulties for Thomistic natural‐law morality: relativism and essentialism. The sociobiology of E. O. Wilson seems to refute the idea of evolutionary relativism. Larry Arnhart has argued that Wilson's views on sociobiology can provide a scientific framework for Thomistic natural‐law theory. However, in his attempt to reconcile Aquinas's views with Wilson's sociobiology, Arnhart fails to address a critical feature of Aquinas's ethics: the role of rational goods in natural law. Arnhart limits Aquinas's understanding (...) of rationality to the Humean notion of economic rationality–that “reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.” On Aquinas's view, rationality discovers goods that transcend the merely biological, viz., the pursuit of truth, virtue, and God. I believe that Aquinas's natural‐law morality is consistent with some accounts of sociobiology but not the more ontologically reductionist versions like the one presented by Wilson and defended by Arnhart. Moreover, Aquinas's normative account of rationality is successful in refuting the challenges of evolutionary relativism as well as the reductionism found in most sociobiological approaches to ethics. (shrink)

This paper discusses how Thomas Aquinas and some Neo-Thomists scholars (Juan José Urráburu, Joseph Hontheim, Édouard Hugon, and Joseph Gredt) analysed the metaphysical possibility of miracles. My main goal is to unpack the metaphysical toolbox that Aquinas uses to solve the basic question about the possibility of miracles and to compare how his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century followers solved the issue themselves. The key feature to differentiate the two approaches will reside in their use of different notions to (...) account for the possibility of miracles, namely obediential potency for Aquinas and the laws of nature for the Neo-Thomists. To show why neo-Thomist scholars source to this notion, I also briefly discuss how the notion of the laws of nature emerged in the seventeenth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aquinas and Black Natural LawThomas S. HibbsIn 1857, after the United States Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott, Frederick Douglass chastised the court for arrogating to itself the role of God, that of being absolute judge. While the Supreme Court has its own authority, he argued, "the Supreme Court of the Almighty is greater. Taney can do many things but he cannot change the essential nature of things—making (...) evil good and good, evil."1 The passage is one of many in Vincent Lloyd's Black Natural Law that underscore the appeals of African American leaders, as part of their critique of slavery and segregation, to a higher or more fundamental law than that of human law. Lloyd describes the function of natural law reasoning, which he traces through the writings of Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., in this way: From the careful examination of a "particular view of human nature" and its implications, they "apply those implications to the specifics of an ethical or political debate."2 That sounds similar to the way some contemporary Catholic proponents of natural law depict their own deployment of it. Early in the book, Lloyd suggests that "European and Catholic natural law traditions can learn much from the black natural tradition."3Concerning what might be learned, he focuses on an expansive conception of reason in the African American tradition, a conception of reason that is integrated with the role of emotion or passion and that is not [End Page 943] individualistic, but communal. He also underscores the epistemic privilege of the oppressed, the way suffering injustice attunes us to justice. Beyond the themes mentioned explicitly by Lloyd, I would add the paradoxical claim that natural law teaching is not just about the accessibility of fundamental precepts of justice, but also about the human capacity for moral blindness and the way in which the violation of the natural law is in important ways its own punishment. Because of the regularity of such blindness, attention to the obstacles to the perception of the natural law must become "part of the very activity of natural law." The ways in which these matters are articulated by African American authors can be, as Lloyd suggests, highly instructive. I would add that Lloyd's treatment of natural law in the African American tradition can also be fruitful for recovering neglected features of Aquinas's account. In what follows, I want to take up each of these themes and set them in conversation with the texts of Aquinas. As Alasdair MacIntyre, among others, has urged, seeing one's own tradition from the perspective of another, can, at a minimum, help us see it more clearly.4 As MacIntyre also notes, any such attempt faces the difficulties of translating from one tradition or community of inquiry to another. I must, accordingly, stress the limitations to the current essay, which can be nothing more than a preliminary investigation. I will largely be taking Lloyd's interpretation of the authors he studies as my assumed starting point, although in some cases I will offer my own reading of texts and authors he considers.5 What I will provide will be no more than an initial conversation, a first reading of Lloyd's theses in relation to germane themes and arguments in Aquinas. A much longer exchange, based on an immersive study of selected African American texts and the chief commentaries on them would be needed to advance the [End Page 944] conversation further. Before doing so, however, I want to provide a further reason that Catholic natural law thinkers should be eager to engage the Black natural law tradition, a reason derived from Joseph Ratzinger's reflection on the strange situation of natural law in the modern world.Ratzinger on the Vanishing Evidence for Natural Law and the Engagement of Wisdom TraditionsAs the contemporary Catholic natural law theorist Russell Hittinger has shown,6 Ratzinger, as a ressourcement theologian, is a critic of "rationalism," with "little confidence" in the older, "moral-juridical manualist and casuistical approach to natural law, which was prominent in casuistical approaches."7 In fact, he thinks that... (shrink)

