Veritatis Splendor: Part 2-Deus, Bonus, Solus, Unus

THE RICH YOUNG MAN asked Jesus what good must he do to obtain eternal life, and Jesus responds to the question with a question, a question which is a challenge, and a question for which he awaits no response, as he answers it for the young man as immediately as he asks it:

Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good.

Quid me interrogas de bono? Unus est bonus.

That's the version in Matthew's Gospel (Matt. 19:18); it uses the typical circumlocution of the Jew, and obliquely references God without use of the divine name. As is typical of the evangelist Mark, the Gospel of Mark (like the Gospel of Luke) directed toward the Gentile audience has no such scruple, and the answer to the question is more forthright, direct:

Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.

Quid me dicis bonum? Nemo bonus nisis unus Deus.

For completion's sake, we include the dialogue in the Gospel of Luke:

"Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.

Quid me dicis bonum? Nemo bonus nisi solus Deus.

Mark 10:18; Luke 18:19.

The rich young man called Jesus, "Good Teacher," Magister bonus, and Jesus does not question the title of Teacher, but he does question the adjective good. Why does he do this?

According to Pope John Paul II:

Jesus wishes the young man to have a clear idea of why he asked his question. The "Good Teacher" points out to him--and to all of us--that the answer to the question, "What good must I do to have eternal life?" can only be found by turning one's mind and heart to the "One" who is good. . . . Only God can answer the question about what is good, because he is the Good itself.

VS, 9. There is a wonderful equivalency if we blend the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and their reference to God: Deus, bonus, unus, solus. God, good, one, only. These are all synonyms: God, Being, Good, One. To ask what is good ipso facto references God. There is no good but that it comes from God, the font and origin of all that is good and thus our final end.

Icon of the Rich Young Man and Jesus
"Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one good."

It is, in fact, impossible to ask a moral question without reference to God. "To ask about the good, in fact, ultimately means to turn towards God." VS, 9. Likewise, it is impossible to answer a moral question without reference to God. And so the fundamental moral question is ultimately a religious question, the God question. The question of good is all wrapped up with the question of God, because only God is goodness itself, and all other goods have goodness only because they come from God and lead to God, the source of the participated goodness in creatures and creation which--though not God--are vestiges, likenesses, or, in the case of man, images of God.

If only God can answer the question about what is good, then it follows that the answer to the question supersedes ourselves and any human teacher or authority. We cannot ask the moral question as if there is no God. There is no room whatsoever for any etiamsi daremus non esse Deum.* While we can ask the question about what is good without explicit reference to God, that is with only implicit reference, it would seem that, in asking about the good, we cannot expressly leave God out of the question. If we expressly leave God out of the moral question, we are not asking the moral question. We no longer seek what is good. We are not the young man of the Gospel, asking the question what is good of the "Good Teacher." We are someone else, and we have asked someone else, and we have asked something else. An atheist or an agnostic is severely hampered in the moral life, as he has either excluded or bracketed the central core of moral question: God.

Since God alone is good, and he is the source of all good, it follows that God is our end, since he "alone is goodness, fullness of life, the final end of human activity, and perfect happiness." VS, 9.

The answer to the question, what good one ought to do requires, then, a revelation from God, either one in the natural order or, more perfectly, one in the supernatural order. "What man is and what he must do becomes clear as soon as God reveals himself." Quod homo est et facere debet, tum patefit, cum Deus se ipsum revelat. VS, 10.

The moral life presents itself as the response due to the many gratuitous initiatives taken by God out of love for man. It is a response of love, according to the statement made in Deuteronomy about the fundamental commandment: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children" (Dt 6:4-7). Thus the moral life, caught up in the gratuitousness of God's love, is called to reflect his glory. . .

VS, 10. The moral life is then responsive to God's prior acts. We are not the initiators in the moral life: we are the responders to God's invitation, to his wooing, to his love. God loved us first, and it is this fact which elicits our response. We love because God loved us first. 1 John 4:19. Caritas Christi urget nos. 2 Cor. 5:14. The love of Christ compels us. The moral life is a free response to God's gratuitous act of love to us. Everything in the moral life is responsive to God's gratuitous first invitation, first act. We never act first. The moral life is always a response to God's grace, God's first gift.

