The first supernatural light upon nature is the light of precept: God commands or forbids something that the mind itself can recognize as right or wrong.  Telling us what we already know or could have known may seem superfluous.  Yet, as equatorial sunlight prickles the skin, so revelation prickles the mind and wakes it up, and it does this in several different ways.

Precept confronts us because certain matters of right and wrong are so obvious that at some level everyone already knows them.  According to Thomas Aquinas, these include all of the things covered by the Decalogue, such as the wrong of adultery and the wrong of theft.  If we already know them, then why is confrontation necessary?  Because the matter is more subtle than it appears.  In one sense, it is impossible to be mistaken about the moral fundamentals; they are right before the eye of the mind.  Thus Saint Thomas declares in one place that “the natural reason of every man, of its own accord and at once, judges [these things] to be done or not to be done.”  In another sense, however, it is quite possible to be mistaken about the moral fundamentals, for the eye can be averted.  Thus he remarks a few pages later, “and yet they need to be promulgated, because human judgment, in a few instances, happens to be led astray concerning them.”

Attention to this subtlety clears up one of his examples.  As Saint Thomas famously remarks in another passage, “[T]heft, although it is expressly contrary to the natural law, was not considered wrong among the Germans.”  Many readers think he meant that human reason can be totally ignorant even of precepts so basic as “Thou shalt not steal.”  On the contrary, not only was theft a punishable offense among the Germans, but, considering the source that Saint Thomas cites (the sixth book of Julius Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic War), he would have been well aware of the fact.  Caesar does not mention the routine Germanic penalties for theft, such as compensation.  On the other hand, he says that the Germans considered such offenses so detestable that to propitiate their gods they sought out thieves and robbers to be burned alive.  Has Saint Thomas overlooked the passage?  There is no need to think so.  When he says that theft “was not considered wrong among the Germans,” what he doubtless has in mind is a later passage where Caesar explains that the Germans approved stealing from tribes other than their own.

The manner in which the judgment of these barbarians was “led astray,” then, is not that they were ignorant of the wrong of taking what properly belongs to one’s neighbor, but that they refused to recognize the members of the other tribes as neighbors.  They didn’t justify theft as such -- just some theft.  They told themselves that they weren’t really thieves.  This is very much like the way a philandering man invents excuses for his affairs.  Perhaps he tells himself that he isn’t really unfaithful to his wife, because he’ll lie to make sure she isn’t hurt.  Or perhaps (especially if he has studied ethics) he tells himself that the “question” of faithfulness is “complicated,” because the other woman is more truly his “wife” than his actual wife is.  This is why confrontation is so important; the divine reminder of what we already know has a tendency to cleanse the mind.  Such cleansing can operate not only at the level of an individual but at the level of an entire culture; with our favorite evasions burned away, we think more clearly.  About what?  Geometry?  No, but certainly about things like theft and adultery.

Precept also corrects us.  Here I am not speaking of the foundational matters, of the principles of right and wrong that we “can’t not know,” but of their more or less remote implications.  A great many points of morality that lie within the mind’s capacity of discovery, and that, after reflection, wise people consider obligatory, nevertheless have to be explained to persons who lack wisdom.  In fact, even the knowledgeable may make mistakes.  “In order, therefore, that man may know without any doubt what he ought to do and what he ought to avoid,” Saint Thomas remarks, “it was necessary for man to be directed in his proper acts by a law given by God, for it is certain that such a law cannot err.”  Consider adultery again.  As we saw above, though we may need confrontation about it, strictly speaking we don’t need correction about it; the good of marriage is just too obvious for us to pretend that we don’t get it about adultery.  Granted, it is not so obvious to the adulterer; habitual duplicity dims the powers of judgment.  The good of chastity in all of its dimensions, on the other hand, is not so obvious even in the first place.  To most people it seems rather a stretch.  They may consider it admirable -- a remote, ideal beauty -- but it is unlikely to strike them as obligatory.  Consequently, concerning lines of conduct like divorce, fornication, perversion, “polyamory,” and even prostitution, they do need correction.

The difference between these two spheres of moral knowledge should not be overstated.  Are people completely ignorant of the moral character of unchastity?  Probably not.  Even today, most people involved in sexual sin recognize its impurity more clearly than they let on.  But do they see the depth of the problem?  That is most unlikely.  We need only listen to the way that they speak: “I’m not a tramp.  I only sleep with men I like.”  Even so, an element of honest ignorance mingles with the element of denial, and so we are right to say that revealed precept does more than admonish us, “You know better.”  Concerning the remote implications of the natural law it actually corrects the error, stays the wandering judgment, and imparts certainty where confusion reigned before.

