Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas Brian Tierney Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas. By Francis Oakley. (New York: Continuum Press. 2005. Pp. 143. $29.95.) This excellent book provides a sophisticated but accessible introduction to some fundamental problems in the history of natural law thinking, and the writing throughout is elegant, lucid, and persuasive. Oakley's central argument is that a major shift occurred in the fourteenth century and that it influenced both the scientific and the moral philosophies of the succeeding age. A byproduct of the argument is a reminder that the traditional periodization of Western history into ancient, medieval, and modern is "more of a hindrance than a help" in the study of intellectual history (p. 81), an observation that will be applauded by many medievalists. [End Page 111] Historians typically treat the physical laws of nature as conceptually distinct from the natural law that directs our moral behavior. But Oakley challenges this sharp distinction. He is not concerned to refute Hume's is-ought argument, that we cannot derive moral propositions from factual ones. His argument is rather that the same underlying set of ideas informs both kinds of thinking and that the physical laws of nature can provide a sort of "intellectual template" to which the natural moral law conforms (p. 70). Underlying Oakley's whole argument is his concern with a persistent tension between the Greek and Hebrew sources of Christian thought. On the one hand we have the Greek idea of a divine reason immanent in an eternal cosmos, a reason reflected also in the workings of human reason. On the other hand stands the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, an all-powerful, willful God of untrammeled freedom who made the universe from nothing and out of his own good pleasure. Oakley shows how the church fathers, especially Augustine, and then the scholastic theologians, especially Aquinas, sought to reconcile the two ideas. Aquinas envisaged an eternal law, a manifestation of divine reason directing all created beings to their due ends, a ground of both the physical laws of the universe and the natural moral law known to man. As Oakley notes, in Aquinas the fit between the templates of moral and physical natural law is very close. But a later generation of theologians, prominent among them William of Ockham, saw in this way of thinking an unacceptable restraint on God's absolute freedom and omnipotent will. Ockham argued that the characteristics of the existing universe did not flow by any kind of necessity from the reason of God; God could have made a different universe with different laws of motion and different rules of morality. And this teaching, Oakley argues, helped to shape the new scientific thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a contingent universe one could not explain the way things behaved by pure reason, by hypothesizing about natural ends and occult essences. The only way to understand the material world was by observation and experiment and mathematical formulations of the resulting data. The problem is more complicated when we consider the moral natural law. Ockham's teaching that moral norms depended entirely on the will of God was reflected in some natural law theories of the early modern period. But alongside this doctrine Ockham also presented a "non-positive moral science" based on reason and experience, and this too had echoes in later thought. In Ockham's own later political writings, where he discussed explicitly the varieties of natural law, he appealed persistently to right reason as a guide to human behavior. Oakley explains the dichotomy by pointing to the common medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained powers of God. However, Oakley's argument here leaves open a much-disputed question that he raises but does not finally answer, the question whether Ockham's voluntarist theology did in fact exercise any significant influence on the content of his later political thought and his teachings there on natural law. [End Page 112] In a last chapter the author considers the emergence of a doctrine of...