But if God alone is the Good, no human effort, not even the most rigorous observance of the commandments, succeeds in "fulfilling" the Law, that is, acknowledging the Lord as God and rendering him the worship due to him alone (cf. Mt 4:10). This "fulfilment" can come only from a gift of God: the offer of a share in the divine Goodness revealed and communicated in Jesus, the one whom the rich young man addresses with the words "Good Teacher" (Mk 10:17; Lk 18:18). What the young man now perhaps only dimly perceives will in the end be fully revealed by Jesus himself in the invitation: "Come, follow me" (Mt 19:21).

VS, 11.

So when Jesus interrupts the dialogue by responding to the young man's question with a question which he himself answers, he is referring the young man to God, the font of the moral question, and the beginning and the end of all good. It is also a direct reference to the "first tablet" of the Ten Commandments,** the moral response to the God who is good and who has revealed himself. The answer to the moral question--the answer to the question, "What good must I do"--involves, first and foremost, the obligation to give to God the worship that is due him for having loved us first:

The statement that "There is only one who is good" thus brings us back to the "first tablet" of the commandments, which calls us to acknowledge God as the one Lord of all and to worship him alone for his infinite holiness (cf. Ex 20:2-11). The good is belonging to God, obeying him, walking humbly with him in doing justice and in loving kindness (cf.Mic 6:8). Acknowledging the Lord as God is the very core, the heart of the Law, from which the particular precepts flow and towards which they are ordered. In the morality of the commandments the fact that the people of Israel belongs to the Lord is made evident, because God alone is the One who is good. Such is the witness of Sacred Scripture, imbued in every one of its pages with a lively perception of God's absolute holiness: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts" (Is 6:3).

VS, 11.

With this short intermezzo done (which itself is a partial answer to the young man's question), Jesus turns to answer the remainder of the young man's question.

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*The reference is, of course to Hugo Grotius famous statement in the prolegomena of his work on the Law of War and Peace. "Et haec quidem quae jam diximus, locum aliquem haberent etiamsi daremus, quod summo scelere dari nequit, non esse Deum, aut non curari abe eo negotia humana." Translated, these famous words are: "And that which we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should dare to concede that which cannot be conceded without utmost wickedness, that there is no God."
**The Ten Commandments or Decalogue is traditionally divided into "two tablets," the first dealing with those commandments which relate to the relationship between man and God, the second tablet dealing with those commandments that relate to the relationship between man and man.

Ignorance of the Wrong-Restless Hearts' Final Rest

THE NATURAL LAW IS INTENDED to be man's guide to a natural perfection, and this regardless of time, place, and circumstance.* In particulars, it is a highly flexible law, even if in essentials it is an unchanging and immutable law. Human nature remains the same--whether found in a Greek monk holed up on Mount Athos, a Jewish Wall Street broker in New York City, a Venezuelan beauty queen participating in the Miss Universe pageant, an Arab pilgrim on hajj in Mecca circumabulating counterclockwise the Ka'aba, or a Chinese man floating in his Junk in Hong Kong harbor. The normative guidance the natural law provides, both in general and in particular, as we go from man inchoate (in potentia) to man realized (in actu) is found in the natural law's precepts. "The precepts of the law," Bertke says, "are the lights placed in the labyrinth of life guiding human acts to the right paths and turns. It is of the precepts' nature to guide man to a correct realization of his capacities, to inform him what must be done if he is to arrive at his ultimate end." Bertke, 24. It is the precepts that help us judge aright what is the fitting and right means to our ultimate end.

