‘Love is the fulfilling of the law’: Arcadia and Love's Labour's Lost

Abstract

The order of the precepts of the natural law corresponds to the order of our natural inclinations. For there is in man a natural and initial inclination to good which he has in common with all substances; in so far as every substance seeks its own preservation according to its own nature. Corresponding to this inclination, the natural law contains all that makes for the preservation of human life, and all that is opposed to its dissolution. Secondly, there is to be found in man a further inclination to certain more specific ends, according to the nature which man shares with other animals. In virtue of this inclination there pertains to the natural law all those instincts ‘which nature has taught all animals’ [Ulpian], such as sexual relationship, the rearing of offspring, and the like. (Aquinas, Summa Qu. 94. Art. 2) Aquinas’ apparently unproblematical words on the ‘naturalness’ of sexual relationship open up a thorny area for the Renaissance and conceal yawning gulfs and treacherous debates within Natural Law theory. Indeed, the difference of degree between Aquinas and Calvin over the issue of the inwardness or otherwise of Natural Law becomes a fundamental one, which was to exercise Milton in particular, when it is focused on sexuality, with its negative and positive concomitants, shame, companionship, and procreation.