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by Andrew Sandlin

The notion of natural law did not begin with Aristotle or St. Thomas, or even with the Stoics. It began in the Garden of Eden with Eve. Under the influence of the Great Tempter, she entertained the notion that probable knowledge derived from nature may be pitted against the verbal, propositional revelation of God Himself (Gen. 3:6). She was convinced that she could deduce reliable information from nature, even though that information conflicted with the letter and intent of God's direct propositional communication. By assuming that the revelation of God in nature could contradict the revelation of God in verbal, propositional communication, Eve asserted her own autonomy--the Original Sin. "At the instigation of Satan", Van Til suggests, "man decided to set himself up as the ultimate standard of right and wrong, of the true and false. He made himself, instead of God, the final reference point in predication."¹

The course of natural law theory in history is the course of this assertion of autonomy.

What Is Natural Law?

It is "those absolute and universally valid imperatives that are innate in the reason of every individual and necessarily come into consciousness with the development of the mind."² It is the notion that God's moral law is woven into the structure of the universe--including the mind of man. Human consciousness itself, therefore, perceives God's moral law for His rational creatures. Man, thus, by virtue of this consciousness, inherently grasps basic divine truth; it is not necessary for him to have recourse to the Sacred Scriptures in obtaining this knowledge.

The Ancient World and Natural Law

In the ancient world, natural law gained prominence among the Greek philosophers. Natural law theory emerged in the pagan attempt to find eternal permanence amid incessant change. In Rommen's words, "Heraclitus of Ephesus (cir. 536-470 B. C.) is famous for his thesis that 'all things flow; nothing abides.' But this ceaseless changing of things led him directly to the idea of an eternal norm and harmony which exists unchangeable amid the continual variation of phenomena."³ The Sophists, social revolutionaries employing intellectual arguments to subvert the ancient Greek order, employed natural law in contrasting the positive (that is, merely man-made civil) law with the eternal natural law. Most of the ancient Greek philosophers were statists because, among other factors, they saw the order of positive law as an accurate reflection of the eternal natural law. These Greek statists did not disagree with the Sophists on the question of the natural law's existence. They simply disagreed over whether the state's positive law did, in fact, reflect the natural law. The latter reflects a Platonic insistence on conformity to the "eternal forms":

For speculative reason, sense phenomena are the bridge of memory to the ideas, which dwell and live on in their supermundane, heavenly abode. The things of this world are or exist only so far as they participate in the being of the eternal ideas, or so far as man in his creative capacity of craftsman, artist, and especially lawmaker copies these ideas.... [T]he mind lays hold of the essence of a thing by finding the ideal concept which corresponds exactly to the literal meaning. Hence, we speak of the true physician, the true judge, the true lawmaker, the true law.... The ideal concept becomes a norm.... This true law, this true right, abides in the realm of the ideas and remains forever the same.⁴

In other words, men's minds enjoy the capacity to grasp the great eternal ideals of which human, earthly phenomena are simply patterns. By grasping the eternal law woven into the structure of the universe and revealed in the mind and consciousness of man, man can construct a legal system--personal as well as civil--that approximates the eternal, idealistic order. The real key to natural law theory, therefore, is the fact that man must live in harmony with himself since his consciousness reflects, in fact, the universal order.

We cannot fail to observe that natural law theory in the context of ancient Greek philosophy was essentially statist. There was virtually no recognition of what we today would call, in Kuyperian terms, "sphere sovereignty."⁵ The state encompassed all of life. Natural law, consequently, was not essentially a matter of individual morality, for individual morality distinct from the state was simply not a category of Greek thought. Natural law was a means of constructing the positive civil law order. Unfortunately, this view "preserved the 'seeds of Logos,' and it found the literary forms or word vessels into which the Christian spirit was [later] to pour its own ideas, which eventually matured into a new, yet related, doctrine of natural law."⁶

Christianity and Natural Law

Many of the early church fathers assimilated the Greek view of natural law and adapted it to Christian purposes. For Plato's universal forms and ideals the church fathers substituted natural law as an extension of God's mind: "For Augustine the substantial ideas, which Plato had conceived of as dwelling in a heavenly abode became thoughts of God.... This eternal law was for Augustine identical with the supreme reason and eternal truth, with the Reason of God himself."⁷ Augustine did not hold that natural law stands above both God and man as a standard to which both must conform; however, he did hold that it is equal to the very nature of God--it emanates from His being. Natural law is essentially an ontological phenomenon--it is rooted in divine being and, therefore, human being. This paved the way for the notion that the conscious mind of man participates in or shares knowledge with the mind of God.⁸

The patristic fathers transmitted to the Scholastics this idea of natural law, not only in the natural law tradition itself, but "also through the study of Roman law and through the development of canon law."⁹ That paragon of the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas, was an avid devotee of Aristotle who had developed his own view of natural law. Aristotle, like virtually all other Greek philosophers, is interested in natural law as an instrument of civic--what we would call political--justice. The Greek philosophers did not recognize a distinction between law and morality: "[L]aws should be based on true moral ideas...they should be used to shape character--to make men virtuous."¹⁰ Not surprisingly, therefore, like Plato, Aristotle supported a "communal morality"--including the state's upbringing of children (shades of Hillary Rodham Clinton's It Takes a Village!). Natural law, to the Greeks, is inherently political natural law.

