Greece, Rome, and the Bill of Rights (8 page)

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Authors: Susan Ford Wiltshire

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legal inheritance. It had, however, received as it were the necessary christening by being accepted and embedded in the teaching of the Christian Fathers.

16

The Christian version of natural law doctrine is stated uncompromisingly in the
Decretum Gratiani
,
17
the oldest collection of church law, compiled around 1140: "Mankind is ruled by two laws: Natural Law and Custom. Natural Law is that which is contained in the Scriptures and the Gospel." This formulation embodies an earlier statement by Isidore of Seville (d. 636): "
Ius naturale
is that which is contained in the law and the Gospel, by which each is commanded to do to the other what he would have done to himself and is forbidden to do to another what he would not have done to himself.... All laws are either divine or human. Divine laws are based on nature, human laws on custom. The reason why these are at variance is that different nations adopt different laws."
18
When Gratian equates natural law with the Scriptures and the Gospel, he summarizes the entire program of medieval moral and legal philosophy. This is because the Christian version of natural law has two meanings: the law of nature is contained in the Scriptures, but also the Scriptures do not contradict the law of nature. This achieves the conclusion, extraordinary for Christianity, that reason and revelation are equivalent.
19
Aristotle also made his way into the Middle Ages and into the transformation of natural law, but his influence was felt much later when translations of his work became available in the twelfth century. Aristotle's thought is more difficult than Stoicism and less congruent with Christianity. "Aristotelianism," says Gerard Verbeke, "had to face many difficulties and much opposition during the first centuries of Christianity. Christians were openly hostile to Aristotle. They took him to task for having denied divine providence, for having rejected immortality of the soul, and for having defended the eternity of the world."
20
The gargantuan labor of reconciling the Aristotelian

 

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and Christian views of life was the lifework of the great Dominican scholar Thomas Aquinas. Born near Naples in about 1225, Aquinas entered the Dominican Order against the wishes of his aristocratic family. After a time in Paris he returned to Italy, where he became acquainted with William of Moerbeke, the translator of Aristotle into Latin. Aquinas's writings, a huge output totalling some thirty-four volumes, were completed in the twenty-year period between 1254 and his death in Naples at the age of forty-nine in 1274.
The
Summa contra Gentiles
, an effort to give Christianity a rational basis, is directed to an audience that does not take Christianity for granted but includes also pagans, Jews, and Moslems. It argues for a natural understanding of religion, addressing specifically Christian doctrines only in the last third of the work. Aquinas could accommodate Greek philosophy to Christian theology because he was a theologian who did not separate religious from philosophical thought. There is, he says, a double ordering of things,
humanitas
and
christianitas
. His theme, "Grace does not do away with nature, but perfects it," blessed nature in a way that the apostle Paul could never have countenanced. Nevertheless, if grace does not abolish nature, neither does nature abolish grace. Nature is to grace as Vergil is to Dante's Beatrice: it can get you only so far. Then grace is required.
Aquinas considered that although grace did not bring the natural state into existence, it was necessary for the proper functioning of the state. The natural laws of the human state were therefore valid, but to be adequate for a Christian society and in order to be perfect, those laws required grace as mediated by the Church.
In the
Summa theologica
, Aquinas struggles with the relationship of rational creatures to divine providence. His analysis demonstrates his understanding that natural law was a way of interpreting human nature and the relationships of human beings to God and the universe. Natural law is not intelligible apart from its link with the eternal divine order. His assessment of natural law sounds quintessentially Stoic:

 

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But of all others, rational creatures are subject to divine Providence itself, in that they control their own actions and the actions of others. So they have a certain share in the divine reason itself, deriving therefrom a natural inclination to such actions and ends as are fitting. This participation in the Eternal law by rational creatures is also called the Natural law.... As though the light of natural reason, by which we discern good from evil, and which is the Natural law, were nothing else than the impression of the divine light in us. So it is clear that the Natural law is nothing else than the participation of the Eternal law in rational creatures.

21

Elsewhere in the
Summa
, Aquinas addresses the relationship of natural law to human justice:
St. Augustine says: "There is no law unless it be just." So the validity of law depends upon its justice. But in human affairs a thing is said to be just when it accords aright with the rule of reason: and, as we have already seen, the first rule of reason is the Natural law.... And if a human law is at variance in any particular from Natural law, it is no longer legal, but rather a corruption of law.
22
Aquinas appropriates another doctrine of Stoic natural law by insisting that human beings possess a natural inclination to know the truth about God. "In this respect," he writes, "there come under the Natural law all actions connected with such inclinations."
23
Sin has not invalidated the human inclination to know God, but faith is required since natural principles permit only the
possibility
of overcoming sin.
One of Aquinas's great strengths is the fluidity of his thought. He admits that the natural law can change by addition or supersession on grounds of utility. To admit of the possibility of a changing trutha possibility Plato found repugnantrequired great courage for Aquinas. D. J. O'Connor describes Aquinas's dilemma concerning the changeability of truth in this way:

 

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Finally, it is worth noting that there seems to be a common origin for many of the difficulties that face St. Thomas in working out his theory. It is the conviction, shown most clearly in his theory of knowledge, that no knowledge is of any value unless it is certainly true and known to be so. But if there is one lesson to be learned from the history of philosophy, it is that if we regard knowledge as tentative, experimental, and corrigible, we shall gradually acquire some information about what the universe is like and about our place in it. But if we regard it as intuitive, certain and incorrigible, we shall not learn any facts about anything because we have set our standards too high.

24

Aquinas influenced the evolution of the idea of natural law in part because he was a practical as well as a speculative thinker. As the person who coined the term
scientia politica
, ''political science,'' he granted validity to the state and to human laws, thus paving the way for a place for the individual apart from superior authority. This was an important first step, although only a step, toward the transformation of individuals into full-fledged citizens.
25
Aquinas was able to combine philosophy, theology, and politics because of his knowledge of Roman law. He was acutely aware, for example, of the difficulties posed by the notion of the
ius gentium
. Ulpian says that natural law, the
ius naturale
, is common to both man and animals, while the
ius gentium
applies only to human beings although it is the same everywhere. One ambiguity here is that "natural reason" is not common to animals and so can hardly be considered a basis for the
ius gentium
. Aquinas saw the
ius gentium
as so important that he dealt with this problem in two different treatises.
Aquinas's great achievement was to provide a rational basis for both ethics and politics, the very institutions that earlier Christians considered hopelessly mired in sin and subject only to the remedy of grace. His momentous discovery was that natural law provided a medium by which to incorporate Aristotelian/Stoic ethics and politics into a Christian view of life. Once again human beings could be conceived of as political animals, and life in

 

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