Correction about one vice has consequences for other vices, and ultimately for our grasp of natural law.  We have been speaking about the good of chastity, but in order to be deceived about that good, a man must also be deceived about a whole range of other goods.  The truest friendship is partnership in a good life; in that respect his friendship is impaired.  Justice requires acute perception of what is really due to the other person; in that sense his justice is impaired.  Courage requires not mere fearlessness but a right estimate of what things are worth fighting for; in that sense his courage is impaired.  Unfaithfulness requires constant deception; in that sense his frankness is impaired.  Deceived in so many ways, his wisdom is askew.  Insofar as wisdom regulates all of the moral virtues, the pattern of his life is askew.  Lacking the stability and discipline necessary for clear and honest thought, constantly tempted to rationalize, his thinking about natural law is askew.  If sexual purity were a recognized prerequisite for those who pursue such studies, matters would be different, but as it is, philosophers need corrective precepts about purity just as much as everyone else.

Finally, revealed precepts illuminate the natural realities by invitation.  Pondering the structures of creation, we can discern reasons why the revealed precepts are so fitting; this is part of what the Scriptures call Wisdom, who speaks personified in Proverbs:

The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.  Ages ago I was set up, at the fi rst, before the beginning of the earth ....  [T]hen I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the sons of men.  And now, my sons, listen to me: happy are those who keep my ways.  Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it .... For he who finds me finds life and obtains favor from the LORD; but he who misses me injures himself; all who hate me love death.

Reflection on the reasons for God’s commandments was one of the great projects of rabbinical Judaism.  Rabbi Saadia Gaon declares that if all relied on theft instead of work for livelihood, “even stealing would become impossible, because, with the disappearance of all property, there would be absolutely nothing in existence that might be stolen.”  In similar fashion, Maimonides says that the eating of flesh torn from living animals -- a violation of the Noahide commandments -- “would make one acquire the habit of cruelty,” and Rabbi Hanina explains about the commandment to administer justice that “were it not for the fear of it a man would swallow his neighbor alive.”  Such arguments might seem to presuppose what they are trying to prove, but the circle is not vicious, because the longer we reflect, the deeper we are able to go.  Consider, for example, Rabbi Saadia Gaon’s remark.  Why would the disappearance of property leave nothing that might be stolen?  Merely in the formal sense that stealing is taking what another person owns?  No, in another sense too.  No one takes care of what might be gone tomorrow; without personal care and responsibility the common good suffers.  If property is rightly conceived as a form of stewardship -- for “every beast of the forest is [God’s], the cattle on a thousand hills” -- then property is far better training even in charity than those alternative institutional arrangements in which no one owns anything, in which “everyone” owns everything, or in which each one owns something but tells the others to go to hell.

The same is true of the precepts of chastity that we were considering before.  Without revelation, just through reflection on the created realities, we may or may not have arrived at them.  But once they are revealed and the revelation is accepted, they are known, and once they are known, the mind goes on to ask what makes them true.  In other words, we ask what it is about our constitution that makes sexual purity so crucial and impurity so catastrophic.  Why ask at all?  Does God require consent in order to command us?  No, but He made us in His image and delights to see it reflected back to Him.  He might have ruled us as He rules the animals, but instead He makes us finite participants in His wisdom.  Not only does He provide for us, but He has endowed us with the ability to understand in some measure the principles of His providence, and to care for each other in imitation of His loving care for us.

By the way, it is for this reason alone that human enacted law is possible.  God could have arranged matters so that we never had to deliberate about what is to be done, never had to labor in order to grasp how the general principles of the natural law should be applied to the particular circumstances of our earthly communities.  Such is not His way with us.  We may ask, “Why didn’t you make it easier?”  That is really like asking, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou dost care for him?” -- but in the mode of a complaint.  The psalmist replies that He has made us little lower than the angels, and has crowned us with glory and honor.

Sundays are reserved for lighter fare and Mondays for student letters, but this string continues on Tuesday

Something is destroyed by the council’s teaching, but not philosophy.  What is actually abolished is a too-simple idea of how revelation and so-called unaided reason are related.  In fact, revelation and reason are in intimate converse, each one entangled with the other.  In the first place, revealed truth about man’s nature presupposes the natural law.  In the second place, it underwrites reflection upon it.  More to the present point, supernature illuminates the natural realities with which human reason is concerned.  This is true in an immediate and direct way for those who acknowledge that this revelation is true.  What I hope to show is that in an indirect way it is even true for those “men of goodwill” who do not.

