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 appears hidden; nature does not first incline the virtuous act but instead requires the enactment of reason. Our supernatural ordination attests more to our glaring estrangement from nature than to our proximity. With Saint Thomas:
For it has been stated that to the natural law belongs everything to which a man is inclined according to his nature. Now each thing is inclined naturally to an operation that is suitable to it according to its form: thus fire is inclined to give heat. Wherefore, since the rational soul is the proper form of man, there is in every man a natural inclination to act according to reason: and this is to act according to virtue. Consequently, considered thus, all acts of virtue are prescribed by the natural law: since each one’s reason naturally dictates to him to act virtuously. But if we speak of virtuous acts, considered in themselves, i.e. in their proper species, thus not all virtuous acts are prescribed by the natural law: for many things are done virtuously, to which nature does not incline at first; but which, through the inquiry of reason, have been found by men to be conducive to well-living.22
Our ethical ordination is not able to fulfill our natural supernaturality without first reuniting and rediscovering its meaning before the natural law appeared identical with ethical prescription, as something other than seamless unity and action. While those essential descriptions (“naturally supernatural,” “trans-natural” that “manifesting in your life the image of God impressed on your rational nature”23) cast the necessary gravity within the realms of metaphysics, epistemology, and theological discourse, their relevance within their own origin in the ethical life appears strained and unproductive. The natural law carries with it more than a whiff of Nietzschean irony. The overemphasis on ethics as an imposition fails to address the nature we seek to save and illuminate, becoming one of abandoning an unclear first-order nature in favor of a finality which cannot be clarified. And how could it clarify our end if it cannot dwell on and in our origin?24 If this supernatural end is said to be the fulfillment of our nature rather than its antithesis, then the natural law must have a meaning before it becomes prescription.25 The natural law remains an obscure end-to-be-perceived, and cannot become an eschatological and living realm, without that placement illuminating our first-order nature, our non-reflexive love—our timeliness because imprinted by the eternal law26—rather than suppressing it by way of a systematic over-intellectualizing of action into theoria. The natural law should be the signpost for freedom, it should widen the scope of mystery rather than diminish it. The Vienna Circle’s Moritz Schlick surprisingly endorses such a view in a remarkable passage:
The concept of duty, which so many philosophers place at the center of their ethics, presupposes the concept of purpose; to obey the commands of duty means nothing else but to stand under the dominion of purposes . . . Let us recall Schiller’s remark, that the principle of play as the true vocation of man will attain its deepest significance if we apply it to the seriousness of duty and destiny. What does this mean? It was Schiller who rebelled against the doctrine of Kant, whereby, of course, the moral is primarily to be found where man acts by conquering himself. For in Kant’s view an action is moral only when it springs from reverence for the law of duty as its sole motive; and since in the actual man conflicting inclinations are always present, moral action means a struggle against one’s own inclination, it means laborious work. Schiller was utterly and entirely right, for this account of the good is infinitely remote from the meaning that everyone is otherwise naturally accustomed to associate with the word. We do not call him the best man, who is obliged unceasingly to resist his own impulses and is constantly at war with his own desires; we say this, rather, of the man whose inclinations are kindly and benevolent from the start, so that he simply does not fall into doubt and self-conflict. The man who struggles with and conquers himself is perhaps the type of the great man but not of the good one . . . There is the deepest wisdom in the biblical injunction: ‘unless ye become as little children.’27
The Predicament of the Five Ways
If a genuine and efficacious ethics requires an accessible and meaningful natural law, this very natural law itself requires the existence of a divine and eternal Being. And thus the demonstration of God’s existence takes center stage in order to understand eternal action. Because of his faith, and not in spite of it, Saint Thomas, like Anselm, believes it absolutely critical that he demonstrate the existence of God. God is not the cause of some aspect of man or of some ideas and not others. He has caused everything that is real and existing in the world. The notion of creatio ex nihilo means that God is the universal cause and that all things in the world are the effects of God; the only thing we own outright is our own nothingness.28 He knows that in the natural world effects necessarily demonstrate the existence of their cause.29 Herein lies the predicament of Saint Thomas in his demonstrations for the existence of God: the faith that God created out of nothing has asserted that God is the universal cause. There can be no other primal cause for existence than God. Man and world are all effects of God as Cause. The faith is telling