What is the nature of law? The question that St. Thomas Aquinas answers in Summa Theologica I-II continues to be a crucial question in contemporary philosophy of law. Various scholars of jurisprudence attempt to identify the necessary features of law. Yet they struggle with the question, what kind of necessity is involved? Is it conceptual necessity? Metaphysical necessity? In this paper, I explore an alternative way of distinguishing different kinds of necessity that is found in Aquinas’ Commentary on Aristotle’s (...) Physics. I argue that the three kinds of necessity simpliciter, from the formal, material, and efficient cause, and hypothetical necessity, from the final cause, are relevant for understanding how Aquinas’ definition of ‘law’—an ordinance of reason, for the common good, made by the one who has care for the community, and promulgated—is a necessary truth. This historically interesting approach offers insights for contemporary jurisprudence. (shrink)

The neoclassical critique of conventional natural law theory -- The presupposition of lex naturalis : man as capax dei -- "Lex" and "Lex Naturalis.".

This new translation of the _Treatise on Law_ offers fidelity to the Latin in a readable new version that will prove useful to students of the natural law tradition in ethics, political theory, and jurisprudence, as well as to students of Western intellectual history.

Against recent commentators such as Annstrong, D’Arcy, Copleston, O’Connor, Bourke, and Grisez, I argue that the logic referred to by Thomas in his “Treatise on Law” should not be understood metaphorically. Instead, it involves a chain of syllogisms, beginning with the synderesis principle, followed by primary, secondary, and tertiary principles, and ends with a practical syllogism. In showing this, I attack the view that the synderesis principle, “good ought to be done and evil avoided,” is tautological. Second, I show (...) the syllogistic relation between this and the more subordinate moral principIes. Finally, I argue that the practical syllogism also involves a logical deduction, where the minor premise is a propositional attitude of perception, and the conclusion is an action which expresses a proposition. What emerges is a more precise account of how actions are related to natural law. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas's classic Treatise on Divine Law is brought to life in this illuminating line-by-line commentary, which acts as a sequel to Budziszewski's Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law. In this new work, Budziszewski reinvestigates the theory of divine law in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, exploring questions concerning faith and reason, natural law and revelation, the organization of human society, and the ultimate destiny of human life. This interdisciplinary text includes thorough explanations, applications to life, and ancillary (...) discussions that open up Aquinas's dense body of work, which tends to demand a great deal from readers. More than a half-century has passed since the last commentary on Thomas Aquinas's view of these matters. Budziszewski fills this gap with his consideration of not only the medieval text under examination, but also its immediate relevance to contemporary thought and issues of the modern world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MARITAIN ON RIGHTS AND NATURAL LAW THOMAS A. FAY St. John's University Jamaica, New York T:HE WAY RIGHTS a11e viewed in our time creates urmoil in our society. But this one-sided view of rights ad ]ts origin in the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseaiu, in which the" Rights of Man" were divinized and hence made unlimited. In contrast, Maritain based his notion of rights on the natu:rail (...) law, and this phifosophic base can ground a more balanced view of rights, one which can protoot both against those who would assert arbitmry rights without any restraints whatever and against an authoritarian State which would subordinate an individual rights to its requirements. I. Maritain's Notion of the Natural Law For Marita:in, the ultimate groundiing of human rights is in the natural law.1 But just what does he mean by the term "natural law? " It is by no means obvious. Certa:inly from antiquity man has had some gmsp of a narturaJ faw, rthat is, of a law which transcends merely positive law, the law fashioned by men. In!J1an and the State, Maritain cites the case of Antigone, the heroine in Sophocles' pJ.ay of the same name. She breaks a positive faw in giving buriaJl to her brother 'and justifies her act by making an appeal to a law higher than any merely human law. And so she says " Nor did I deem Your ordinance of so much binding force, As that a mortal man could overbear The unchangeable unwritten code of heaven; 1 Les droits de l'homme et la, loi naturclle (New York: Editions de la Maison Frnncaise, Hl42), p. 84. 