Now there are two ways in which one might inquire about these matters, two ways to investigate how the mystery of man is illuminated by the mystery of the Word.  One way is to focus solely on the Word Incarnate, Jesus Christ.  Now this Man was God.  Because we are not God, it might seem that this fact tells us nothing about ourselves, but the sheer fact that the human and divine could commune in a single person brings out with shocking clarity the depth of the older teaching that the one is the image of the other.  The sharpest, clearest definition of human nature is simply imago Dei.  In surrender to God, then, we lose nothing; only in Him can we discover ourselves.

Or consider the hope of redemption, grounded in Christ’s death and resurrection.  The fact that this directly concerns our destiny rather than our nature does not make it irrelevant to our nature.  What it tells us is that it was no mockery for the Creator to set eternity in the hearts of men, that the thirst for Himself with which He endowed us can be satisfied after all, that we can drink from Him forever.  Perhaps there is no logical contradiction in the idea of an image of God who is destined to futility, but there is certainly a performative incoherency in it.  As Benedict XVI points out, hope that life will not end in emptiness is a requirement of our nature: “Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well.”

The approach that I have just described -- considering only what Christ shows us about ourselves -- may seem to be the high road.  But although the mystery of the Word made flesh is the highest arch of the structure of revelation, the Word was not imparted to us only in the flesh.  All expressions of the Word are connected; we do not throw away scripture, sacrament, and apostolic teaching because we have Christ.  In reality, everything in revelation illuminates the mystery of man.  This more general matter is what I wish to explore.

I mentioned three ways in which revelation is related to natural law.  It presupposes natural law in that it makes no sense without it.  Time after time God commends His commandments to our admiration.  “What great nation is there,” He asks the children of Israel, “that has statutes and ordinances so righteous as all this law which I set before you this day?”  Plainly the question expects the Israelites to compare the relative righteousness of the verbally revealed ordinances of God and the humanly enacted ordinances of other nations.  But how can they compare, unless they have the power of comparison?  How can they have such a power, unless they already know something about righteousness?  And how can they already know something about it, unless God has already revealed that something by other means?  We find the same pattern throughout the word of God: Even when His disclosures exceed what natural reason could have figured out for itself, we can distinguish them from nonsense.  They depend on natural reason for their intelligibility.

Revelation underwrites rational reflection on the natural law by acknowledging the ways in which created reality itself is a kind of revelation; nature itself bears a kind of testimony to the truths of its Creator.  A law is written on the heart, even in the person who “has not the Law.”  We bear a certain order and design, which gives the way we are put together a significance it could not have if it were merely the unintended result of an accidental sequence of events.  The principles of this design can be recognized -- for example, the complementarity of the sexes.  Finally, our actions have natural consequences; the law of the harvest, that we reap as we sow, is not a mere product of the myth-maddened mind.  This fourfold testimony teaches us, in a manner not unlike the way in which the properties of soil and seeds instruct the farmer.  Experience assists human wisdom because Eternal Wisdom has seen to it that it shall; the universe has been designed to make this possible.

More to the point of this series, supernature illuminates the natural realities that are the business of natural law philosophy by inviting the intellect to reason more fully and adequately about matters that it may in principle be capable of finding out on its own, but rarely does.  Philosophy has rightly been called a preamble to theology; but theology is also a preamble to better philosophy.  An everyday parallel may make this clear.  Persons of my own sex often fail to notice things that ought to be perfectly obvious, and are in fact obvious to most women.  “Have you seen my glasses?”  “Yes, you’re holding them.”  “Are we out of milk?”  “Turn around; it’s on the table.”  “Why did Sheila speak so unkindly to that young man?”  “Because she likes him.”  Philosophy is like that too.  The facts of created reality may be right under our noses without our noticing.  We may be nearly blind to them until their Creator says, “Look here,” as the pagan thinkers were nearly blind to the sacrificial quality of love.  Does this “look here” allow natural law thinkers to dispense with arguments accessible to nonbelievers?  Obviously not, but it allows them to peer into the phenomena of our common life with greater confidence and penetration than they otherwise could.  It provides hints and insights about all sorts of matters which natural reason can later confirm by its own proper methods.  So reason grasps the things within its ken more quickly, deeply, and surely when revelation calls attention to them.

Astonishingly, it also grasps these natural realities more readily when supernatural realities not within its ken are revealed to it -- as we will see.  But to see this we need more equipment -- say, a prism.