As commands, the precepts inform and guide the intellect and the will, since both intellect and will are involved in any human act. Though guiding both intellect and will, the precepts principally are commands or norms of reason, not merely arbitrary commands, and by acting in accordance with these precepts of reason we are properly fitted into the great order of the cosmos, in harmony with our own nature and with God's plan for us in any particular time and place:

By following the precepts of the natural law man assumes his correct relations to everything else in the realm of being; order is brought out of the apparent chaos of many conflicting tendencies. The conflict between matter and spirit inherent in the complexity of man's nature, is resolved by obedience to their mandates, and harmony in relation to his prime purpose in [his natural and supernatural] life is obtained.

Bertke, 25.**

The precepts of the natural moral law oblige, and as obligations they impose themselves upon man. But they impose themselves upon man's freedom, seeking not to curb it or frustrate it, but to guide its use properly. So the natural moral law is an obligation in the order of freedom. It is not a restriction on freedom. And it certainly is not a law of physical necessity.

Sts. Thomas, Augustine, and Teresa of Avila
God alone suffices

Though there is a necessity to obey the natural moral law, that necessity is moral, not physical. The necessity is not a necessity of must (as if we have no choice or are compelled to obey it), but is a necessity of ought (since the obligation imposes itself upon our freedom and orders its proper use). The precepts of the natural law are oughts which impose upon themselves as an obligation because they are ordinations of reason, and not merely arbitrary dictats. Since they are based upon reason, the precepts carry their own reason for their obligation. It is self-evident that a life in accord with reason, a life fitted with reality and which promotes our very being and reflects who we are, is superior to a life that is irrational and which is not fitted with reality and contradicts or lessens our being and who we are. We are meant to flourish, our whole being inclines towards its flourishing, and obedience to the precepts of the natural law assures that flourishing, whereas disobedience to those precepts would result in our not flourishing. The obligation is then plain, as it is a matter of simply living right or reasonably instead of living wrong or irrationally. Of being rather than not being.

The precepts can be view under an active mode or a passive mode depending upon if we look at them from the perspective of the one commanding or the one commanded:

In the case of the natural law the active command is an act of the divine intellect; passsively, it is the actual ordination as perceived by the creature.

Bertke, 25.

The passive mode of the natural law (God's command as perceived by us) can be known without knowledge of God, so knowledge of at least the foundational precepts of the natural law can be known self-evidently, without knowledge of God, which knowledge is not self-evident. Similarly, the natural law binds us self-evidently, regardless of whether we have derived from our observation of reality and application of reason (or from Faith) that there is a God who has promulgated such a law.

It is a curious fact that man is a restless creature. No created thing fully satisfies him. Glory, honor, power, wealth, health, pleasure, the development of all natural powers of our soul or the possession of any and all created things do not, it would seem, satisfy.† But it would appear implausible for man to have no end, that he is condemned to be dissatisfied, and so there is implied in man's very restlessness that there is something he ought to seek beyond created things that will satisfy him, that ultimate good for which he yearns, which is God alone, his summum bonum, his finis ultimus, his plenary good, his ultimate end in which he alone finds repose and perfect joy and happiness.

I answer that, It is impossible for any created good to constitute man's happiness. For happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether; else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired. Now the object of the will, i.e. of man's appetite, is the universal good; just as the object of the intellect is the universal true. Hence it is evident that naught can lull man's will, save the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because every creature has goodness by participation. Wherefore God alone can satisfy the will of man, according to the words of Psalm 102:5: "Who satisfieth thy desire with good things." Therefore God alone constitutes man's happiness.

Respondeo dicendum quod impossibile est beatitudinem hominis esse in aliquo bono creato. Beatitudo enim est bonum perfectum, quod totaliter quietat appetitum, alioquin non esset ultimus finis, si adhuc restaret aliquid appetendum. Obiectum autem voluntatis, quae est appetitus humanus, est universale bonum; sicut obiectum intellectus est universale verum. Ex quo patet quod nihil potest quietare voluntatem hominis, nisi bonum universale. Quod non invenitur in aliquo creato, sed solum in Deo, quia omnis creatura habet bonitatem participatam. Unde solus Deus voluntatem hominis implere potest; secundum quod dicitur in Psalmo CII, qui replet in bonis desiderium tuum. In solo igitur Deo beatitudo hominis consistit.

