Wisdom, Law, and Virtue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics

Chapter 15: Jean Porter on Natural Law: Thomistic Notes

Chapter 15 JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW: THOMISTIC NOTES Introduction Jean Porter’s book Natural and Divine Law1 aims at making theologians aware of medieval Scholastic theological discussions of natural law. The sources she consults include both theologians and canonists, extending over a period including the twelfth and much of the thirteenth century. She sees such discussions as a possible fruitful source for contemporary Christian ethics. As a former student of Etienne Gilson’s, I rejoice to see this interest in medieval thought and in its theological dimension. As a disciple of St. Thomas, I am sure that acquaintance with the background against which he formulated his views of natural law can help one appreciate the magnitude of his accomplishment. A reader, one would hope, might benefit from such a book by coming to see how what were often confused and confusing presentations eventually become coherent in the works of Thomas. Thus, many years ago Father Thomas Deman used the history of moral discussions by theologians to present Thomas as the founder of moral theology, establishing its order and its place within the unity of sacra doctrina.2 However, Porter’s own intentions do not run in that direction. She is interested, rather, in what a knowledge of the nitty-gritty of medieval theological discussion can do to dispel the sort of ‘‘neat package’’ image of natural law that is somewhat the result of its presentation both by modern philosophers and in some Church documents. Jacques Maritain used to insist on how much ‘‘rationalist recasting’’ and ‘‘the advent of a  Jean Porter on Natural Law  geometrising reason’’ had by the eighteenth century ruined the conception of natural law.3 I would say that an attempt to reestablish an awareness of the difficulty and variety of natural-law discussion is well worthwhile. However, my ultimate conviction from such an exploration of medieval natural-law theory, including the texts of Thomas with their very thoughtful distinctions between levels of natural-law precepts (and the possibilities or impossibilities of dispensation, whether by God alone or by human judges), is simply that natural law is not enough. I immediately recall the first article of the first question of the Summa theologiae (ST) of St. Thomas. We have need of a divine revelation, not only as regards knowledge of truths that transcend human reason but even of those truths necessary for salvation that are within the range of our reason. The truths about God at which reason can arrive are known only by a few, after a long time, and with a mixture of error.4 And this need, Thomas eventually makes clear, also concerns truths about how humans should live their lives. Natural law needs the support of divine authority, at least in the present weakened condition of the human being in this world.5 Thus, I was pleased to see ‘‘divine law’’ in the title of the book. In fact, a main interest of Porter’s is to make us aware of the theological context in which the medievals theorized about natural law. Again, this kind of interest puts one in mind of Etienne Gilson’s autobiographical Le philosophe et la théologie, in which he recounted how, in order to establish the existence of authentic philosophizing during the medieval period, when he was faced with the ‘‘axiom’’ that there was no philosophizing between the Greeks and Descartes, he had to rediscover what theology was in the Middle Ages. How could it constitute such a friendly biosphere for sound philosophy?6 With natural law also, I would say, there is no reason to think that theology, particularly medieval theology, was not an exceptionally good context for development of knowledge of it. However, it does seem to me, in reading Porter, that her insistence on the medieval theological setting for natural-law discussion tends to move in a rather particularizing direction, to what constitutes a historicizing of the concept of natural law. She tells us: ‘‘My aim throughout has been to present these medieval authors as conversation partners from whom we can learn, even as we transform their ideas in the process of appropriating them for our own moral reflections.’’7 I wonder if one can ‘‘transform’’ an idea. One  Wisdom, Law, and Virtue can place an idea in a larger framework, but the idea is generally the expression of a form, such that to change it by adding...