Thomas' view of natural law was not identical with Aristotle's, but was deeply influenced by it. In Aquinas we detect one of the principal flaws in the Western conception of natural law--the great chain of being. In other words, man's relation to God is seen principally as ontological and realistic, rather than ethical and epistemological. Man virtually participates in the being of God.¹¹ As Rommen summarizes Thomas' view: "[I]n the essential nature of the created world, as it came forth in conformity with the will of the Creator, are embedded also the norms of its being.... Its [natural law's] basic norm may be simply stated: Act in conformity with your rational nature. For rational nature, known through self-consciousness or reflex thinking, constitutes the ontological criterion of the man's oughtness.... That which is, also ought to be."¹² Thus, by looking into his own nature, man grasps God's law, which according to Aquinas, is equal to the Decalogue.¹³ This law inherent in man is a reflection of the very divine Being.

A leading tenet of Christian natural law theory has been the priority of intellect to will. Natural law is reflected in the structure, content, and exercise of man's reason. One of the first principal attacks against natural law, for example, arose with Ockham, who subordinated law to God's will: it is a dictate of His will rather than a reflection of His nature and being. The real question that epitomizes this dispute is: could God's laws have been different (even opposite) from what they actually are? Do God's laws rest in His will, or in His very being? Natural law theory gives up its entire case if it subordinates God's law to His will; it must argue that His law is a reflection of His very being. In other words, law is ontological and not volitional. This led some natural law advocates to speculate whether natural law would be valid even if God did not exist. We have here moved considerably from the conception that natural law is an inherent revelation of God's very being to the possibility that the very moral structure of nature is what it is apart from any personal God whatsoever. This was the position of the great legal theorist Grotius.¹⁴

The Reformation and Natural Law

To a certain degree, the theology of the Protestant Reformation broke with medieval natural law theory--but not altogether. For one thing, the Reformers, especially Calvin, had such a low estimate of man and his natural (i.e., sinful) condition, that they could ill afford to maintain any confidence in an unregenerate man's awareness of divine moral law. While, for instance, Calvin recognizes the truth of God's revelation in nature, he asserts that "in order to enjoy the light of true religion, we ought to begin with the doctrine of heaven...[N]o man can have the least knowledge of true and sound doctrine without having been a disciple of the Scripture."¹⁵ Strangely, Calvin reintroduces the idea of natural law where many expect that he would expunge it altogether--in politics. In the last chapter of the Institutes he flatly denies that the civil laws of Moses should govern a political order, and opts instead for the "laws of nations." As Lang summarizes:

"All the Reformers recognized, of course, a natural moral faculty on the ground of Rom. ii, 15. But there are also indications that even they, at that early time, held as a matter of learned tradition some kind of conception of a specific natural law. But in distinction from Melanchthon, Luther attributed to it only a subordinate importance, Calvin almost no importance at all. Finally the views about the relation of politics, law, and equity to the word of God, and to Christian ethics were as yet little elucidated, though Calvin was the most positive in hoping to find the foundations for an evangelical Christian conception of the state in the ethical principles of the Bible--which principles, however, are not to be identified off-hand with the Mosaic law."¹⁶

As Lang suggests, it was the retention of this natural law theory, however slight, in the thinking and action of the Reformers which laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment, "an age whose views about historical criticism and natural science, about politics and social life, are in part directly opposed to the Reformation conception of the world."¹⁷ This thesis is documented exquisitely in Frederick Beiser's The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton, 1996). The link was this: if nature is a reliable source of knowledge apart from a consideration of Sacred Scripture in some matters, why not in all matters? Aquinas had argued that nature is a suitable revelation and that "grace" (including Sacred Scripture) is necessary only for the crowning knowledge of Christianity. But if man's capacity for reasoning suffices in obtaining a great deal of valid information about God and the universe, why not in everything?