Through the prism of revelation, at least five different colors of light shine on the natural realities.  We may call these preceptive, affirmative, narrative, promissory, and sacramental.  Although these lights clarify every facet of our nature, for simplicity I deal mostly with the facet of conjugal sexuality.  One cannot talk about everything, and the Word made flesh did after all perform His first supernatural miracle at a wedding.  I make no claim to break new ground concerning sexuality per se.  The purpose is merely to show how the natural and supernatural realities are related.

Continued tomorrow

Any Underground Thomists in the San Antonio area?  I'm

giving the Mars Hill Lecture at 6:30pm TONIGHT (Thursday,

January 15) at the Geneva School of Boerne.  The talk is free,

intended for a broad audience, and open to the public:

"Written on the Heart:  What Writing?  What Heart?" 

According to a famous statement of the Second Vatican Council, “It is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear.”  What does this say about natural law, which is commonly supposed to be an affair of human reason?

One might suppose that it says nothing about it: The “mystery” of man which we need revelation to understand has nothing to do with his nature but only to do with his destiny.  Or perhaps the “mystery” becomes fully clear in Christ only in the sense that only Christ was perfect man.  In either case, isn’t reason alone still sufficient to investigate man’s nature?  Surely we need not resort to supernatural realities to say what a human being is.  As the late John Paul II recognized, this compartmentalizing interpretation just will not work.  “With these words,” he wrote,

the Second Vatican Council expresses the anthropology that lies at the heart of the entire Conciliar Magisterium ....  Christ alone, through his humanity, reveals the totality of the mystery of man.  Indeed, it is only possible to explore the deeper meaning of this mystery if we take as our starting point man’s creation in the image and likeness of God.  Man cannot understand himself completely with reference to other visible creatures.  The key to his self-understanding lies in contemplating the divine Prototype, the Word made flesh, the eternal Son of the Father.  The primary and definitive source for studying the intimate nature of the human being is, therefore, the Most Holy Trinity.

Then is man’s very nature -- not just his destiny -- so intimately tied up with supernature that it cannot be grasped fully by reason alone?  If so, then it might seem that the whole idea of a philosophy of natural law is destroyed.  Nothing is left -- it might seem -- but theology.  Suppose this really were the result.  One might ask, “So what?  What difference does it make whether we get our insight into man from theology rather than from philosophy?  There is more than one way to skin a cat.”  Ah, but that is just the problem: In this scenario theology would be the only way to skin the cat.  The only way to have a meaningful conversation with an unconverted person about our shared human nature would be to convert him first.

That is certainly what many people think, but it is not what the Council teaches.  “All this holds true not only for Christians,” it says, “but for all men of good will in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way.”

Well, then what does that mean for the philosophy of natural law?  Is it destroyed, or isn’t it?

Continued tomorrow

Any Underground Thomists in the San Antonio area?  I'll be giving the Mars Hill

 lecture at  6:30pm, THIS THURSDAY, January15, at  the Geneva School of Boerne.

The talk title is  “Written on the Heart: What Writing? What Heart?”

The last two posts, especially yesterday’s, may have startled some of my readers by implying that history matters -- even from the perspective of natural law.  What human beings did by rebelling against their Creator mattered; what God did to rescue them also mattered.  Thus in the view of the Christian mainstream of the natural law tradition, natural law can be understood properly only from the perspective of salvation history.

In its foundational principles, natural law per se does not change.  It couldn’t, because the fundamental nature of a being cannot change.  If there was a change, you would have a different being.  The old one would have ceased to exist.  But although our nature cannot change, its condition can change.  One and the same body can be either well, or ill, or healed.  In much the same way, the condition of our nature can be either innocent, fallen, or redeemed.  So Christian thinkers have insisted since the Patristic era.

The main reason this fact is overlooked is that in the modern period, revisionist natural law writers tried to shake off the classical tradition, either denying, ignoring, or disparaging the significance of salvation history.  Natural law came to be conceived in a much more abstract and ahistorical way.   Think Hobbes.  Think Locke.  Think Voltaire.

So far did the pendulum swing in an ahistorical direction that in order to bring history back into the theoretical picture, other modern thinkers thought they must deny that we even have a fixed nature.  Think Rousseau.  Think Hegel.  Think Marx.

So here we are, with the strange misunderstanding that one can admit the importance of nature or the importance of history, but not both.  Sometimes people who are otherwise sympathetic to the classical natural law tradition even chastise it for denying that history matters – a view which it never held.

