[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”1118391160″ locale=”us” height=”333″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Tlh5mfWHL.jpg” width=”216″ alt=”Eugene F. Rogers” ]What is Natural?
A Feature Review of
Aquinas and the Supreme Court: Race, Gender and the Failure of Natural Law in Thomas’ Biblical Commentaries
Eugene F. Rogers , Jr.
Hardback: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013
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Reviewed by Myles Werntz
In recent months, a variety of Supreme Court cases on gender, sexuality, and what is “natural” to us make Eugene Rogers Jr.’s most recent book an exceptionally timely contribution. In court opinions, blogs, public debates, and theological arguments, the concept of what is “natural” to us remains a highly debated concept, with Thomas Aquinas one of the most frequently cited figures. In this book—a collection of new material alongside previously published material—Rogers makes the breathtaking argument that Thomas Aquinas does not, in fact, say what you think he says on the topic of natural law, nature, and what is appropriate to humans as natural.
Thomas’ Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles stand as two of the central texts of the natural law tradition, routinely used in Supreme Court opinions, Rogers notes, to argue for a conception of nature which corresponds to that which is public consensus. Insofar as what is natural emerges as a process of rational inquiry, then what the general public agrees to as “reasonable” derives in part from what is rationally understood as ‘natural’. The version of Thomas which emerges in these discussions is a Thomas who argues that, because God gives reason to us, and because reason remains unimpaired by sin, then what is theologically normative can be arrived at through reason. In sum, whatever reason arrives at as a definition of “natural” must be that which is of God.
This traditional interpretation of Thomas, Rogers argues, fails on multiple accounts. First, as Rogers rightly argues, Thomas has no understanding of reason as a faculty independent of grace. Because, for Thomas, creation itself is an act of grace, there is never a place for humans to reason about nature that does not already involve God; accordingly, in Thomas’ language, grace completes nature and revealed truth fulfills the insights of reason. A natural law tradition which seeks to understand “nature” independent of theological truth, by contrast, Rogers argues, misreads Thomas as a kind of empiricist and not as a theologian. Secondly, the natural law tradition tends to extract Thomas’ comments on the natural law from other aspects of Thomas, making Thomas into a dry, dusty casuist rather than a complicated, grace-infused reader of Scripture. For Thomas, to understand nature means to first understand who God is, insofar as the world is a creation of God and to be understood accordingly. To understand nature as a creation of God, then, one must be virtuous and that understanding what is “natural” can never be a sheer act of deduction or of observation. Understanding what is “natural” must be an act of the Spirit’s reshaping grace. Thirdly, and most importantly, natural law for Thomas is interwoven with the divine law. Within the Summa, Thomas’ treatment of natural law is relatively slight compared to his extensive treatment of divine law, though remarking that these two are connected. To know the natural law, Thomas argues, one must know the divine law, known through revelation. Rogers remarks that most natural lawyers would find this scandalous, for this compromises the church-state boundary and makes knowledge of what is “natural” to us a distinctly theological undertaking.
Throughout the first half of the book, Rogers argues that central to these failed interpretations of Thomas on the natural law is inattention to Thomas’ many biblical commentaries, which provide a very different picture of natural law. Focusing largely on Thomas’ comments in the relatively under-read Romans commentary, Rogers argues that Thomas has in mind a two-part story of the natural law. The first movement in Thomas—in stark contrast to most natural lawyers—is that the natural law has failed. For Thomas, what is of God (and thus, what the world which God has created consists of) is both available to us and not; God is both available to us and beyond us, meaning that nature is both available to us and beyond us. We are, according to Thomas, able to know precepts, but not how all possible precepts fit together; likewise, we are able to have a grasp of universals, but not singulars. As Rogers reads Thomas, the problem for humanity comes when we confuse what we can and cannot know by reason, a form of idolatry. In taking our partial knowledge of nature as total, we are saying in effect that we know as God knows—a heretical claim.
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