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The Perspective of Love
Natural Law in a New Mode
R. J. Snell
The Perspective of Love
Natural Law in a New Mode
Copyright © 2014 R. J. Snell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Pickwick Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
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isbn 13: 978-1-62032-713-5
eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-343-1
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Snell, R. J., 1975–
The perspective of love : natural law in a new mode / R. J. Snell.
xii + 208 pp. ; 23 cm—Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 13: 978-1-62032-713-5
1. Religion and law. 2. Natural law. 3. Natural theology. I. Title.
BL65.L33 S62 2014
Manufactured in the USA
For all in the Templeton Honors College,
Fellows in the Apostolate of the Further Question
Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This . . . is why Christ the Redeemer “fully reveals man to himself.”
—John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis
Preface
According to the rightly celebrated theorist J. Budziszewski, natural law is a fact, a “feature of the world having to do with the constitution of the human person, and behind that, with the constitution of created reality as a whole.”1 While it is, he suggests, possible to question that fact, if “we are serious about being Christian philosophers . . . we should already know the answer to that logically possible question,” and it would “be frivolous—a squandering of what has been given to us—to waste breath on the question of whether the human person has a constitution.”2 In other words, we could, but ought not, ponder the existence and reality of the natural law—it is a fact.
Further, if we do exert the effort to theorize about the natural law, our questions should be humble before the factual reality; they should “come in second place, not in first,” and accept as given knowledge of the world and the human person.3 Consequently, theory “will not be the belly-button-searching kind . . . will not always be turning into metatheory of the natural law, a theory about theories.”4 Instead, theorists will get busy, engaging the pathologies and deceptions of the time—they will serve as signs of contradiction—a task frustrated by “turning . . . eyes skull-inward in a futile attempt to catch [themselves] at the act of contemplation.”5
In this book, I do not heed his counsel, turning not only to metatheory but of the type attempting to catch itself in the act of contemplation (although I’ll call that noetic exegesis). I do so cautiously, for his was good advice, and I’m well aware that such metatheory tends to sharpen knives without ever cutting anything, and our time may lack such luxury. Still, whatever the immediate crisis, there is a place for the long game, for understanding and creating conditions of inquiry and progress. I’m not so hubristic as to think my work will accomplish this, but I hope to pull in that direction. Further, Budziszewski allows that while metatheory may be frivolous for a Christian to ask “on his own behalf . . . it is not frivolous if we live among humans who deny the personal structure of their being.”6 Charity recognizes that the scandal of our time is so dire as to require inquiry into the obvious, and, moreover, Budziszewski suggests the Fall has rendered “our state . . . out of joint with our nature.”7 So while Christians needn’t theorize about the fact of the natural law for themselves, the Fall and the revolt of modernity justifies explaining the obvious—or so his argument allows.
Oddly, however, it is the doctrine of the Fall which renders natural law a non-starter, a dead end theologically and culturally for so many Christians, mainly but not only Protestants. Culturally, the argument goes, the natural law fails to persuade anyone not already on board because it relies (generally under deep cover) on theological commitments about creation, design, purpose, and human identity. Theologically, natural law downplays the Fall, overlooks the noetic effects of sin, ignores salvation history, makes the Gospel non-essential to the moral life, confines grace to a heavenly or spiritual domain, and thinks that the human can know and act well without first knowing and acting like Christ and being formed by his Church and its sacraments. Not only does natural law smuggle in theology, it’s bad theology (likely Pelagian).
But if the denial of natural law by non-believers justifies metatheory, so does friendly fire from Christians, which is now almost a barrage. This text engages metatheory in an attempt to show that the “Protestant Prejudice” should be incorporated into natural law theory, but also that the usual objections fail to distinguish the varieties of natural law theory; while the arsenals of the Protestant Prejudice may score direct hits on some modes—what I’ll term the common sense and theoretical—they are far less troubling to what I’ll term the modes of interiority and transcendence.
After a brief introduction explaining the project and its context, Part One differentiates natural law as common sense, as theory, and as interiority, explaining how the Protestant Prejudice tends to overlook interiority. Part Two examines interiority in more detail, grouping together a range of contemporary thinkers beginning from the first person perspective of ethics. As opposed to earlier, or classical accounts, these thinkers do not begin with theoretical anthropology, metaphysics of the person, or metaphysical biology but share a methodology of noetic exegesis—adverting to the performance and intentionality of the concrete person’s practical reason—and so can be grouped together, despite their differences: (1) John Paul II and Martin Rhonheimer, (2) contemporary natural law, or the so-called “new natural law” of Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, and others, and (3) the methodological phenomenology of the Canadian Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan. While these three “schools” do not agree on every detail, they provide a broadly similar starting point from which to address the usual Protestant concerns.
In Part Three, I outline natural law in the mode of transcendence, explaining how concrete subjects undergo both the reign of sin and the transformation of love. Without
