of natural law, whatever their differences, hold that law is somehow “embedded into the structure of creation, especially human nature. . . .” No doubt this is true, but much depends on the little word “into.” The history of natural law, including current proponents, includes common sense readings of “into,” and, in fact, includes several different types of common sense readings: (1) natural law as found in inclinations, (2) natural law as found in the intuitive meanings of intersubjective community, and (3) natural law as in nature. Each expression operates within the common sense mode of meaning which (1) begins with and is largely limited to non-theoretical, albeit still intelligent, descriptions of very powerful experiences, (2) codified and shared within community and its educational forms, often through proverbs and authority articulating successful ways of living and acting, and (3) viewing the real in a common sense grasp of the bodies, or the “already out there now real,” known through a kind of objectivity which grasps ordering principles of the real. For each type of common sense natural law, “nature” corresponds to a certain pattern of interest or care, emerging as the heuristic in keeping with that same pattern of care. Nature, for common sense, is the ordering pattern of that which is most real to us, as experienced by us, whether in our passions, or our community, or our religion, and even in our attempts to articulate the grounds of being. Law, for such meaning, is the order found in nature, an order which we do not create or constitute but rather find always already operative, not of our own devising; law is the order of nature, the ordo naturae.
Already, though, certain tensions and patterns emerge prompting the transition to a new differentiation of consciousness, a new mode of meaning. We see the transition in the history of ideas, of course, for Socrates asks hard questions about inclinations and custom, as does Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristotle, the Stoics, and others; so, too, do the queries about the right way to live prompt further questions about the nature of “nature,” the genesis of order, political and moral systems best in keeping with that order, the distinction between appearance and reality, and so on. Despite the developments, common sense natural law 1—nature as inclination—is alive and well, for instance, in both sides of the debates about same-sex marriage. Common sense natural law 2—nature as proverb—appears whenever insights cluster and are shared within concrete communities of shared value and meaning, with the various common senses of different groups each appearing natural and normative to its membership. Common sense natural law 3—nature as nature—continues in both its mythic and philosophic forms whenever natural law is thought to reside in the world of nature, either as a function of the divine or as material order itself (ordo naturae), or as innately known.
Since the various common sense natural laws continue, so too the tensions and questions regarding their meaning and adequacy. It’s not as though Antigone settled once and for all the difference between what it means to be a good citizen and what it means to be a good human, and Socrates certainly put no end to the sophists among us, or to the force of custom and habit. Consequently, while we can trace how the tensions and questions within the historical past prompted developments within natural law as it moved from common sense to the theoretical mode of meaning, those very tensions and questions can be discerned in contemporary scholarship and debate. Understanding the role of differentiation in how meaning is made requires a move from common sense to theory to explain how there are yet more “natures” to identify and grasp, yet more accounts of natural law to investigate. We turn, thus, to the second mode of meaning, the theoretical.
41. Budziszewski, The Line Through the Heart, 199.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 200.
44. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 7–8.
45. MacIntyre, “Theories of Natural Law in the Culture of Advanced Modernity,” 94.
46. For the rationality of Thomism as a tradition, see MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 127–49.
47. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 4–20; Snell and Cone, Authentic Cosmopolitanism, 1–12, 44–65.
48. Ibid., 4–5.
49. Lonergan, Insight, 29.
50. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 5.
51. Lonergan, Insight, 34.
52. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 13.
53. Ibid., 14.
54. Lonergan, Insight, 197.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 198.
57. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 87.
58. Lonergan, Insight, 202.
59. Ibid., 90.
60. Ibid., 203.
61. Ibid., 205. This is the underlying premise of Snell and Cone, Authentic Cosmopolitanism and its articulation of the education of love—the world is, for us, as we love it; if our loves are properly ordered, so too the world.
62. For an exposition on these patterns of organization, see Lonergan, Insight, 204–12; Snell, Through a Glass Darkly, 86–91.
63. Plato, Republic, 338a–344d in Collected Dialogues of Plato.
64. Plato, Gorgias, 482e in Collected Dialogues of Plato.
65. Ibid., 483d–484b.
66. Voegelin, Plato, 32.
67. Plato, Gorgias, 508a in Collected Dialogues of Plato.
68. Plato, Republic, 331a–b in Collected Dialogues of Plato.
69. Voegelin, Plato, 57.
