123. The sacredness of the natural moral law
123. THE SACREDNESS OF THE NATURAL MORAL LAW
Is natural law less sacred than divine law?
A gloss on Rom 2:14: When the Gentiles, who have not the (Mosaic) law, do by nature those things that are of the law, comments as follows: Although they have no written law, yet they have the natural law, whereby each one knows, and is conscious of, what is good and what is evil. . . . Now among all others the rational creature is subject to divine providence in the most excellent way, in so far as it partakes of a share of providence, by being provident both for itself and for others. Wherefore it has a share of the Eternal Reason . . . and this participation of (in) the eternal law in (by) the rational creature is called the natural law. . . the light of natural reason, whereby we discern what is good and what is evil, which is the function of the natural law, is nothing else than an imprint on us of the divine light. . . . [T]he natural law is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law (I-II,91,2).
The natural law is not less sacred than the eternal law: because it is the part of the eternal law that is known by natural reason. It is known by conscience. Conscience is (1) an awareness of the whole moral dimension, of the meaning of “good and evil”, (2) knowledge of what kinds of things are good (e.g., justice, charity, mercy) and what kinds of things are evil, and (3) a pressure or inducement or feeling of duty or obligation that moves us to do good and avoid evil. It moves us in a unique way, a way that is not merely causal necessity or determinism, yet tells us that obedience to moral law is morally necessary.
Even those who are skeptical of any objective, universal moral law—even moral relativists—feel this obligation. No one admires a man who deliberately disobeys his own conscience, nor can anyone admire such disobedience in himself. He does not know it, but this is the Voice of God speaking to him, even if he may be an atheist. It is a real, living participation (sharing) by his human reason and will in the divine reason and will. This absolute duty can come only from an absolute source, and that can only be God, because ultimately everything else is relative—as the relativist himself dimly perceives (for all error is the misunderstanding of some truth), although he doesn’t know that it is relative to God.
To say that the natural law is less sacred than the divine law is like saying that your son is less human than you are, or that God’s Son is less divine than his Father. For the natural law is not merely an image of the divine law but “has a share of the Eternal Reason”, the Mind of God. It is the eternal law incarnate.
Therefore when your natural conscience speaks, that is the Voice of God, though it is heard through your human nature with all its faults, so what you hear is not infallible. You have to form your conscience aright. You can make mistakes in interpreting it, just as those who have private revelations from God, even saints, can make mistakes in interpreting these revelations. Even though they come from God, as sunlight comes from the sun, we can err about them, as sunlight can become clouded when it passes through dirty windows. This is why even saints and mystics can contradict each other. Sincere people of good will who are trying to follow their conscience with all their heart can also contradict each other. Only God Himself is infallible, and the Church and the Book that He Himself guarantees. Nothing else.
We moderns tend to think of our reason from below, so to speak, as a growth of evolution, history, family, human tradition, socialization, etc. It is at least equally accurate to think of it from above, for that is where it came from. (Remember, “reason” = understanding, not just calculation.) Reason did not evolve from biology, it came from God’s direct creation of the soul.
Souls can only be created, all at once, not assembled out of previous parts, like bodies, because souls have no parts. They have different powers, but not different parts. You can’t have half a soul, or cut off parts of your soul.