The European Enlightenment and Natural Law

In the European Enlightenment, "nature" itself began to take on virtually divine qualities. Consequently, natural law theory played a somewhat different role in such Enlightenment thinkers as Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau than it had previously. It is in the thought of the leading Enlightenment philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, that natural law theory gains its supreme Enlightenment expression. The early Christian natural law thinkers had recognized the conscious human mind as a reflection of the mind of God. It thus had immediate access to and reflected divine moral law. From this, it was a short step for the Enlightenment thinkers to insist that man could order all, or virtually all, of life according to his reason. This became rationalism. In the words of Rommen, "Human reason now becomes the sovereign architect of the order of knowledge; it becomes the measure of things. The objective basis of natural law, the ordo Rerum and the eternal law [as insisted on by the earlier Christian thinkers], has vanished."¹⁸

Kant was neither a pure rationalist, nor a pure empiricist. He believed neither that man's mind was a blank slate on which the senses permitted the external world to impress objects of knowledge (Locke), nor that man's mind had the innate capacity to reason its way to ultimate truth (Descartes). Rather, Kant insisted on a mixture of both. Man's mind inherently possesses certain categories by which it orders knowledge whose data is transmitted to it by the senses in contact with the external world. In other words, man's mind creates a reality for himself. Kant did not in any sense deny the existence of the external world, but he did set forth an epistemological distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds. The phenomenon is something that is perceived by the senses and can be "processed" by the categories of the human mind; the noumenal, by contrast, is "the thing-in-itself." It is something as it really is and therefore cannot be perceived by the mind. God and other matters eternal are of the noumenal realm; therefore, man can have no genuine conception of God--at least, God is not an object of human knowledge. While asserting natural law theory, therefore, Kant held that such was nothing but a construct of the mind of man. Natural law was human reason. This was rationalism with a vengeance.

Natural law was, quite simply, the philosophical province of the eighteenth century. In fact, it may be fair to call the eighteenth century not merely "the age of reason," but also "the age of natural law." In fact, for all practical purposes, this is merely a tautology. Natural law was identified with the right exercise of human reason.¹⁹

In fact, virtually all Christians in the eighteenth century--including the most orthodox--were happy advocates of an odd rationalistic synthesis which saw the laws of nature grasped intuitively by human reason as simply reinforcing the Christian Faith and the Bible; reason itself is a reflection of that law. The orthodox did not disagree with their heterodox and heretical counterparts over the existence and applicability of natural law, but only over the conclusions to which natural law leads us.²⁰ The orthodox did not pit Scripture against reason; they simply held that Scripture could not possibly contradict reason. When it was found that what were considered to be the assured results of reason (and, later, the assured results of science) contradicted Scripture, the orthodox cause was largely lost: Nature cannot be wrong; therefore, our orthodox understanding of Scripture must have been wrong.

Recent Times and Natural Law

It was, in fact, rationalism that essentially destroyed natural law theory. Perceptive observers became increasingly skeptical of the claims of reason. In the nineteenth century, for example, the emergence of Romanticism led men to suppose that human law was not a reflection of the eternal natural law, as had been supposed, but simply a humanly constructed legal pattern that arose in certain historical contexts. This was the fruit of historicism. More fundamentally, with the gradual loss of confidence in even the sort of God posited by the Deists, the notion of a universal rational norm lost any hold on the imagination. What has come to be called postmodernism really started with Frederich Nietzsche late in last century. There is simply no standard of universal morality; morality is simply a reflection of man's human condition. Therefore, men may posit their own "values." To this way of thinking, natural law loses its universal character. It means little more than every individual's historically conditioned notions of right and wrong.²¹

In the postmodern ethos, therefore, natural law has few prominent supporters. Some are manfully trying to carry on the old Thomistic tradition. This is particularly true among today's political conservatives.²² It is also true for some modern evangelicals like Norman Geisler, who argues against biblionomy on distinctly Thomistic grounds: the political order should be based on natural revelation, not biblical revelation.²³

Today's advocates of a revival of natural law theory recognize what is necessary to their program: "The first prerequisite of an unalterable, permanent, standard, natural law is the possibility of a knowledge of being, of a knowledge of the essences of things; in other words, a realistic epistemology or theory of knowledge.... Natural law in the strict sense is therefore possible only on the basis of a true knowledge of the essences of things, for therein lies its ontological support."²⁴ This idea must be upheld by the Roman Catholic conception of the great chain of being. Rommen states this most eloquently when he discusses where the perception of innate ideas leads man:

These ideas lead further to the conception of an order of reality, that is, according to the degree of being which things possess. This order rises from purely potential being which is not yet real through the stages of created actual being with a greater and greater content of being and with less and less mere potentiality. It mounts from the inanimate creation through the world of inanimate beings to the living rational being that is man as the norm of creation. It culminates in God, the most perfect Being, who is both infinitely superior to the whole of creation and essentially different from it.²⁵