439 440 THOMAS A. FAY This is not of today and yesterday, But lives forever, having origin Whence no man knows...2 The Stoic philosophers spol{'e of a natural law; so did tnpian in the ancient Roman period, and St. Augus:tine in the early Middle Ages. The se-y;enteenth and eighteenth century saw the classical Law of Nature philosophers, such as Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke. And of course, by no means least on our list, there was Thomas Aquinas. Mal11'tain takes Thomas's to be the most perfect statement of natural law. But even here there are certain ambiguities and problems. For example, with 11egard to the "primary " and " seconda,ry" precepts of natural law, the statements of St. Thomas in early work The Commentary On The Sentences are at variance with the vocabulary and the teaiching of the Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 94. Maritain attempts to clarify these obscurities by introducing what he rtakes to he the key to Thomas's 1 doctrine of natUl"al law-the notion of knowledge through inclination.3 As Maritain sees it, there are two aspects of natural law, one ontological and the other gnoseologicaL4 The ontological.aspect of natural law means that man has a being-structure which is the locus of inrtelligible necessities, that he possesses ends which necessarily correspond to his essential constitution and which are common to all men. This means that there is, by virtue of human nature itself, an order or a disposition which human reason can discover and accol'lding to which the human will should act if lit is to attain the necessary and essential ends of being human. This order or disposition is what he means by nrutural law. From this it follows that 001y being in nature, be it a tree or a dog or whatevier, has its own na.tural law, which is the normality of its funotioning, the proper way in which, by reason 2 Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 85. s Ibid., p. 91. 4!bill., pp. 85-94. MARITAIN ON RIGHTS AND NATURAL LAW 441 of its specific structure and specific ends, it " should " achieve the fullness of its being, The " shou1d " here is not a moral imperative but rather an ontological one, just as we say that a "good" eye" shou1d" be :able to perceive certain objects with clarity at a certain disrtance. But as soon as we enter the realm of free... (shrink)

This volume contains new translations of the essential philosophical writings of Thomas Aquinas, from the _Summa Theologiae_ and _The Principles of Nature_. The included texts represent the breadth of Aquinas’s thought, addressing causality, the fundamental principles of nature, the existence of God, how God can be known, how language can be used to describe God, human nature, happiness, ethics, and natural law. The goal of these translations is twofold: to allow Aquinas to speak for himself, but also to (...) make his thought accessible to the contemporary reader without the burden of unnecessary adherence to convention. A thorough introduction to Aquinas and his ideas is included, as is a series of useful appendices connecting Aquinas’s arguments to those of Anselm, Scotus, Ockham, and others. (shrink)

The far reaching changes in man's social and personal life taking place in our lifetime underline the need for a sound ethical evaluation of our rights and duties and of human behaviour both on the individual level and in the political society. On many issues judgments of value vary widely and a consultation of the thought of Thomas Aquinas on the basic questions will be helpful, the more since he is not only one of the greatest philosophers but also (...) succeeded in integrating in his moral philosophy the wisdom of the ancients, in particular of Aristotle and the Stoa. This book presents Aquinas's thought on such central questions as man's happiness, how to determine the morality of our actions, the natural law and the main virtues, as well as on the common good, war, human labour, love and friendship. Throughout the book the intellectual character of this moral philosophy is pointed out and problems are set in a historical perspective. (shrink)