S.T. IaIIae, q. 2, a. 8.

This spiritual inquietude and its satisfaction is classically rendered by St. Augustine in his Confessions: fecisti nos, domine, ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te. You have made us Lord for you, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. St. Thomas succinctly stated: Deus solus satiat.†† The mystic, St. Theresa of Avila put it wonderfully well in her "Bookmark": Solo Dios basta! Only God suffices.

Nada te turbe,
nada te espante;
todo se pasa,
Dios no se muda.
La pacientia todo lo alcanza.
Quien a Dios tiene nada la falta:
solo Dios basta.

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
Whoever has God lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.

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*We say natural perfection, not supernatural perfection, which, without thereby deprecating his natural perfection, is what man's ultimate calling. We know, not through nature, but through revelation, however, that the natural law also has a tutorial or preparatorial task, as the natural perfection is fulfilled or perfected by the gift of Grace. While compliance with the natural law is necessary for salvation, it is not sufficient for salvation. Moreover, man's perfection is, as we know through revelation, found ultimately in a union with God, a participation in God's very being, a gift and destiny which is wholly supernatural.
**Again, this harmony will not be achieved without grace, given man's current state of disharmony, his Fallenness. Nature, while not entirely corrupted by man's Fall, is a natura corrupta or natural lapsa, and is not a natura integra, and the only means to overcome the corrupt or lapsed nature and obtain a measure of its original integrity is through the natural law and through habitual supernatural grace. In this life, however, that integrity is never fully restored, even after sanctifying grace, and full integrity awaits us only after death and resurrection of the body in glorified form.
***E.g., S.T. IaIIae, q. 98, art. 6, ad 2: "A law should not be given save to the people, since it is a general precept." q. 90, art. 2, c. "Consequently, since the law is chiefly ordained to the common good, any other precept in regard to some individual work, must needs be devoid of the nature of a law, save in so far as it regards the common good." The law or precept, however, is also concerned with particularities: "A command denotes an application of a law to matters regulated by the law. Now the order to the common good, at which the law aims, is applicable to particular ends. And in this way commands are given even concerning particular matters." q. 90, art. 2, ad 1.
†This is beautifully analyzed by St. Thomas in his "treatise on happiness," found in the Summa Theologiae, to which, because of its length, the reader is referred. S.T. IaIIae, q. 2 (English); S.T IaIIae, q. 2 (Latin).
††"Deus enim solus satiat, et in infinitum excedit: et inde est quod non quiescit nisi in Deo, Augustinus, in I Conf.: fecisti nos, domine, ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te." St. Thomas, In Symbolum Apostolorum, a. 12.

Cardinal Mercier and the Natural Law, Part 12: The Moral Order Needs God

THE MORAL ORDER IS CHARACTERIZED by immutability and universality. Any order that is neither immutable or universal is an order other than moral: it is man-made, conventional or positive.

In terms of immutability, the law, so long as the matter is the same, can be expected to be the same. The precepts of the moral law do not change, as they are set in the nature of things. The moral law is not like the injunctions of Allah in the Qur'an, which are subject to being abrogated by the seeming whims of divinity or the desires of his prophet. There is no notion of naskh (نسخ) or abrogation in natural law.

[T]he application of the moral law is general, independent of the circumstances of time and place, and in this sense is eternal and common to all; it binds every man in possession of his natural reason no matter what time he may live or where he may dwell.

[250(57)] Thus, Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Atheist . . . all are bound by the one, unchanging moral law, and all are answerable to God for its breach. The moral law is thus exceptionless, but in saying this, one must also be wary not to identify the moral law itself with human expressions of it or human formulae. Thus, weakness in our expression or our formulas may require exceptions, adaption, or modification when confronting particular cases or new situations. But this is not a change in law, but a change in our description or grasp of it.

