Eternal Law, Part 2: Whether All Law Comes from the Eternal Law, and What Is Subject to It (Articles 3–5)

Orientation #

He begins simply “Now to the third article,” continuing the question on the eternal law, and ends “Stop there” after a. 5. The previous class read a. 2 of the same question (prev. lecture).

The class, in order #

1. The three objections of a. 3 (“not every law is derived from the eternal law”) #

• Obj. 1: there is a law of the fomes [ed.: the “law of the fomes,” concupiscence; he notes “we don’t know how to translate that,” a law in an almost metaphorical sense]; to it pertains the prudence of the flesh, which Paul says cannot be subject to the law of God (Romans).
• Obj. 2: nothing iniquitous can come from the eternal law, by which it is just that all things be most ordered; but some laws are iniquitous — Isaiah 10, “Woe to those who [make wicked laws].” Aside: someone should quote that to the Supreme Court, to Congress, to the president’s executive orders — put it over the entrance, “remind them when they go in.”
• Obj. 3: Augustine, De libero arbitrio I: the law written for ruling the people rightly permits many things that would be vindicated through divine providence; but the ratio of divine providence is the eternal law.
• Sed contra: Proverbs 8:15, “Through me kings rule, and the makers of law discern just things”; the ratio of divine wisdom is the eternal law.
• Aside on abortion “law”: is a law permitting abortion really a law? And the Church’s answer that a Catholic may vote for a restriction on abortion, making clear he opposes all of it — “some restriction is good.”
• He warns the class, in Thomas’s voice, to take Berquist “with a grain of salt” until they see what the master says — he is “taken in by these objections,” like showing students that sometimes the part is more than the whole.

2. The body of a. 3: ordered movers and ordered governors (“the second mover does not move except in so far as he is moved by the first”) #

1. Law implies a thought directive of actions toward their end.
2. In all ordered movers, the power of the second mover is derived from the first, because the second does not move except as moved by the first (Aristotle, beginning of the Ethics).
3. So in all governors the reason of governing descends from the first to the lower: as what is done in the city comes from the king by precept to the lower administrators — “even better example, the army,” since Aristotle compares the order of the universe to an army, the order being more manifest there than in the city; and in art, the reason of the act comes from the architect or chief artist down to the artists who work by hand (his father’s company: one naturally adept man would show everyone the new procedure and they followed him).
4. Therefore, the eternal law being the reason of governing in the highest governor, all reasons of governing in lower governors derive from it; and those reasons are all the other laws.

• Conclusion he savours for its grammar: “all laws, insofar as they partake of right reason, to that extent are derived from the eternal law” — they partake of right reason as much as they are derived.
• Augustine (De libero arbitrio I): in the temporal law nothing is just or lawful that men have not derived from the eternal law. Aside: tack that up too — above the Constitution; and a paraphrase of Shakespeare about not revolting at abuses.

3. Reply 1: the fomes as law only as punishment (“in so far as they incline to sin… they do not have the notion of law”) #

• The fomes has the ratio of law in man in so far as it is a punishment following divine justice (so derived from the eternal law in an unusual way); in so far as it inclines to sin it is contrary to God’s law and has no notion of law (referring back to q. 91, a. 6).
• Why deserved: because our reason is not subject to God, what should be subject to reason is not subject. Examples of the disorder: a drug-overdose death a day in this state; people who cannot control anger, concupiscence, drink.

4. Reply 2: an iniquitous law is violence, not law (“more of a certain violence”) #

• Human law has the notion of law so far as it is according to right reason, and so is derived from the eternal law; in so far as it recedes from reason it is a wicked law and has rather the notion of violence.
• Applications from the class: abortion as legislative/institutionalized violence; legalized divorce as institutionalized injustice.
• Distinction drawn in discussion: violence is force against a natural inclination (Aristotle and Thomas: opposed to the natural — “violently pushing the rock”); coercion/coaction is against the voluntary. A student applies it: contraception, even consensual, is a kind of violence, being against the natural inclination. Etymology asked about “violation”: it comes from Latin violentia.
• Yet even an iniquitous law keeps a likeness of law by the order of the power of the lawmaker, “for all power is from the Lord” — Christ to Pontius Pilate: Pilate’s claim of power is in a sense admitted, but as from God, “to use it, not to abuse it.”