Every form of government, whether by its action or inaction, encourages certain forms of behavior and discourages others. The moral well being of a society necessitates its consideration of civil law's legitimate role in shaping moral character. In this paper, I will attepmt to argue that the Thomistic account of civil law is not merely negative, but entails a positive pedagogy that seeks to nurture the moral virtue of its citizens, for both the viciously inclined and those who are already (...) good. Furthermore, Aquinas’ theory of the common good is such that its role is not merely limited, i.e., through establishing some form of civic tranquility and providing basic goods of the material or economic order with little worry of the moral habits thus cultivated. The treatment of Thomas’ teaching on human law will not be fully exhausted in this paper. However, from examining the texts from the Summa Theologiae and the De Regno, it will appear evident that St. Thomas has provided a concise and intelligent framework for seeing and actualizing the necessary relationship between human law and moral virtue. (shrink)

At the end of February 2000 the Pope fulfilled a longed-for dream in his visit to Egypt, culminating in his ascent to Mount Sinai. Here the Pope displays once again a perfect intertwining of reason and faith, philosophy and theology. This paper delves into the metaphysical ground of social ethics, as Fr. de Torre did in the 1977 book, The Roots of Society.

"This is an absolutely dazzling book on Orwell, casting a brilliant new light, not just on Orwell himself, but on the entire intellectual history of our time. It is a 'must read', not just for devotees of Orwell, but for anyone concerned with discussions of socialism and capitalism, totalitarianism and democracy, ideological passion and intellectual honesty. It will prove a superb teaching aid at both undergraduate and graduate levels."--Yuri Maltsev, co-author of The Tea Party Explained and editor of Requiem for (...) Marx "There has always been some mystery about how Orwell could give us the nightmare world of Ingsoc (English Socialism) while himself remaining an unrepentant English Socialist. This and other puzzles about Orwell are convincingly solved in Dr. Steele's masterly account. If you want to know what made Orwell tick, you just have to read this eloquent, provocative, and hugely entertaining book."--Barry Smith, Director of the National Center for Ontological Research and author of Austrian Philosophy. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a shift away from the traditional view that Aquinas's theory of the natural law is meant to supply us with normative guidance grounded in a substantive theory of human nature. In the present essay, I argue that this is a mistake. Expanding on the suggestions of Jean Porter and Ralph McInerny, I defend a derivationist reading of ST I-II, Q. 94, A. 2 according to which Aquinas takes our knowledge of the genuine goods of human (...) life and their proper ordering to one another to be self-evident only to the wise who are able to discern the truth about our God-given human nature. I then show that this reading provides a better account of Aquinas's view than two recent alternatives: John Finnis's brand of inclinationism and Daniel Mark Nelson's virtue-based interpretation. (shrink)

