God's Glory Appears: Divine Drama and Divine Command

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR'S thoughts regarding aesthetics and our response to beauty (which is an analogy to our response to the glory of God) and its extension in the the dramatic art form (which is an analogy for understanding the "theodrama" of the Christ-event in its Trinatarian aspect) interplays with his voluntaristic or "divine command" ethical thought and so colors it and distinguishes it from more naked theories of divine command ethics such as Karl Barth's theory (which relies, of course, on its Calvinistic antecedents).

For von Balthasar, "the Godhead is already dramatic life, [and] God can encompass our drama into the divine dram.  This is the meaning and fruit of the Christ-event.  The drama of revelation is a new moment in the already existing drama among the processions" between the three persons of the Trinity.  Steck, 61.

A divine command theory of ethics "holds that the goodness of at least some acts depends in a nontrivial way on God's will."*  Steck, 59.  Von Balthasar appears to hold to a divine command theory of ethics, but it is radically colored or oriented by his  "divine address" theory.  Von Balthasar's divine command theory revolves around the address of God in the dramatic Christ-event.

"For von Balthasar and Barth, the new relationship that Christ effects between God and the human person is not at all peripheral to daily existence, but rather is an essential part of our manner of being in the world."** Steck, 59.  It, of course, involves a deeply personal encounter between one man and the one God.  It is an I-Thou ethic. 

Like any relationship, this divine-human relationship implies interchange, address, and response. And if our covenantal relationship with God is constitutive of our identity as a human person . . . then it follows that the address given us by God and our response to it affect us to our core; they establish us as persons.***

God's address to us in Christ, then, is not something extrinsic to us.  It is not simply carrying out something that God wishes; rather, it is something constitutive to the person, something that confirms us as persons, something that allows us to realize ourselves as persons in an authentic way.

Christ Calls Peter and Andrew by Duccio di Buoninsegna 

The notion of God addressing the human person in Christ is according to Steck something that fits neatly with a divine command theory of ethics, and this for a number of reasons.  First, divine ethics "understands moral action in terms of a response to God's personal call," and so shares in the quality of call-and-response that is central to Von Balthasar's view of the Christ-event.  It seems to be "word-based," not "thing-based" or "good-based."  Viewing the ethical life as call-and-response gives a personalistic ring to ethics, emphasizes the freedom in response, and avoids viewing ethics as involving obedience to "some kind of impersonally valid natural law."  (Steck, 60) (quoting TD2.292)  A command is different than a law.†

Second, a divine command theory is more easily fitted into a covenantal frame of reference.  The Christ-event is at root an invitation to a covenant, an invitation by a sovereign God to an insignificant man to participate in the Trinitarian life of God.  For von Balthasar, "obedience is not only a creaturely submission to God but also a participation in Christ's receptivity to the Father's will."  Steck, 60.  Such participation expands our personhood as it participates in divine personhood and so is ultimately freeing.  "[T]he address to the human existent, like the address of the Father to the Son, is autonomy-granting, personalizing, and indivudalizing."

This intimate, concrete, and covenantal view of von Balthasar's ethics makes it more mission-like.  The command that invites us into the Trinitarian life also invites us to share in the one mission of Christ.

God addresses humanity not only universally but personally, giving each of us a christological "name" that constitutes our idenity and the norm of our conduct. Thus, in describing divine desires for the human agent, von Balthasar rarely uses Barth's favored term, "command," preferring instead terms such as "call," "will," and "address," which have less punctualistic and occasionalistic connotations.

Steck, 60. 

A big distinguishing factor between Barth's ethics and von Balthasar's ethics may be what Barth (disparagingly) called the "damned Catholic And," das verdammte Katholische Und.††  In Barthian ethics, man is nothing next to the sovereign and infinite God.  In von Balthsarian ethics--which are founded within the Catholic tradition--man has his nobility even ad coram Dei. when face-to-face with God.  "For von Balthasar, however, the "And" is part of the glory--the "masterpiece," as he calls it--of God's act of establishing a covenantal relationship."  God "lifts up a genuine dialogue partner, by creating a space where divine and human freedom can encounter one another, without the latter becoming a moment in the former."  Steck, 61.