5. Digression: diminished senses of a word, and diminished senses of “being” (“to be ignorant, to be blind, to be dead”) #

• His standing example of a word in a diminished sense: “complete” — a house completely burned is as far as it can be from complete; a car a “complete total wreck.” Aside: he prays to his guardian angel before driving, being old enough to start making mistakes; nervousness about self-driving cars and the first lawsuit over a computer glitch.
• Both obj. 1 and obj. 2 are answered the same way: these are law only in a diminished sense — as Aristotle ends the senses of being with being blind, being ignorant: a being of reason, something in reason only, nothing outside it. Is it something to be dead?
• Student on Spanish’s two verbs “to be,” essential vs. temporary — they answer the phone with the transitory one.
• Thomas on the fourth book (Metaphysics): Aristotle’s plethora reduces basically to four — substance, accidents, coming-to-be, and negations. Coming-to-be is not yet being (the grandchild coming to be; bread rising is coming to be bread); “Be all that you can be,” the army advertisement; being in this room is an accident (category).
• From the Sentences commentary, on “I am who am” as the name most proper to God: four reasons, the first (he thinks from Jerome) that most of our life is past or future and we do not have it, while God has all his life at once — “I hardly am.” Owen Bennett’s example of the chain: “How much of that exists?”

6. Reply 3 and the long discussion of permitting vs. approving (“not as it were approving of them, but as not being able to direct them”) #

• Human law permits things not by approving them but because it cannot direct them; many things directed by divine law cannot be directed by human law, and human law’s not entering there itself comes from the order of divine law. It would be different to approve them. So human law is derived from the eternal law but cannot follow it perfectly.
• Cases: Augustine and Thomas allowing houses of prostitution lest innocent people be attacked (with the Old Testament incident where the men were wanted instead of the woman); Moses’ bill of repudiation — permitted, as he was told, because otherwise they would kill their wives; Christ answers only “because of your hardness of heart” (Matthew), and he does not know the Old Testament passage about killing the wives.
• Bishops who want not merely to permit but to approve: “it’s one thing somebody commits a sin… another thing to say it’s okay.” Augustine: defend the sin with your reason and you commit two sins. Student: talk of mechanisms for same-sex marriages is condoning, and cooperation.
• Slavery: Paul tells slaves how to behave to masters rather than attacking slavery — in that society it could not be abolished; a student argues the natural trajectory of Christianity is incompatible with slavery and rooted it out; he recalls a papal encyclical (a “cycle”) on slavery and earlier popes speaking at the discovery of the Americas.
• Music: Aristotle at the end of Politics VIII on what music people should be brought up on, yet seems to allow the hoi polloi some trashy music. Modern “crazy music” — should we permit it? His remark to a nephew about rock and roll: not the worst thing, “kind of like smoking cigarettes or getting tattoos. It’s just really dumb.”
• John XXIII, one eye open and one eye closed.
• The voting case returned to: vote for the candidate who limits abortion rather than not voting. Cardinal Burke’s correction of the sloppy phrase “the lesser of two evils”: “We never vote for evil. We never approve of evil. We vote for the restriction of the evil as much as is in our power.”

7. Article 4: are necessary and eternal things subject to the eternal law? (“This guy can really tie you up”) #

• Obj. 1: everything reasonable is subject to reason; the divine will is reasonable since it is just; the eternal law is the divine reason; so God’s will, which is eternal, is subject to the eternal law.
• Obj. 2: whatever is subject to the law is subject to the king’s law; but the Son will be subject to the Father when he hands over the kingdom (1 Corinthians). He hints the way out: the two natures.
• Obj. 3: the eternal law is the ratio of divine providence; but many necessary things are subject to providence — the permanence of bodiless substances and of the celestial bodies, which they thought eternal.
• Sed contra: necessary things cannot be otherwise, so need no restraining; law is imposed on man that he be restrained from bad things. (He dwells on translating contineri: controlled, restrained, held in check, contained.)