If there is any one author in the history of moral thought who has come to be associated with the idea of natural law, it is Saint Thomas Aquinas. Many things have been written about Aquinas's natural law teaching, and from many different perspectives. The aim of this book is to help see it from his own perspective. That is why the focus is metaphysical. Aquinas's whole moral doctrine is laden with metaphysics, and his natural law (...) teaching especially so, because it is all about first principles. The book centers on how Aquinas thinks the first principles of practical reason, which for him are what make up natural law, function as laws. It is a controversial question, and the book engages a variety of readers of Aquinas, including Francisco Suárez, Jacques Maritain, prominent analytical philosophers, Straussians, and the initiators of the New Natural Law theory. Among the issues addressed are the relation between natural law and natural inclination, how far natural law depends on knowledge of human nature, what its obligatory force consists in, and, above all, how it is related to what for Aquinas is the first principle of all being, the divine will. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas’s thought on how human natural inclinations relate to the cognition of basic human goods has been and continues to be highly disputed. Pointing out the weaknesses of both old and new natural law interpretations, I offer an interpretation that is highly sensitive to Aquinas’s language in key texts on this issue and in addition draws upon texts where Aquinas explicates the relationship between inclination and selective attention. I argue that the natural inclinations primarily play (...) a directive role in drawing an agent’s attention to naturally apprehend basic human goods. This directive role is both externalist and reliabilist—the agent need not be aware of the inclinations and cognitive features that reliably direct her attention. Following a principle he inherits from Aristotle, I claim that for Aquinas, as human beings are by nature, so do the basic human goods seem to them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue ed. by Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph WhiteFrederick Christian BauerschmidtThomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue. Edited by Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, O.P. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2013. Pp. viii + 304. $36.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-6976-0.The essays collected in Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue are (...) the fruit of a conference held at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2011. As presented in this volume, they form five pairs, one each by a Catholic and a Protestant theologian, focused on the topics of (1) the being of God, (2) the Trinity, (3) Christology, (4) grace and justification, and (5) election, providence, and natural law. Thomas Joseph White provides a lengthy introduction, and Bruce McCormack concludes with a brief epilogue. All of the essays at least touch on both Barth and Thomas, though in varying degrees. It must be noted that, with the exception of the essays by White and Wawrykow, the Catholic interlocutors generally engage Barth less deeply than the Protestant interlocutors engage Thomas. Why this might be the case is a point to which I will return.Under the topic of the being of God, Robert Jenson begins with a brief, reflective essay focusing on the radical implications of Barth’s account of God’s “being” or “reality” as “event,” “I,” and “decision” (Ereignis, ich, Entscheidung), and on the content of God’s essence as “the loving One.” Jenson argues that if we follow Barth’s trajectory, we arrive at the paradoxical view that “God’s being is an implosion of freedom, so sheerly contingent that it is not contingent on anything and so is the one necessity. And it is an explosion of love, so sheerly a commitment to the other that it is freedom” (51). Thomas gets only a brief mention, though presumably he stands as the conventional account of God’s being that provides the background against which the true radicalism of Barth’s account can appear. Richard Schenk offers a Catholic counterpoint, engaging not so much with Barth himself as with Jenson and other post-Barthian thinkers such as Ebeling. His essay responds to Jenson’s paradoxes of imploding freedom and exploding love by educing from Thomas’s writings “a theodicy-capable theology of the cross” (57) that operates within a commitment to God’s impassibility as traditionally understood. Implicit in Schenk’s argument is the wager that a God who is, qua [End Page 301] God, beyond all suffering is a richer resource of hope for suffering humanity than is a God who suffers with us in his divinity.Under the topic of the Trinity, Guy Mansini’s essay launches something of a preemptive strike on Bruce McCormack, who, in a widely discussed essay (“Grace and Being,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 92-110) and in subsequent writings, has developed Barth’s notion of Christ’s obedience on the Cross as the manifestation in time of his “intra-trinitarian obedience” to the Father in order to argue against traditional notions of divine being and in favor of something like the view Jenson sketches in his essay. Mansini draws on the patristic and monastic traditions as well as Thomas to explore the humility and obedience of Christ, arguing that obedience can only be a virtue of a created will: “’To obey,’ like ‘to be caused’ or ‘to be moved,’ belongs exclusively to the created order” (82). Thus, Christ is humble and obedient qua human, not qua divine, and therefore one cannot sensibly speak of an intra-trinitarian obedience but only of the obedience of Christ’s human will to the one divine will that is common to the Father, Son, and Spirit. McCormack’s essay, which follows, seeks to show that the position he has developed by way of Barth’s theology can also be grounded in Thomas’s theology of the relation of divine processions and missions, at least as this has been interpreted by Matthew Levering. McCormack reads Thomas with notable ecumenical generosity, seeing in Thomas’s view that the... (shrink)