The moral law is recognizable, knowable, universally, by all men who have come to the age of reason, that is when he "has it in his power to reflect and is capable of perceiving the subordination his actions should have in regard to their moral end, and the time at which he has become a moral agent." [250(57)] No man can be ignorant of the first principles of the moral law, or even of the immediate conclusions of those first principles, though invincible ignorance is possible for more remote conclusions. Therefore, all men know that they ought to pursue good and shun evil, and that, for example, the intentional killing of an innocent human being is intrinsically wrong. There can be no ignorance of such fundamental principle and immediate conclusion. It is possible, however, to envision situations where someone may be invincibly ignorant of more remote conclusions that require additional knowledge or which are complicated by circumstances. Thus, a person may be invincibly ignorant that the use of contraceptives that are also abortifacients are, under the natural law, morally wrong (in addition to their contraceptive nature) because they involve the intentional taking of innocent life. (See generally Dr. Bogomir M. Kuhar, Infant Homicides Through Contraceptives (Bardstown, Ky: Eternal Life 2003) (5th ed.) They may be entirely unaware of the chemical nature of the drug they are taking and the abortifacient nature of it.

Can there be a morality independent of God? Mercier rejects the notion. Too bound up with God is the moral imperative, so that it is both erroneous and impracticable to posit a morality that is independent of God. Indeed, not only is God, who is knowable by reason, both the fundament and ultimate end of the natural moral order, revelation, and the graces of the Church, are aids that, under the present condition of the human race, are necessary.

An independent morality may include deistic or rationalistic views, or, more radically, atheistic ones. The deistic and rationalistic views, while not wholly rejecting God from the scope of the moral order, seek to establish a moral theory that does not include, and is independent of, all positive (i.e., revealed) religion:

Catholic doctrine merely sums up accurately the lessons taught by experience when it proclaims the universal and constant inferiority both in knowledge and practice of the moral law among those peoples who are without the supernatural aid of revelation and grace. The doctrine of the relative necessity of Revelation--which finds its application equally in the moral as in the purely speculative order--is briefly summed up in the following extract from the [1st] Council of the Vatican: 'To this divine Revelation it is indeed to be attributed that those things which, in matters divine, are not of themselves beyond reason can be known, even if the present condition of the human race, by all men, without difficulty, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error.'

[256(66)] (See, in this regard, The Need for Revelation: "Pis-Aller" by Matthew Arnold.)

The atheist moral program is even more objectionable. It is in vain to build moral theories without God. "Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam. (Ps. 126:1) "Now a moral system without God is as erroneous as it is impracticable." [256(66)] Mercier gives three reasons for the intrinsic failure of the atheistic moral program. First, without God there is no basis for any moral imperative. Here, the Dostoevskian wisdom within the Brothers Karamazov bears its full weight as encapsulated by the words: Если Бога нет, то всё дозволено. If God did not exist, all things would be permitted.

Take away, as the ultimate term of our volitions, an absolute, that is to say, an end which subsists of itself, and all our aspirations towards good and all our deliberate volitions cease to have any final object. We cannot conceive the absolute obligation to will what is morally good--in other words, duty--unless there be, beyond all contingent goods that I may or may not will, a good which is not contingent, which is an end in itself, namely God.

[256-57(66)] Thus atheism is as much a moral, as it is an intellectual, disease.

Moreover, natural theology shows, by reason, that an ontological order exists which demands the existence of a First Cause, of God. Moreover, the ontological order as it relates to morality, and upon which the entirety of the moral order depends, requires that there be a God who loves himself with necessary love, "so that only in view of Himself can He love those beings who are capable of sharing, though in a way far different from Himself, His infinite Perfection or His infinite Goodness." [257(66)] Without God that is love, and without God sharing that love with all men, it is impossible to envision a moral order. Put succinctly, God is both the justificatory source as well as the end (goal) of the moral order.