8. Body of a. 4: what belongs to the divine essence is the eternal law (“but are really the eternal law”) #

• Whatever is subject to divine government is subject to the eternal law; what is not subject to the government is not subject to the law. The human parallel: things that can come to be by man are subject to human governing, but what pertains to the nature of man is not — that man has a soul, hands, feet, that he is male or female. So all things in what is created by God are subject to the eternal law; what pertains to the divine nature or essence is not subject to it but is it.
• Parallel problem he raises: is there a purpose for God, for the Trinity? An objection in the Sentences: one God is enough — as if a second or third were needed for some end. But the persons are not for a purpose; something per se necessary is not. God acts for a purpose in creating, but that purpose is himself; the divine nature is the end of the whole universe. “God is not for the sake of some end, but He is the end for which everything else is.”

9. Replies of a. 4, and the question whether God acts wisely (“or is He wisdom itself? That’s better said”) #

• Reply 1: the divine will considered in itself is God’s very essence, not an accident, so not subject to the divine governing or the eternal law but the same as it; considered as regards what God wills about creatures, those are subject to the eternal law as their reason is in divine wisdom, and by reason of these God’s will is called reasonable — otherwise he should rather be called reason itself.
• His gloss: we try to live wisely because we are not wisdom itself; does God try to act wisely in his own life? It “sounds funny” — better to say he is wisdom itself. A student asks whether Christ in his human nature could be said to be trying to live wisely, though impeccable; he grants that one who cannot fail may still be trying, and that as man Christ obeyed — “Not my will, but thine be done,” i.e. the human will.
• Reply 2: the Son is not made by God but naturally generated, so not subject to providence or the eternal law but is himself the eternal law by a certain appropriation (Augustine, De vera religione (inferred) — he says “the book on religion”); he is said subject to the Father by reason of his human nature, according to which the Father is said greater. The Arians said no.
• Reply 3: he simply concedes it (necessary things like the bodiless substances and heavenly bodies under providence) — “maybe shouldn’t have conceded that.”
• Reply to the sed contra (the “fourth”): the Philosopher, Metaphysics V — some necessary things have a cause of their necessity, like the conclusion of a demonstration; they have their inability-to-be-otherwise from another, and that is the most efficacious restraint, since things are said to be contained so far as they cannot do otherwise than is disposed about them. Against Democritus, who said one should not look for a reason of necessary things: for things necessary through another one can. Euclid’s theorems are necessary but known through other statements.

10. Article 5: are natural contingent things subject to the eternal law? (“placed a law to the waters that they do not go beyond their limits”) #

• Obj. 1: promulgation belongs to the notion of law, and promulgation can only be made to rational creatures.
• Obj. 2: what obeys reason partakes somehow of reason (Ethics I); natural contingent things are wholly without reason.
• Obj. 3: the eternal law is most efficacious, but defects happen in natural contingent things. Aside: birds flying into his daughter’s big clear window — one at least each visit; another hit the round window of the church; barn swallows flying in and out of his open garage door. Clear glass is what deceives them, not stained.
• Sed contra: Proverbs 8:29, God gave the sea its limit and placed a law to the waters.