Fifty years of debate have strengthened Germain Grisez’s 1965 interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s famous article on the natural law in Summa theologiae I-II.94.2. Revisiting Grisez’s argument in light of these developments reveals that his “gerundive interpretation” of the first principle of practical reason is not only Thomistic, but essentially Aquinas’s interpretation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law by Stephen L. BrockBrian BesongThe Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law by Stephen L. Brock (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020), xv + 277 pp.Fr. Stephen L. Brock is arguably one of the most important contemporary contributors to the Thomistic understanding of natural law. Hence, the (...) publication of his updated and revised doctoral dissertation on the topic [End Page 289] of the metaphysics of natural law in St. Thomas will be gladly received by Thomistic scholars and moral theorists alike. In The Light That Binds, Brock's central task is to explain the metaphysics of the promulgation of natural law in man. Put differently although extant literature on natural law may be useful for action analysis—why lying is always wrong, say—less attention has been paid to the way in which natural law has been promulgated by God and is present in the human intellect. What literature is available, either as an explanation of St. Thomas or as criticism of the same, has failed to do Aquinas justice, so Brock argues.The book comprises seven chapters and an introduction. In the first chapter, Brock's central goal is to survey the ways in which (especially more recent) commentators of Aquinas have distorted the sense in which natural law constitutes genuine law, as well as the relationship between natural law and God. For, there is a line of thought on natural law, particularly prominent in the "new natural law" tradition, according to which the principles at the heart of the theory do not fully satisfy the four criteria of legitimate law given by Aquinas. Rival views have natural law constituting a real law, but in virtue of an epistemically explicit reliance on God as lawgiver, among other distortions. Figureheads surveyed in the chapter include Dom Odon Lottin, Ernest Fortin, and Francisco Suárez, among others.In the second chapter, Brock outlines and defends his positive view regarding the legal status of the natural law by way of continued discussion of Lottin, particularly Lottin's contention that St. Thomas was heavily influenced by a mid-thirteenth-century Franciscan tract, De legibus et praeceptis. Brock argues that St. Thomas conceives of natural law as having an even closer relationship to eternal law than is posited by the earlier Franciscan tract, and the rest of the chapter is largely focused on unpacking this close relationship. In sum, natural law is law because it involves a rational ordering by God of our intellect to the goods of our nature, a human participation in an eternal ordering of all things to their ends (i.e., the eternal law). We need not discover the source of the ordering—namely, God—in grasping the first principles of his ordering, as Brock explains here and elsewhere. But the strictly legal status of the principles requires that natural law comes from a legitimate authority, among other essential elements.Chapters 3 and 4 tackle the more human side of the metaphysics of natural law. More concretely, in these chapters, Brock explains the wheres and the whats of our possession of the natural law. For, not all ordering of objects to ends implies the sort of normativity we see in the natural law. Brute animals, among others, have natural inclinations too, and yet they are not governed through these instinctual drives by a natural law. Natural law [End Page 290] is present preeminently in the human intellect, Brock argues, and is not to be confused with the prerational drives that we share as part of our animal nature. God instills these rational drives—the light, as it were—into reason in such a way that an individual can grasp its force autonomously, as basic conceptional truths about what right and wrong consist in (72). Here it would have been nice for Brock to reflect briefly on how Aquinas's views on moral knowledge fit within his broader epistemological commitments, as the natural (conceptual) knowledge of right and wrong at first glance shares common ground with the Franciscan tradition on divine illumination as found in figures... (shrink)

This paper will study the universality of natural law that Thomas Aquinas explains in Sententia Libri EthicorumV. In the 5th book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells the difference between natural law and positive law in the context of politic law. This reference point raises the question about the naturalness of the justice rules within the political society. Especially when it comes to the variability inherent in practical matters. Thomas, by contrast, appeals the first principles recognized (...) by practical intellect in order to support the universality of natural law. The comparison among the Aristotelian and Thomistic position on the universality of the natural law, would reflect doctrinal overcomings, continuities or ruptures between different authors that examine, however, a common topic. (shrink)

