The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World - Softcover

Hittinger, Russell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933859466 ISBN 13: 9781933859460

Verlag: ISI Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

The last two decades or so have seen a marked resurgence of interest in natural law thought, a movement in which Russell Hittinger has been a major figure. The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World reveals the power and subtlety of Hittinger's philosophical work and cultural criticism. Whether discussing the nature of liberalism, the constitutional and moral problems posed by judicial usurpation, or the dangers of technology, Hittinger convincingly demonstrates that in our post-Christian world it is more crucial than ever that we recover older, wiser notions of the concepts of freedom and law - and that we see that to place these two concepts in opposition is to misunderstand both profoundly.

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Russell Hittinger teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa, where since 1996 he has held the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies and an appointment as Research Professor of Law. Since 2001 he has been a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas. He is the author of A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory.

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The First Grace

Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian WorldBy Russell Hittinger

ISI Books

Copyright © 2007 Russell Hittinger
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-933859-46-0

Introduction

The title of this book is taken from the letter of a presbyter named Lucidus who recanted of certain doctrines condemned at the second Council of Arles (A.D. 473). Lucidus and others in southern Gaul taught that after the sin of Adam no work of human obedience could be united with divine grace, that human freedom was not weakened or distorted but totally extinguished, and that Christ did not incur death for all human beings. In the letter of retraction, the natural law is mentioned twice. The natural law is said to be the "first grace of God" (per primam Dei gratiam) before the coming of Christ (in adventum Christi). Lucidus also affirmed that, according to Romans 2:15, the natural law is "written in every human heart."

The point at issue for the thirty bishops at Arles was how the human creature is located in an order of divine providence. On the one hand, the bishops wanted to avoid the heresy of Pelagius, who held that man's natural gifts are sufficient for salvation-a position that makes the economy of divine law and revelation superfluous. Thus, Lucidus confessed that humans "were not set free from the original slavery except by the intercession of the sacred blood." On the other hand, the bishops worried that an overly severe doctrine of predestination would imply that God removes some creatures from the gifts of providence, leaving the human race, as Rousseau would later say of the state of nature, as "if it had been left to itself."

The quote from Rousseau indicates the theme of the subtitle of this collection. For, beginning with the state-of-nature scenarios imagined by Enlightenment philosophers, natural law came to mean the position of the human mind just insofar as it is left to itself, prior to authority and law. Natural law constitutes an authority-free zone. The influential jurisprudent H. L. A. Hart accurately summarized the post-Christian estate of natural law discourse:

Natural Law has ... not always been associated with belief in a Divine Governor or Lawgiver of the universe, and even where it has been, its characteristic tenets have not been logically dependent on that belief. Both the relevant sense of the word "natural," which enters into Natural Law, and its general outlook minimizing the difference ... between prescriptive and descriptive laws, have their roots in Greek thought which was, for this purpose, quite secular. Indeed, the continued reassertion of some form of Natural Law doctrine is due in part to the fact that its appeal is independent of both divine and human authority, and to the fact that despite a terminology, and much metaphysics, which few could now accept, it contains certain elementary truths of importance for the understanding of both morality and law.

For Hart, the "core of good sense in the doctrine of Natural Law" need not be entangled in "theocratic" premises. Rather, it is reducible to certain "truisms concerning human nature and the world in which men live, [and] as long as these hold good, there are certain rules of conduct which any social organization must contain if it is to be viable." Reminiscent of Hobbes, Hart's natural law is neither a higher law nor a lower law. It represents those contingent but pervasive aspects of the human predicament which provide the background problems and motivations for positive law.

Hart's assertion that natural law has an "appeal" that is separable from the premises of either natural or revealed theology has its own appeal to many, if not most, contemporary proponents of natural law. The leading American critic of legal positivism, Lon Fuller, who maintained a long-standing debate with Hart over the moral bases of law, certainly did not disagree with his foe on the need to avoid or suppress theological and metaphysical referents in understanding natural law. Fuller insisted that natural law is not a "higher law," but one "entirely terrestrial," and therefore ought not to be brought into the precincts of propositions about "God's commandments." In his famous tract on the "higher law" background of American constitutional law, Edward S. Corwin presents as a "a quaint argument" Sir Edward Coke's oft-cited dictum in Calvin's Case: "The law of nature is that which God at the time of creation of the nature of man infused into his heart, for his preservation and direction; and this is Lex aeterna, the moral law, called also the law of nature. And by this law, written with the finger of God in the heart of man, were the people of God a long time governed before the law was written by Moses...." Perhaps this would be of mere antiquarian interest were it not for the fact that Coke was trying to make the point that the legal universe neither begins nor ends with the command of the human sovereign. When he referred to the eternal law-to the same law that taught the Jewish people prior to Sinai-Coke did not think of himself as making an argument to authority, but clarifying and concentrating the minds of his colleagues about an authority already recognized by a legal culture tutored by common sense and the Scripures. Such claims today are usually regarded as rhetoric that the moralist or jurisprudent need not, ought not, or cannot make in advancing an argument about the natural law.

The essays in this volume investigate problems that arise once natural law is understood as free-floating with regard to authority, whether human or divine. The first two chapters treat theoretical issues related to the definition of natural law, particularly in the area of theology, which is the historical matrix of natural law doctrines. In these chapters I point out that even contemporary Catholic thinkers who have no aversion to theology as such are reluctant to predicate "law" properly of natural law. For Mortimer Adler and Joseph Fuchs, to mention two examples, natural law is related to a superior cause, but not in the manner of legality. Natural law is neither a higher law nor, strictly speaking, any law at all. I test this position against the older tradition, chiefly (but not only) that of St. Thomas Aquinas, and then draw out some of the consequences for theology once one derogates from the idea that natural law is authentically a higher law. In chapters 3 through 8 I examine theoretical and practical problems that emerge when appeals are made to natural law for or against laws made by civil authority. Given the widespread demand today for justiciable natural or human rights-which is to say, their recognition by courts-the issue of authority often becomes an acute question. At one level, the questions are institutional in nature. Why, for example, should we believe that natural law is best discerned by courts in the context of litigation?

At another level, which is the deeper one, we find functional appeals to a higher law that turns out to be no higher law at all. While retaining the nimbus and residue of an older tradition that really did affirm an order of obligation prior to the positive law, contemporary appeals to natural law often subvert that order. In its most extreme (but not uncommon) form, political institutions are required to recognize and protect the immunity of individuals from any known source of obligation and authority. In the name of authority-the authority of some "higher law"-the individual comes to occupy an authority-free zone in the very midst of civil society.

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ISI Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1933859466
• ISBN 13: 9781933859460
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 380
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar