The Predicament of the Natural Law
For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them. . . . When the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.10
The ethical life rooted in the natural law envisions a number of things, one of which is happiness, albeit a peculiar faith-demanding sort which must be distinguished from affectivity and pleasure and yet not isolated from them; fulfilled, in fact, by them in love.11 This love fulfills because it abolishes the speculative distance of the intellect.12 The intellect chastens the will so that the will achieves a martyrological violence, not to itself but to the intellect to which it had first and long-since surrendered. Such happiness invokes submission and rebellion, and the lines between the two are more blurred than one might even imagine. Our abidance by and adherence to the natural law requires us to become the delicate weight in the swinging pendulum between an affective dominance and an over-intellectualization of act-into-conceptio, somehow striking an unearthly middle ground—human flourishing.13 Happiness is triggered by the immediacy of the will but agonically lengthened into a distance by the intellect—into an end to be achieved, a teleological goal—which must turn away from and somehow retain this initial will-based trigger. It is precisely this “turning away” which initiates the ethical system, thus inevitably conceiving it as an imposition. In this jarring of orders, everything carries purpose unto glory; all persist with clean lines and harmony raised by the unseemly, uneven and forgotten. Ours is an order offering up its own iniquity, and yet it retains its beauty as neither figmentary nor spectral. 14 By its “imposition” ethics is, from the outset, a preparation for judgment. Because ethical meaning places us in the enactment of time as a participant, a moving finger that writes and then moves on15 in the order of things, all ethical action seeks the imprimatur of the Other. Even if an ethical system devolves into a progressivist materialist egoism where otherness is affirmed as nothing more than mere ontical validity—as token gratuity or obstacle—all imposition, by being artifice-intelligence, sustains itself because it invokes judiciary vision, requiring something other from the world than the world. Underneath all the falsehoods is the unstripped natural law; its placement lifts us from the world and strips us down; it is a supernatural ratification as much as it is a sacrificial disrobing of our being.
They must be stripped bare of all those things before they are tried; for they must stand their trial dead. Their judge also must be naked, dead, beholding with very soul the very soul of each immediately upon his death, bereft of all his kin and having left behind on earth all that fine array, to the end that the judgement may be just.16
The law is said to be “natural” and yet it opens the door to the meaning of our nature precisely because it must lift us out of our natural connaturality,17 reclaiming a new nature in order for it to be so enacted. We are seeking instead to step back, to reside in the ground before the imposition of the natural law becomes identical to the ethical-political structure it guides; before it takes on the character of habit from which, for Saint Thomas, it is distinct:
A thing may be called a habit in two ways. First, properly and essentially: and thus the natural law is not a habit. For it has been stated above (I-II:90:1 ad 2) that the natural law is something appointed by reason, just as a proposition is a work of reason. Now that which a man does is not the same as that whereby he does it: for he makes a becoming speech by the habit of grammar. Since then a habit is that by which we act, a law cannot be a habit properly and essentially. Secondly, the term habit may be applied to that which we hold by a habit: thus, faith may mean that which we hold by faith. And accordingly, since the precepts of the natural law are sometimes considered by reason actually, while sometimes they are in the reason only habitually, in this way the natural law may be called a habit. Thus, in speculative matters, the indemonstrable principles are not the habit itself whereby we hold those principles, but are the principles the habit of which we possess.18
If the natural law in its originary precept can never be “blotted out from the hearts of men”19 we do much justice to human nature when we speak of it as super-natural, trans-natural, naturally supernatural, in but not of the world. Perhaps, still, we are missing something crucial, namely the missing components of ethical meaning. The language of our super-natural nature occurs as a secondary action leaving a first order behind; it is the spiritual framing of ethical imposition, it occurs only after the first order of human action, once unified with the world, is hidden.
What occurs before brings us to the un-reflexive recognition of Being which grounds metaphysics and, through it, our desire for the good and our aversion to evil, thereby providing the source for all natural law precepts. Saint Thomas speaks of our first encounter in knowledge not as a conceptual undertaking but as the universal apprehension that grounds knowledge and which allows the metaphysical and practical orders to unfold. And while it is a simple, singular universal apprehension, it is by no means a simplistic one. It is this seamless unity of thinking and Being which opens to us our beatitude, and which grounds the very complexity of all theoretical and practical action where thinking and Being more often than not fail to align:
Now a certain order is to be found in those things that are apprehended universally. For that which, before aught else, falls under apprehension, is ‘being,’ the notion of which is included in all things whatsoever a man apprehends. Wherefore the first indemonstrable principle is that ‘the same thing cannot be affirmed and denied at the same time,’ which is based on the notion of ‘being’ and ‘not-being:’ and on this principle all others are based, as is stated in Metaph. iv, text. 9. Now as ‘being’ is the first thing that falls under the apprehension simply, so ‘good’ is the first thing that falls under the apprehension of the practical reason, which is directed to action: since every agent acts for an end under the aspect of good. Consequently, the first principle of practical reason is one founded on the notion of good, viz. that ‘good is that which all things seek after.’ Hence this is the first precept of law, that ‘good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.’ All other precepts of the natural law are based upon this: so that whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends as man’s good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the natural law as something to be done or avoided.20
The language of our natural super-nature is used to justify—and not wholly inauthentically—the turn away from the immediacy of the will; it is the judicial placing of the dams which hold back affective immediacy until it can be rerouted and managed by distance, spectatorship, and virtue training.21 These are the courtesies of tradition, education, and prescription, the rules of the game of which we spoke, and of which we will have cause to speak again in greater detail. But what then was there before all was held back and suspended? If it be natural—and thus good—mustn’t that non-reflexive love be foundational for the ethic? Our supernatural ordination finds its meaning by being born from our ethical predicament, the oddness of a natural law which imposes order upon nature, while refusing to call that placement alien. The natural law is as much a frail and exotic artifice—for no state of nature is natural—while claiming to be the prime substance of our innermost being. We can see this odd stance in the way in which all acts of virtue are prescribed by the natural law, finding their indelible image in its precepts. Yet when many virtuous acts are considered in themselves, the lineage to the natural law