In _The Priority of Prudence_, Daniel Mark Nelson proposes a reappropriation of a moral perspective that focuses on the cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. The study aims to recover and rehabilitate the virtue of prudence as a way of resuming a moral conversation that has been stalemated for too long. Nelson's main source for reviving the virtue of prudence is St. Thomas Aquinas's account of the cardinal virtues in the _Summa Theologica_. A primary problem with using (...) Aquinas as a source for reviving an ethics of virtue centered on prudence is that he is commonly perceived as the most prominent figure in the conflicting natural-law tradition. According to Nelson's reinterpretation, however, Aquinas teaches that moral understanding depends first and foremost on prudence working in accord with other cardinal virtues and that natural law functions to explain moral reasoning rather than to guide it. This study serves to advance the debate about the contemporary relevance of an ethics of virtue by way of its significantly more detailed explication of prudence. Nelson makes important connections between influential reinterpretations of the ethical theory of Aquinas that have been published during the last thirty years and widespread interest in an ethics of virtue that has been expressed by Alasdair Maclntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, William Sullivan, Robert Bellah, and others. _The Priority of Prudence _represents a significant contribution to the scholarly literature both in the study of Aquinas and in the debate on the ethics of virtue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Light that Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of the Natural Law by Stephen BrockAngel Perez-LopezThe Light that Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of the Natural Law by Stephen Brock (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020), xv + 277 pp.How does the natural law fit the definition of law? Opinions clash among different interpreters of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Stephen Brock's (...) book provides both a magisterial and a definitive answer to this question.Like fine wine, this book has been fermenting and maturing for almost thirty years. Originally a doctoral dissertation, this recently published work has been rewritten, and to a certain extent, reworked by the author with respect to some of its content.Without disregard for nuances, the first chapter introduces the reader to four different groups of Aquinas's interpreters. The first two groups question the full legal character of the natural law in its dependence to the eternal law. The third one questions its naturalness. The fourth group, instead, upholds both the divine origin of the natural law's full legality in its dependence on the eternal law, as well as its natural character.Brock places Dom Odo Lottin, Wolfgang Kluxen, Germain Grisez, and John Finnis in the first group. They maintain that the natural law is a law only in a qualified sense and that it does not entirely fulfill the definition of law. The natural law would provide an intrinsic morality. It should be treated independently from the eternal law. The second group is composed by authors such as Frederick Copleston, Alan Donagan, or Gregory Stevens. Similar to the first group, they argue that the natural law is an autonomous self-standing law, legislated by human reason. Thus, it should be treated independently from the eternal law, except to point out its ultimate origin.The author who exemplifies the third position is Ernest Fortin. Reacting against Finnis, Fortin's position jeopardizes the natural character of the natural law. In his view, the legal force of the first principles of practical reason is not fully actualized until one recognizes the divine institution sanctioning them. [End Page 981]All the authors of the fourth group uphold that the natural law is fully a law on account of its divine origin and that it is also entirely natural insofar as it is naturally known by human reason. Herein Brock places commentators of Saint Thomas such as Francisco Suarez, Dominic Farrell, Lawrence Dewan, and himself. He also includes in this last group other philosophers such as G. E. M. Anscombe and Peter Geach. In the course of his whole study, Brock shows how Aquinas's true position differs from the other members of this group. Special attention is given to the differences between Aquinas's true mind and the interpretations offered by Suarez, Farrell, and, to a certain degree, even by Dewan. In order to better appreciate the depth of this process, I have found it very helpful to read Farrell's The Natural Law According to Aquinas and Suarez in conjunction with Brock's work.The second chapter targets the natural law's legal character in its dependence to the eternal law. It proves that Thomas provides a strict definition of the natural law when he says that it is nothing but a participation of the eternal law in the rational creature. This chapter opens with a historical study concerning the influence of the Summa Fratri Alexandri in the Summa theologiae (ST). Aquinas's understanding of the dependence of the natural law on the eternal law turns out to be more systematic and refined. It is based on a fuller comprehension and development of what law is (the ratio legis).The remainder of the second chapter consists in a superb commentary regarding ST, I-II, q. 91, a. 2, on whether something existing in man is fit to be called a natural law. Promulgation is the element of the definition of law that specifies the different kinds of laws. Hence, the natural law is differentiated from the others by its natural promulgation, namely, by the act through which the order of the eternal law (already instituted by God... (shrink)

Introduction -- Saint Thomas : putting nature into natural law -- Maritain and the love for the natural law -- The new natural law and evolutionary natural law -- International human rights, natural law, and Locke -- Conclusion : evil and the limits of the natural law.

For Thomas Aquinas, the creator of natural law is a personal, substantial, and relational God. For Laozi, it is an impersonal, non-substantial, self-manifesting dao. There are similarities, and this article will consider several of them. For Thomas, the act of creation comes from God, and for Laozi the giving birth of the universe is from the dao’s unconditional generosity. Thus it is possible to compare the way in which the world-originating generosity of God generates the moral law (...) and the way in which the self-manifesting dao generates the moral law. In Thomas’s view the natural law is the rational participation of the human being in God’s eternal law. Laozi’s heavenly dao governs all things in the universe, and for this reason human beings and their techniques should comply with dao. Thomas emphasizes human freedom of will and the responsibility to pursue what is good and to avoid what is evil. Laozi emphasizes the objectivity of heavenly dao without any reference to human freedom of will or individual responsibility. With religious Daoism there develops the idea of collective responsibility and the divinization of dao, a point that invites further comparative study of Thomism and Daoism. (shrink)

