Mondays are reserved for questions from students.  This student is writing from Oxford.

I am enjoying your Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, and I have a question relating to natural law and contingent divine commands.  Since classical natural law is based on the essences or natures of things, and on their goal-directedness, it is universal and also objective.  It also bypasses the difficulties of divine command theory -- although perhaps divine command theory can meet these in some other way.  But does a natural lawyer have to have a divine command theory in addition to his theory of natural law?

My reason for thinking that he might is that some Old Testament commands seem to be contingent and not based on the nature or end of anything, for example dietary laws, or the commands to sacrifice Isaac or to war against the nations in the promised land.  It seems that only a divine command theory can ground commands like these, but this brings back the problems the natural lawyer sidestepped by adopting natural law theory instead of divine command theory.

One of these related problems is whether God can perform “moral miracles” – whether He can command something wrong and so make it right.  On a divine command theory this looks possible, but I’m not sure how it would work on a natural law view, since goodness depends on essences and goal directness, and so God would seem to need to change our essences for this act to be good.  But if God changed our essences, then it seems we would become something we aren’t.  We would cease to be human.

Reply:

By a divine command theory, some people mean merely a theory which holds that the moral laws are, in fact, divine commands.  According to classical natural law theory, they certainly are.  God commands in one manner via the natural law (by incorporating certain potentialities for good into our nature, potentialities which can be realized only in certain ways), and in another manner via the Divine law (by making what we are to do explicit in the words of revelation).  But other people use the term “divine command theory” for a theory which holds that God can command anything whatsoever – a theory according to which the mere fact of its having been commanded would make it right.  Classical natural law theory denies this, because God cannot contradict His own being; he could not have commanded anything contrary to that justice and goodness which are identical to Himself.

To think of the matter another way, St. Thomas rejects both the view that the good is good just because God commands it (which makes God higher than good), and the view that God commands what He does because He is obeying an external standard of good (which makes good higher than God).  Both of these views make God and good different, but in fact they are the same.  God simply is the uncreated good.  He is identical to His own goodness, His own justice, His own will, His own wisdom, and so forth.

How then does natural law come into the picture?  Nature is what He has created, and natural law expresses its inbuilt norms.  Life, for example, is intrinsically directed toward preservation; marriage, toward procreation, and the union of the procreative partners.  Though God could have created a different nature than He did, He could not have created a nature that contradicted His uncreated goodness.

Your first question is about contingency.  Certainly, some commands are contingent, but this doesn’t mean that they are arbitrary.  Detailed laws can be derived from deeper principles in two different ways.  One way is by “conclusion,” which means strict inference.  To illustrate with ordinary human laws, murder is wrong, so by conclusion, murder by poisoning is wrong.  Such a law cannot cease to be right.  The other way is by “determination,” which means pinning something down that could have been otherwise.  For instance, we ought to take care for the safety of others on the roadways, but this might be arranged either by commanding that everyone drive on the right or by commanding that everyone drive on the left.  This is changeable.

The same distinction applies to Old Testament precepts – not only the moral precepts, but even the ceremonial and judicial precepts.  One example is that we need to worship God together.  The norm that specific times be appointed for such worship is derived by conclusion, and cannot be otherwise.  Yet the norm that appoints the seventh day is derived by determination, and can be changed.  Another example is dietary laws, of which I will discuss only one.  Because we ought to hold life in reverence, we must not murder; this is derived by conclusion, and cannot be otherwise.  Yet the ceremonial rule that we symbolically express such reverence for life by not consuming blood, which represents life, is derived by determination, and can be changed.

Tomorrow I’ll continue this discussion by answering your question about “moral miracles.”

Once, monasteries preserved civilization through chaos.  Today, intact families fill that role.  Fathers and mothers, especially you who are young and struggling, hail and greetings!  What were once the most mundane of virtues have in our time become rare and heroic.  Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn their children to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.

It’s strange how the notion that men and women are identical works against the very equality that it tries to uphold.  The same, are they?  The same as what?  Though with some dissimulation, identicalists almost always answer, "The same as men."

Men who despise women are not the only ones who take this line.  It is also taken by those so-called feminists who detest everything feminine, regard womanly women as traitors to the cause, and insist on an ideal which is supposedly indifferent to sex, but is actually masculine.

This is the same root from which spring those strange male fantasies about worlds of the future in which women lead armies, command starships, gun down enemies, and are ready for sexual intercourse at any moment.  The underlying wish is that both sexes would be men, but that some of these men would look like women and wear tight clothes.

Considering how things have been going lately, I wonder why no one imagines a different future, in which the institution of marriage has disintegrated.  Women of that time raise children in matriarchal clans, like elephants.  Now and then, a man who is hardly a man drifts in to mate, after a short time drifting out to roam with others who are just like himself.  Thanks to our social policies, it is already happening among the poor.

People used to be taught to associate with persons who are good.  Since the cardinal sin is now viewed as having opinions about the matter, we don’t consider whether people are good any more.  Now we ask whether they are “nice.”

It is still a moral judgment, but it doesn’t look so much like one.

This way of thinking always reminds me of a man I used to know who was sentenced to the penitentiary for a felony.  After his release, we were chatting one day.

“You know,” he remarked, “you meet some of the nicest people in prison.”

In certain times – ours is one of them -- war among different understandings of the world produces a fear of ideology.  In the name of getting along, the cry then goes up that we must all become non-ideological.  People who admit that they believe in something are called fanatics.

This does not really do away with ideology, because it is impossible for a rational being to live in the world without trying to understand it.  Nor does it do away with the differences among ideologies, because every understanding of the world is some understanding of the world and not another.  It doesn’t even do away with fanaticism, because people who hold ideologies they are unaware of holding are unable to be humble about them.

What the call for an end to ideology does produce is world-views which deny that they are world-views -- for example, the John Rawls sort of liberalism which pretends to be “political, not metaphysical.”

So in the name of peace, world-views which deny that they are world-views make war, which denies that it is war, against the world-views which admit that they are world-views.

This is a particularly dishonest kind of war, which spawns a particularly dishonest mode of speech.  We say we’re not for abortion, just for “choice,” not against marriage, just against “discrimination,” not against good character, just against “being judgmental.”

Is there a solution?  Of sorts.  Give up the pretense to neutrality and nonjudgment.  Admit to understanding the world this way, not that way.  Go ahead and argue about how the world really is, what is really true, what is really good.  But use the weapons of reason, not deception.

This solution is effective only among those whose world-views recognize that truth is accessible to reason, and that it is more than the word of the winner.