The Immutability of Natural Law According to Suarez

Abstract

The Thomist 62 (1998): 97-115 THE IMMUTABILITY OF NATURAL LAW ACCORDING TO SUAREZ DAVID WILLIAMS Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts IMMUTABILITY tends to be a problematic topic for the medieval tradition of natural law. There is a wide consensus that natural law is concerned with what is right and wrong per se. "It does not vary according to time, but remains unchangeable," as Aquinas has it (STh I-II, q. 94, a. 6). This principle seems to be required for such a law to have a truly natural character. If a fire in Boston and one in Madagascar are both equally fire, sharing a common nature, then natural law ought to be the same in all times and places. The difficulty is that the conditions necessary for a fire are simple and well-defined while those of human action are almost infinitely variable. The circumstances of time, place, and persons can intersect in so many ways that they seem to escape the grasp of any general theory. There are many who find this difficulty an insuperable obstacle to traditional ideas of natural law. One well-known author characterizes those ideas as "abstract, a priori, and deductive," or as seeking "to cut through the concrete circumstances to arrive at the abstract essence that is always true, and then work with these abstract and universal essences."1 Others accept the justice of this critique while suggesting that its true target is not the Thomist idea but rather a degenerate form of natural law thought derived from later scholasticism.2 This analysis would lay much of the 1 Charles E. Curran, "Natural Law in Moral Theology," in Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick, S.J., eds., Natural Law and Theology (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1991), 265. 2 Here one thinks of Germain Grisez and those inspired by him such as John Finnis or William May; cf. Germain Grisez, "The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, 1-11, q. 94, a. 2" Natural Law Forum 10 (1965): 158-196; John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights 97 98 DAVID WILLIAMS blame for the rationalist and deductive character of"conventional natural law thinking" atthe feet of Francisco Suarez (1548-1617). Indeed, that is a primary thesis of the only English-language article published on Suarez's idea of natural law in the last two decades.3 The aim of the present essay is to show that, whatever else one may say about Suarez's understanding of natural law, it cannot fairly be labeled as an abstract or a priori system that is dismissive of the particular circumstances of human actions. Arguably the greatest figure of the sixteenth-century Scholastic revival, Suarez produced two works, Disputationes Metaphysicae and De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore, that became standard texts in both Catholic and Protestant universities for generations.4 In the ten books of De Legibus, he consciously gathers and refines almost four hundred years of speculation on law into a coherent theory. It is this attempt to give a comprehensive and detailed view of law as a whole that sets him apart from many other authors in the natural law tradition, including Aquinas, who treat of the subject by the way or in small portions of larger works. Suarez's contribution is particularly significant in the present discussion (which makes the misunderstanding of his thought more striking), for while maintaining the constant character of natural law, he lays out a specific and detailed way of approaching concrete situations. The question of immutability and change occupies more than a third of Suarez's treatment of natural law in De Legibus 11.5 He (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980); and William May, "The Meaning and Nature of the Natural Law in Thomas Aquinas," American Journal oflurisprudence 22 (1977): 168-89. 3 William May, "The Natural Law Doctrine of Francis Suarez," New Scho/astici$m 58 (1984): 409-28. There are also a number of references to Suarez in Finnis's Natural Law and Natural Rights. The influence of the dismissive attitude toward Suarez's natural-law theory engendered by this line of thought may be shown in the fact that the issue of American...