Natural Law and Modern Society presents a new theory of natural law, grounded in the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, aimed at answering questions relevant to the ethics and morality of the theory of law, obligation and political authority; from the domestic realm to international community.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ON LEO STRAUSS'S UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURAL LAW THEORY OF THOMAS AQUINAS * DOUGLAS KRIES Gonzaga University Spokane, Washington IN COMPOSING the introduction to Natural Right and History in the early 1950's, Leo Strauss described the situation in American social science as a division between two parties : the modern liberals of one persuasion or another, who had largely abandoned natural right altogether, and the (...) students of Thomas Aquinas.1 Since the fundamental goal of that book was a recovery of the classical or pre-modern theory of natural right, one might have anticipated that Strauss's work would have been received enthusiastically by the latter group. If nothing else, Strauss and the Thomists were natural allies because they shared the same modern enemies: namely, historicism (the view that all human thought is confined to the immediate historical horizon of the thinker) and positivism (the view that human thought cannot make value judgments, but only judgments about observable matters of fact). Beyond that, Strauss explored very seriously the issues of reason and revelation.and of religion and politics-both of which are crucial for Thomistic political thought. Yet, despite such favorable auguries, a congenial affiliation of *The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful criticisms he received in the preparation of this manuscript from David Calhoun of the Philosophy Department at Gonzaga University. 1 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 2, 7. 215 216 DOUGLAS KRIES Straussians and Thomists was never formed.2 Many factors probably contributed to the losing of the opportunity,8 but presumably chief among them was the fact that, even though Strauss's view of Thomas was genuinely respectful, it was not unequivocally sympathetic. Strauss preferred classical natural right theory to modern natural right theory, and he came to the conclusion that Thomas's teaching on natural right-while certainly ' pre-modern ' 4-introduced novelties into the classical position which weakened it rather than improved it. The goal of this essay is to analyze Strauss's reservations about Thomas's statement of the problem of natural right. Such an analysis will, I hope, contribute to a more fruitful exchange between the students of Leo Strauss and those of Thomas Aquinas. I Perhaps the best way to initiate an explanation of Strauss's view of the differences between classical and Thomistic natural right is to contrast the starting points of the two theories. The classical approach begins with what is said about right, with the everyday opinions that are held about what is just. From such an immediate starting point the classical approach ascends toward true knowledge through the process of dialectics. Although all people have views about what is just, in fact such opinions, when examined through friendly disputation with a philosopher, are almost always found to be self-contradictory; however, the 2 This is not to suggest that Strauss was completely ignored and rejected by the Thomists. For an overview of the Thomistic literature which has considered Strauss, see James V. Schall, "Revelation, Reason and Politics: Catholic Reflexions on Strauss," Gregorianum 62 (1981), 349-365, 467-497. s See Ernest L. Fortin, "Rational Theologians and Irrational Philosophers: A Straussian Perspective," Interpretation 12 (1984), 349-350. 4 For Strauss, the fundamental division within the history of political philosophy was between the ancients and the moderns. He understood Thomas to be in the former camp and was critical of contemporary Thomists who, under pressure from the success of modern physics, had attempted to ' modernize ' Thomas by jettisoning his teleological view of nature. See Natural Right and History, pp. 7-8; What is Political Philosophy? (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1959), pp. 285-6. NATURAL LAW THEORY OF THOMAS AQUINAS 217 very fact that one comes to realize that contradiction and seeks to rectify it points to the fact that human beings realize that a more comprehensive, non-contradictory view might be possible. The contradictions thus force one to ascend beyond the opinions that are at best only partially true toward an ever more consistent view, a view based on nature; if such a process could reach culmination, the culmination would constitute a statement of what is right by nature.5 The starting... (shrink)

The Euthyphro problem and the natural law : an investigation of some aspects of the medieval debate on natural law -- Aristotle : natural law and man in the "metaxy" -- St. Thomas Aquinas : the "lex naturalis" -- Thomas Hobbes : The state of nature and natural rights -- John Locke : natural law, natural rights and God -- Concluding remarks and a heavenly dialogue.