view rests substantially upon the fact that the sole and exclusive moral fulfillment of the idea of man was held to lie in citizenship. Whence, too, the acceptance of slavery. The slave, it was maintained, is by nature unfitted for citizenship; he is incapable, in the Aristotelian sense, of being educated to virtue. The virtuous life is the goal of man. But he can achieve this goal only as citizen of the polis and in obedience to its laws. All education and training in virtue consequently become politics, and the latter is ethics. The ancients knew only a politico-legal morality. The city-state, in their view, is the ultimate and absolutely supreme pedagogue, the fulfillment of the moral being of man.
The notion of human personality was in its deepest meaning hidden from the ancients, as was also the eternal, superterrestrial goal of the immortal soul. Moreover, they had but a faint idea of a personal God as the supreme lawgiver distinct from the world; nor did they know anything of a Church as the medium of salvation. For them the polis and its divine worship remained the ultimate. Wherever the idea of human rights forced its way through (among the moderate Sophists and in Stoicism), its effect was revolutionary: either it dissolved the city-state or it encouraged dreams of the great society (civitas maxima) of mankind, which of course merely raised the question of its own meaning. Thus the ancients failed to arrive at the distinction between natural law and natural moral law.
Nevertheless, the main problems connected with the idea of natural law existed already in antiquity. The positivism of the Skeptics, of Epicurus, and of Carneades stood in opposition to the natural law in its two recurring forms: the metaphysical one in Plato and Aristotle, and the individualistic one in the earlier Sophists. Furthermore, the continually recurring definitions of law, which have stirred up and divided philosophico-legal thinking down to the present day, had already been formulated: law is will, law is reason; law is truth, law is authority. The doctrine of an original state of nature, of fundamental importance for individualism but of merely persuasive value for other thinkers, appeared already among the Sophists. It appeared also among the Stoics for a similar reason but with another object in view, namely, to provide the basis for a distinction between a primary and a secondary natural law. This distinction, valuable to the Church Fathers in connection with their doctrine of original sin, served the Scholastics to differentiate the self-evident principles of the natural law from the conclusions obtained through reasoning the content of the natural law is more exactly determined—as well as to solve more or less successfully certain thorny theological problems.
The Natural Law in the Age of Scholasticism
A new philosophy and a new world order did not follow at once upon the entrance of the Christian faith into the ancient world, into a sociocultural complex that was in process of dissolution and was addicted to somber mystical beliefs and practices. Indeed, precisely because of the advancing disintegration, or rather decomposition, of ancient society and culture, a considerable number of early Christians were eschatologically minded; that is, they were unduly concerned with the supposed imminence of the last things, the end of the world and the second coming of the Lord. At all events and for a variety of reasons, the transforming power of Christian doctrine could at first accomplish little.
Christianity, however, contains three ideas of decisive importance for the present problem: the idea of the supermundane, transcendent, personal God as Lawgiver in the absolute sense, the idea of Christian personality, whose eternal goal transcends the state, the law, and the mores of the polis; and the idea of the Church as the institution charged with the salvation of mankind standing alongside and, in matters of faith and morals, above the will of the state. Such ideas had in the long run to affect the whole problem of natural law: not, indeed, in order to revolutionize it, but to explore it more thoroughly, to strengthen its foundations, and to complete it materially.1
The history of the natural-law idea shows that Christianity took it over at a very early date. Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, declares that the natural law is inscribed in the hearts of the heathen, who do not have the Law (of Sinai), and is made known to them through their conscience. It is valid both for pagans and for Jews because it is grounded in nature, in the essence of man. (Cf. Rom. 2:12–16).
The Fathers of the Early Church made use of the Stoic natural law, finding in its principles “seeds of the Word,” to proclaim the Christian doctrine of the personal Creator-God as the Author of the eternal law as well as of the natural moral law which is promulgated in the voice of conscience and in reason. Thus, for instance, we read in St. John Chrysostom (d. 407): “We use not only Scripture but also reason in arguing against the pagans. What is their argument? They say they have no law of conscience, and that there is no law implanted by God in nature. My answer is to question them about their laws concerning marriage, homicide, wills, injuries to others, enacted by their legislators. Perhaps the living have learned from their fathers, and their fathers from their fathers and so on. But go back to the first legislator! From whom did he learn? Was it not by his own conscience and conviction? Nor can it be said that they heard Moses and the prophets, for Gentiles could not hear them. It is evident that they derived their laws from the law which God ingrafted in man from the beginning.”2
The Fathers also took over the Stoic distinction of a primary and a secondary natural law, which they interpreted in a theological sense. They regarded the former as applying to the state of unimpaired nature or innocence, while they assigned the latter, with the coercive authority of the law, with bondage and slavery, to the theological condition of fallen nature. Nature, somehow wounded indeed but not destroyed, is therefore still able fully to recognize the first principles of morality and law. But the conclusions from the first principles, which were also plainly intelligible in the state of unimpaired nature, are now attainable only by means of deductive reasoning, since the practical reason is also weakened. Accordingly law takes on a harsh, compulsory character, and the state bears a sword. But the state as such was not regarded by the Fathers as some sort of consequence of sin. An age ignorant of tradition has been able to take such a view of the state only on the basis of patristic texts torn from their context and because of a want of understanding of the mental outlook of the Fathers.
The Fathers did not attempt to construct a system of ethics and jurisprudence. Their speculative thinking was wholly taken up with elucidating the truths of faith, which were in danger of being swamped in the upsurge of pseudomystical doctrines characteristic of the numerous mystery cults of declining antiquity. In addition, their heavy pastoral duties in the period of persecutions, organization, and evangelization left them little leisure for thorough theoretical treatment of questions of moral and legal philosophy.
St. Augustine (d. 430), it is true, forms an exception, and a very brilliant one. In his extremely fertile mind the ideas of ancient philosophy came once again to life and were worked into the new Christian mentality. His talents and the struggles against the Pelagian and Manichaean heresies, as well as the shattering experience of the breakdown of the Roman Empire, of the earthly city, brought ethico-legal problems home to the great bishop of Hippo.
For Augustine the substantial ideas, which Plato had conceived of as dwelling in a heavenly abode, became thoughts of God. The impersonal world reason of the Stoics became the personal, all-wise and all-powerful God. The purely deistic Nous of Aristotle became the Creator-God who transcends the world, but who continually sustains it through His omnipotence, directs it through His providence, and governs it according to His eternal law. This eternal law was for Augustine identical with the supreme reason and eternal truth, with the reason of God Himself, according to whose laws the inner life and external activity of God proceed and are governed. God’s reason is order, and His law rules this ontological order, the order of being, of essences and values. But since this norm is identical with the immutable, immanent nature of God, it does not