Finally, recourse to God is required to provide the assurance that observance of the moral law is supported by sanction. "For how is the observance of the moral law to be sufficiently guaranteed if man has no certitude that a just and powerful God will sooner or later establish an eternal harmony between virtue and happiness on the one hand, and between vice and misery on the other?" [257(66)] Without God as the great equalizer, the Eternal Judge, one despairs of the moral project, and one will lapse into morality as expediency. Invariably, morality will temporize.

Cardinal Mercier also criticizes secularist models of morality. These are identified by the suppression of God and his replacement with some other substitute or absolute. He divides those into three general groups. The first involves a sort of implied social contract, or social debt. The second posits a sociological origin of duty. The third group appears to tout progress of man's nature, self-realization or self-development. All these suffer from endemic faults and are doomed to failure. [257-58(67)]

Potpourri of Natural Law

QUESTIONS RELATING TO A PHILOSOPHY OF NATURAL LAW overlap with other philosophical questions, including those relating to freedom of choice (free will), the priority of reason over will, and the existence of God. So inextricably intertwined are these issues, that it is doubtful that a natural law theory can be accepted if there is a disbelief in free will, if will is given precedence over reason in the assessment of good (if right takes precedence over good), or if the existence of God is denied. Before he discusses the natural law proper in his The Tradition of Natural Law, Yves Simon summarily addresses these three issues.

Free Choice. The principal point that Simon stresses in his discussion of free choice is to dispute the false dichotomy generally posited between free choice and lack of causality or order. There is a tendency to pit freedom of choice against law. This is a false opposition, as freedom of choice is not inconsistent with reason, or order, or with law, but works hand in glove with these. Whatever its source (and the Christian tradition would place its source in the Fall), there is a tendency to place law and freedom in opposition, since freedom is seen to exist only where there is indeterminacy, which is another way of saying where there is no law.

There seems to be in the human mind an everlasting readiness to associate free choice with indeterminacy and, under favorable circumstances, to place the principle of freedom in a lack of determination, in the lack of a positive feature, in a lack of causality and rationality.

Simon, 58. Thus (the argument goes), if God exists, man is not free. Or if natural law exists, we are not free. Or if man has a human nature to which he ought to conform, he is not free. Unless man is servant to no God, to other man, to no social convention, to nothing but his existential self, he is not free. Autonomy from reason, from (any) cause, from nature, from God is the hackneyed recipe for freedom. It is as foolish a recipe, or perhaps as satanic an inspiration, as the argument that one is free only if one jumps into an abyss and is spared the limitations of being supported by the earth. It is this false perception which must be overcome and seen as a falsehood, or else one will be blinded to the notion of freedom within the constraints of reason, or of law, or the love of neighbor, or under God.

Human Lemmings Following "Autonomy" to a Moral Abyss

Yves Simon notes that the notion of freedom as absence of cause was historically manifested in the Epicurean response to the atomism of Democritus. Confronted with the necessity associated with the Democritean "necesitarianism" that "everything is made of atoms," and its doctrine that the "soul is nothing else than an aggregate of atoms that are more polished and move more smoothly that others," Simon, 59, Epicurus devised the notion of the unpredictable, indeterminable swerve, in the downward rain of atoms, the paregklisis (παρέγκλισις), what Lucretius, the Roman materialist, called the clinamen.

(Oh how dark and dreary, nay depressing, are Democritus and Lucretius! What sort of comrades are they! Let us theists say with the poet John Dryden in his "Epistle the First" against all who would rob us of our God, whether they be Democritus or Lucretius or Christopher Hitchens :

. . . [T]his is a piece too fair
To be the child of chance, and not of care.
No atoms, casually together hurl'd
Could e'er produce so beautiful a world.
Nor dare I such a doctrine here admit,
As would destroy the providence of wit.

And poor Epicurus! Who would save us from this dreariness by the doctrine of swerve! As if we should be happy that, in jumping into the abyss, we may gain meaning from the fact that we "swerve" before we hit bottom. Either way, it seems to me, we end up rather flat, our end being one-dimensional, pancake-like.)