Though Rommen attempts to preserve the distinctiveness of God by recognizing that He is "essentially different" from His creation, the very ontological relation between man and God according to which man's mind reflects the mind of God subverts that noble attempt. As Rommen observes: "Since, therefore, from knowledge of the essences of things the order is perceived as established by God in conformity with His essence, this order necessarily appears to the will of the rational and free creature as likewise an order to be obtained and perceived and as a norm of the finite will. But this order is naturally and really 'given.'"²⁶ Thus Rommen asserts with childlike candor, "Otherwise we could never derive a norm from the essential order of the world, but solely from the revealed will of God [i.e., Sacred Scripture]"!²⁷

With this conviction it is not surprising that Rommen holds that natural law must supplement and throw light on biblical law, just the opposite of the consistent Reformation view, which is that the Holy Scriptures must throw light on our understanding of nature. We should not, therefore, be surprised in finding this natural law advocate to conclude,

that the obligation of the natural law does not depend for its efficacy on a knowledge either of God as legislator or of the divine will. For in the impossible hypothesis that God might not will the natural law, the latter would nevertheless become known to men and would oblige men in the same way as now because human nature would be constituted in the same way as now by command of the divine reason and both human nature and its acts would be ordained to the last end [ ! ]²⁸

In other words, even were God not to exist, natural law would exist because it is inherent in the human constitution.

At this point, we observe how natural law has replaced God Himself--and has replicated the Original Sin of the Garden of Eden, where man, under the guise of following a supposedly revealed law in nature, becomes as God.²⁹

Andrew Sandlin (M.A.) is the president of the National Reform Association, executive director of the Chalcedon Foundation, and editor of the Chalcedon Report.

Endnotes:

1. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ, 1969), 47.

2. J. Gottschick, "Natural Law," in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York and London, 1910), 8:83.

3. Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law (Indianapolis [1947], 1998), 5.

4. ibid., 12-13.

5. Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, 1931), 79 and passim.

6. Rommen, op. cit., 23.

7. ibid., 33.

8. A notion embraced today by some evangelicals. See, e. g., Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority (Waco, TX, 1979), 3:168, 171, 364-365 and Ronald H. Nash, The Word of God and the Mind of Man (Grand Rapids, 1982).

9. Rommen, op. cit., 34.

10. J. Budziszewski, Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (Downers Grove, IL 1997), 45.

11. Christopher Dawson, Medieval Essays (Freeport, NY, 1954, 1968), 101.

12. Rommen, op. cit., 40-42.

13. Ibid., 46f.

14. Ibid., 57.

15. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk. 1, Ch. 6, Sec. 2.

16. August Lang, "The Reformation and Natural Law," in Calvin and the Reformation, ed., William Park Armstrong (Grand Rapids, 1909, 1980), 72.

17. Ibid., 57.

18. Rommen, op. cit., 78.

19. This is not identical to the view of natural law set forth in the United States' Declaration of Independence, where due regard is given to "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God." As Gary Amos has shown, by "the laws of nature and of nature's God," Jefferson had in mind the Thomistic and Puritan idea of divine revelation in nature complemented by the teachings of the Sacred Scriptures. The Sacred Scriptures are simply augmented by natural law, and these supposed two sides of the same coin are what the phrase really means. Unlike Kant's view, reason itself is not a reflection of divine law. See Gary Amos, Defending the Declaration (Charlottesville, VA, 1989), 35-74.

20. W. Neil, "The Criticism and Theological Use of the Bible, 1700-1950," in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed., S. L. Greenslade (Cambridge, 1963), 3:239-240.

21. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York, 1968, third ed.), 101-118.

22. Mitchell S. Muncy, ed., The End of Democracy? (Dallas, 1997), 148.

23. Norman L. Geisler, "A Premillennial View of Law and Government," Bibliotheca Sacra, vol. 142, no. 567 (July-September, 1985), 257-260.

24. Rommen, op. cit., 143.

25. Ibid., 151.

26. Ibid., 153.

27. Ibid., 154.

28. Ibid., 143, n. 11.

29. In Rushdoony's words, "The natural law philosophy seeks to find brute laws in a world of brute facts, i. e., ultimately meaningless laws in an ultimately and immediately meaningless world of facts. Natural law philosophers attempt to present us God's world without the God of Scripture and Scripture's law, and they succeed only in presenting us with a specimen of themselves.... Thus, wherever nature has been held to be the source of law, law has ended up by reflecting or being identical with the sin of man," Rousas John Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law (no loc., 1973), 684, 683.

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