Continuing my reply to yesterday’s letter from a student:

Your second question is about what you call “moral miracles.”  Can God make it right to do what is intrinsically wrong, just by commanding it?  This question arises especially for those who not only accept natural law, but also accept the Bible as authentic divine revelation.

The answer is no.  Omnipotence does not mean that God can do literally everything.  He cannot act against that goodness are justice which are identical to Himself.   In particular, not even God can make exceptions can be made to the precepts of the Decalogue, such as “Do not murder” and “Do not commit adultery,” because they embody or “contain” God’s very intention to justice and the good of all His creatures.  To ask whether He could command such things is to ask whether God could be other than God.

St. Thomas Aquinas argues that on the other hand, God can declare exceptions to certain more detailed arrangements, arrangements which further His intention to justice and the common good only in some cases, not in all.  For example, God will never command theft.  But theft is taking away property unduly – taking away property which the other party does not deserve to lose.  Under ordinary circumstances it would have been theft for the Hebrew people to demand spoils from the Egyptians when they left the country of Egypt.  But God, as judge, decreed these spoils as a just punishment to the Egyptians for having subjected the Hebrew people to slavery.  Because of this judgment, the taking of spoils was not theft, just as it would not theft for you to be sentenced by a court to pay a fine as the punishment for some crime.

Much more troubling to many people is God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.  To you it seems that this may be a “moral miracle,” the conversion of sheer wrong into right just by commanding it, because it looks like a command to commit murder.  In the Thomistic analysis, God cannot command murder.  But murder is the undue taking of human life, and it is not murder if a just judge sentences a person who is guilty of capital crime to death.  Ever since the fall, all human beings had been under sentence of death for rebellion against God, and the Redeemer had not yet come.  God -- the divine judge who decrees this sentence -- can also decree the time and manner in which it is carried out.  If He decrees that in the case of Isaac, Abraham should carry it His sentence in the manner in which sacrifice is carried out, then although there is a strong departure from what would normally constitute murder, there is no departure from the prohibition of murder per se, because the act is not murder.

Disturbing as it is, I think this analysis of the story is correct.  We tend to misunderstand the story’s point because we read our own preoccupations into it instead of trying to understand what it is actually about.

The point of the story is certainly not that fathers may kill their sons at will, for the decision was not Abraham’s.  No human being can make such a decision.

Nor is the point that God can command anything.  God was acting here as a just judge, not as an arbitrary tyrant.

Nor is the point that God Himself desires child sacrifice.  In the first place, God intervened to stop Abraham before he actually committed the act.  In the second place, later in the Old Testament, God forcefully and repeatedly makes clear that He abhors child sacrifice, and that he condemns the nations which practice it.  But Abraham does not know that God abhors it.  He comes from a culture in which child sacrifice is common, and for all he knows, a god might desire such a thing.  Whether children may be sacrificed is just not the issue for him.

Nor is the point that every seeming divine appearance really is one.  We, living much later in history than Abraham, our consciences formed by a great deal more instruction, have the advantage of knowing that God abhors child sacrifice.  So if you hear what sounds to you like a divine voice commanding you to kill your son or daughter, you may be utterly sure that it is a delusion.

Then what is the point of the story?  For Abraham there is only one question:  Whether or not he will trust God to keep His promise to give him descendants.  Such trust is severely trying for Abraham because he and his wife are far beyond the normal age of childbearing, and Isaac is their only son.  The point is that he trusts God anyway.  Notice, too, what happens at the end of the story:  After putting an end to the proceedings and rescuing Isaac, God Himself supplies a ram as a substitute sacrifice.  In a later age, the Church took the substitution of the ram as foreshadowing the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ – the means by which at last we can be set free from the universal sentence of death.

St. Thomas discusses other acts you might consider “moral miracles” too.  For example, it might seem at first that God commanded the prophet Hosea to commit adultery, because He commanded him to marry a woman who lived like a whore.  According to St. Thomas, not even God can command someone to have intercourse with a woman who is not his wife.  Such a command would be contrary to the divine intention of purity which God built into human nature in the act of creation.  But God is the author of marriage; it follows that if God, for special reasons, commands Hosea to take a particular woman as his wife – even a woman who would otherwise have been regarded as unsuitable -- then by the very fact of the command, the woman is Hosea’s wife, and he is not committing adultery.

You mention that your questions came to you as you were reading my Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law.  I’ve included additional discussion of this sort of thing in the online Companion to the Commentary, which continues into selections from Questions 98-108, concerning the Old and New Testament divine law.  God bless your investigations.