CHAPTER 2

THE NATURAL LAW:

ST THOMAS AQUINAS
• Our present age is not impervious to such attacks of
absurdity, frustration, and near desperation. History,
however, is gracefully replete with people who have
exerted effort in pointing out a viable way out of such
darkness and confusion.
• One of the options, if one wants to call it that was
arrived at through the meeting between Philosophy
and a religion of revelation that is Christianity. The best
representative of this integration and arguably also, an
excellent thinking through of a reasonable way that
addresses the questions of the human person.
• Thomas Aquinas begins from the standpoint of faith.
His perspective presupposes the existence of a God
who is the author (source) and the goal (end) of all
reality. This creator for Thomas, however, relates in
freedom with the human person and so enables
him/her in freedom to recognize through reason. In
accordance with his foundational knowledge, the
human person can choose to act in such a way that is
worthy of one’s very reality. One who can reach the
wisdom at the very heart of all things is obliged to act
in accordance with his/her dignity
• The human being then is said to be gifted with “the ability to know the
highest good” that engages him/her in freedom in “choosing to act on
the good that he/she ought to do”. Freedom here is knowing the best
goal and being able to reach for it through decisive action.
• For Aquinas God reveals His goodwill as the Eternal Law reflected in
order of reality. Relating with the Law as governing all is relating with
God Himself whose will emanates to govern all that is.
• The reality then of life as growth, nutrition, and reproduction is
founded on the will that is eternal.
• Human freedom for Aquinas therefore is an imprint of the divine will
in the very being of the human person.
• CONSCIENCE AND NATURAL LAW
• The ability of man to know is important in his/her
acting ethically. One cannot do the right even if one
does not know what it is. Even if one does not know,
he/she is obliged to know. If one acts badly out of
ignorance and does not act to rectify the situation by
bothering to learn, that person is to be held
accountable according to.
• While the conscience absolutely binds us in doing the
good and avoiding evil, conscience as reason is also
absolutely asked to be given formation.
• The conscience therefore can be mistaken and
being so does not exempt the human person from
culpability. There different kinds of conscience that
may lead us to wrong doing: callous, perplexed,
scrupulous and ignorant.
• The uninformed conscience simply lacks
education, while perplexed one needs guidance in
sorting out one’s confusion. The callous and
scrupulous are binary opposites but both are
malformed in being too lax or too strict.
• Callousness of the conscience results in the
long time persistence in doing evil that the
self is no longer concerned whether what
he/she does is god or bad.
• Scrupulousness on the other hand fails to
trust one’s ability to do good and hence,
overly concerns itself with avoiding what is
bad to the point of seeing wrong where
there really is none.
Three Contemporary Questions:
•WHO AM I?
•WHO DO I WANT T0 BE?
•HOW CAN I GET THERE?
CONCLUSION:
• Thomas Aquinas was influential in his articulation of the theory of
natural Law. He showed us that the universe was determined by an order
of love that ought to define the sense of the good of human beings.
Whether one believes in a transcendent, loving God or not, he showed
how people could intuit an order to things that was inherent to all beings
that existed. Whether one was a believer or not, one could see that there
is this order which is the ground of people’s wholeness and self –
realization. Many philosophers up this day build upon this idea of a
natural order upon which is founded a natural law. Even in legal theories,
this foundational idea is influential. However as western involved, other
theories also evolved which insisted that the foundation of norms for the
good should be rooted in human reason alone. In this school of thought ,
Immanuel Kant would be one of the most important thinkers.