11. Body and replies of a. 5: God impresses inward principles of action on nature (“God is said to command the whole of nature”) #

• One speaks otherwise of man’s law and of God’s. Human law extends only to rational creatures subject to man, since law directs the acts of those under someone’s governance; no one properly imposes a law on his own acts. Aside: King Canute trying to command the waves — “that didn’t work.”
• What is done with irrational things subject to man is done by the man’s own act moving them (his cows and chickens); irrational creatures do not act of themselves but are led by others, so man cannot impose law on them. He asks aside: “what about the dog?”
• To rational subjects a man can impose law, because by his precept a rule is impressed on their mind as a source of acting. So, as man impresses an interior beginning of acts by declaring, God impresses on the whole of nature the beginnings of their own action — and in this way God commands the whole of nature (Psalm 148, “He laid down a precept and it will not pass away”). Irrational creatures are subject in another way, as moved by divine providence, not by understanding the precept as rational creatures do.
• Reply 1: the impressing of an inward active principle in natural things holds the place of promulgation for men, since promulgation impresses on man a directive principle of action.
• Reply 2: irrational creatures do not partake of human reason nor obey it, but partake by way of obedience of the divine reason, whose power extends further than human reason. As the members of man’s body are moved at reason’s command without partaking of reason, having no grasp of reason, so irrational creatures are moved by God without being rational. Student aside: when we train a dog are we not doing something like God, since habit is a second nature? — “a little like God”; but their doing that does not make them rational.
• Reply 3: defects in natural things, though outside the order of particular causes, are not outside the order of the first cause, God, whose providence nothing can escape — subterfugere, “to flee out from under.” Since the eternal law is the ratio of providence, even the defects of natural things are subject to it.

His words #

• fomes — the law of concupiscence; “we don’t know how to translate that”; law in an almost metaphorical sense.
• prudence of the flesh — what pertains to the fomes, which cannot be subject to God’s law.
• ratio — variously “reason,” “thought,” “notion,” “the reason behind”; the eternal law is the ratio of divine governing and of divine providence.
• notion of law — what a thing must have to be law at all; an iniquitous law lacks it.
• violence — force against a natural inclination, opposed to the natural; distinguished by a student from coercion/coaction, which is against the voluntary.
• diminished sense — his term for how the fomes, a wicked law, or “being” said of blindness or death is called by the name.
• being of reason — what reason takes as if it were something, nothing outside reason.
• contineri — “restrained, held in check, contained, held back.”
• subterfugere — “to flee out from under,” of what escapes providence.
• cycle [ed.: encyclical] — the papal letter on slavery he half-recalls.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 4
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 5
• Augustine, De libero arbitrio I (quoted twice within a. 3)
• Proverbs 8:15 and 8:29; Isaiah 10; Psalm 148; 1 Corinthians (the Son handing over the kingdom)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 91, a. 6 (back-reference)
• Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententias (inferred) — on “I am who am”; and the objection that one God is enough
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (ordered movers; what obeys reason partakes of reason)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (senses of being) and V (necessary through another)
• Aristotle, Politics VIII (music)
• Augustine, “the book on religion” — De vera religione (inferred)
• Matthew (the bill of repudiation); Romans (prudence of the flesh); the Gospel of the blind man calling “Son of David”
• Euclid; Democritus; the Arians; Cardinal Burke’s letter as bishop of St. Louis; John XXIII

His questions #

• Is a law permitting abortion really a law, or a violence? Institutionalized violence: it recedes from right reason, so it lacks the notion of law.
• Is it something to be dead? Is to be blind, to be ignorant, to be? Only in a very diminished sense — a being of reason, nothing outside reason.
• Is there coming to be in this world? Yes, as one of the four basic senses of being, though coming-to-be is not yet being.
• Is there any purpose for God, or for the Trinity? No: God acts for a purpose in creating, but that purpose is himself; he is the end of everything else.
• Does God act wisely? Does he try to live wisely? With regard to creatures he acts wisely; of himself it is better said that he is wisdom itself.
• Could Christ in his human nature be said to be trying to live wisely, and was he as man obeying God? Yes — even one who cannot fail may still be trying; “not my will but thine” is the human will.
• How can God impose law on irrational creatures, who cannot receive a promulgation? By impressing on the whole of nature the inward beginnings of their own action, which holds the place of promulgation.
• When we train a dog, are we not doing something like God? A little like God, since habit is a second nature — but it does not make the dog rational.
• Is there an etymological relation between violence and violation? Left open beyond noting both come from Latin violentia and that violation too is violence.