We ought not to accept the general concept without some sort of critical frame of mind:

Some discrimination should be exercised before assuming that a free act has to be an event without a cause, and event without law and without reason, a thing akin to chance but more causeless than a chance event.

Simon, 60.

Let our minds stay. Let our minds pause. Let our minds go up instead of down. Let us suppose, even ex hypothesi if not ex fide, the opposite is true. Let us suppose:

[F]ree choice is to be described not as a case of indetermination but rather as a case of superdetermination, as a distinguished case of domination over diverse ways of acting and over the diversity of acting and nonacting, the notion of a law immanent in free natures assumes a sense widely different from whatever its sense might be in a theory which conceives of freedom after a pattern of indeterminacy.

Simon, 60. It would seem that the advocate of the natural law, and not its opponent, has the open mind. Only the close minded man, the man of a lemming-like mind, is foolish enough to jump into the abyss and hope for swerve. The open-minded man is willing to think that perhaps it may be wise to think twice before jumping into an abyssal void.

Reason versus Will. "In most, if not all, phases of its adventurous history, the notion of natural law is violently attacked whenever the voluntaristic trend is predominant." Simon, 61. When, in one's philosophical or jurisprudential view, will is placed before reason, there can be no natural law. This is because natural law places reason as logically prior to the will. Reason, not will, is the fundament of law. Since our understanding of the natural law is affected by the predominant notion of human law, when legal positivism reigns, as it did, for example, in Nazi Germany, or in the philosophy of the Franciscan William of Ockham (ca. 1288-ca. 1348), or the jurisprudence of the English philosopher John Austin (1790-1859) or the American Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) we may be sure that the environment for the natural law is poor. Legal voluntarism, a jurisprudence where law is primarily will, the command of the sovereign, is like throwing salt into the jurisprudential field. It stunts the growth of a sound philosophy.

God. The tentative words of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius--etiamsi daremus non esse Deum--seem to us moderns harbingers of the evils of atheism in law. (For a short treatment of Grotius's statement see Natural Law: Ecstasis and Telos.) God's absence in law is far from theoretical when we are confronted with the gaunt faces and lifeless bodies of our brothers and sisters in the Gulag of Soviet Russia or the Konzentrationslager of Nazi Germany.

Victims of the Rejection of Natural Law at a Gulag

Victims of the Rejection of Natural Law at Dachau

In the face the evils harvested by Marxist materialistic philosophy in Communism or in Nazi Germany where the will of the State overcame all right, one is haunted by Dostoevsky's message as summarized by Jean Paul Sartre: "Where there is no God, all things are lawful," Если Бога нет, то всё дозволено. Natural theology and natural law are inextricably intertwined, despite the efforts of many to divide them and their insistence that one can proceed lustily without the other.

There is no question of denying the connection between the problem of natural law and the problem of God. But it is not easy to show precisely what this connection is. One may wonder whether the study of moral nature and of natural law is a way to the knowledge of God or whether the knowledge of God must be had before the proposition that there exists a natural law of the moral world is established.

Simon, 62 Simon favors the first option.

The Prison of Atheistic Existentialism

But from this logical priority in the order of discovery it does not follow that the understanding of natural law can be logically preserved in case of failure to recognize in God the ultimate foundation of all laws. Again, the intelligence of natural law is a way to God. This means, for one thing, that it normally leads to the knowledge of God's existence and it means, for another, that if the way to God is blocked, no matter what the obstacle, the intelligence of natural law is itself impaired (this is logically inevitable).

Simon, 62. Thus, someone who, like Jean Paul Sartre, has locked himself in a cell of atheistic existentialism with the fundamental premise that there is no God, will be forced to reject, time and time again, any concept of the natural law because to accept it would require abandonment of his fundamental premise. Jean Paul Sartre, is, in the words of the popular Eagles song "Hotel California," a prisoner of his own device. And there are stubborn men who will remain in the prison made with their own hands, though someone shows them that their cell door is wide open. 'Tis a pity he's a fool.