"The contingent, free [and autonomous] yes to God's address is the place where God's glory shines through in the earthly.  Eliciting this free yes is the goal of the divine drama in Jesus Christ."  Steck, 61.
_______________________________
*This definition given by Steck seems to prove too much, as it suggests that all theologically-based ethical theories are voluntaristic or divine command theories.  For the will of God to be trivial (which would be required to have a theory that is not based upon divine command, i.e., one based upon God's reason or ratio) is close to suggesting that such theories must hold that the natural moral law is untied to God's will, which comes close to saying that God's will is irrelevant in morality. 
**This, of course, is true for any Christian-based ethic. 
***This seems like a problematic formulation.  The address by God to us through Christ does not "establish us as persons."  We are persons by God's creative act (persons by nature) before God addresses us in Christ.  We are  a person that Christ saves, not a thing saved to be a person.
†A command without law (i.e., not placed within a greater context of law or reason) runs the risk of being arbitrary.  Hence the danger of divine command theories, which tend toward occasionalism.
††I haven't been able to find where this is in Barth's writings.  However, it is quoted (without reference) by Hans Küng in his Theologie im Aufbruch: eine ökumenische Grundlegung as the Barthian response to the Catholic insistence that Revelation is found in both Scripture and Tradition ("das verdammte katholische Und").  See also the translation of that work, Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View (the "damned Catholic And").

Duns Scotus: A Moderated Primacy of Will over Intellect

ON THE MATTER OF PRIMACY of the will or intellect, there is a huge divide between the Thomists and Scotists. St. Thomas, who advocates what is generally characterized as the "Dominican" or "intellectualist" position, puts the intellect ahead of the will, whereas Blessed Duns Scotus, who may be represents what may be called the "voluntarist," "Augustinian" or "Franciscan" position, teaches the primacy of the will. A good, succinct summary of this dispute may be obtained by referring to Alexander Broadie's Gifford Lectures, The Shadow of Scotus:*

Voluntarists and intellectualists are in dispute with each other on a wide range of matters, with voluntarists emphasising the role of will and of our freedom in our relations with the world, in contradistinction to the intellectualists who emphasise the role of intellect and of our theoretical knowledge. The dispute is clearly articulated in the diverse responses to the question whether it is will or intellect that has primacy. Voluntarists say will has primacy and intellectualists ascribe primacy to intellect.

Broadie, L. 2. The issue of whether the will or intellect has primacy is a sort of overarching dispute, and it bleeds rather profusely but messily over into various subjects: metaphysics and the question of universals, theology and the nature of God, and moral theology and the nature of law and good. All these questions are somewhat related: Is Reason or Will preeminent in God? Is Reason behind creation: is God's creation explained best by His Ratio; or is creation better explained in terms of God's Will, His Fiat? Analogously, is Divine Reason or Divine Will preeminent in defining the content and the binding nature of divine law? Derivatively, is human reason or human will preeminent in human law? Morally speaking, is reason or will preeminent in determining the good? In terms of faith, what is preeminent: assent to the intellectual truth that God Is, or that superlative act of will, namely, love, in response to that God Who Is?

Blessed John Duns Scotus

The relatedness of the questions results in a sort of tendency, but it is only a tendency. Those who advocate the primacy of the will tend to be voluntarists in the area of morality, tend to be nominalist in the area of metaphysics, and tend to emphasize faith as an act of will rather than an act of intellect. On the other hand, those who advocate primacy of the intellect tend to place reason as preeminent in questions of morality, tend to be realist in their metaphysics, and tend to stress the intellectual aspect of the act of faith. This is why that scholar of Scottish philosophy Alexander Broadie, and a host of others, have observed that "the debate between voluntarists and intellectualists, between those who assign primacy to will and those who assign it to intellect, comes very close at times to being the debate between nominalists and realists." Broadie, L. 2. It comes "very close at times," but being close and being the same are two different things.**

This is especially true with respect to Scotus, for though he advocates the primacy of the will, he neither advocates a full voluntarism in his morality nor a full nominalism in his metaphysics. There is a rather large "spectrum" and there are significant "shades" in the debate between realism and nominalism, between moral voluntarists and intellectualists, and between those who advance the primacy of the will over intellect or intellect over will. Scotus falls in a "rather shady part of the spectrum, a part in which the two categories [nominalism/realism and voluntarist/intellectualist] apply to him in almost equal measure." Broadie, L. 2. There is, moreover, a significant spectrum and significant shades on the issue of the primacy of the will and the intellect, Scotus situating himself within the extremes of pure intellectualism or pure voluntarism. Scotus's notion of primacy of the will does not ascribe a pure or absolute primacy of the will over the intellect, but rather an attenuated or moderated, though nevertheless real, primacy.

The problem of the primacy of will over intellect is further complicated by the manner in which the intellect and will are distinguished by various parties. As we have seen, St. Thomas believed that man's reason is really distinct from his will, and man's will and intellect are therefore severable parts of man's soul. Henry of Ghent, on the other hand, taught that the will and intellect are essentially identical and not separate parts of a human soul, though they were, in relation to the soul, distinct.** Scotus taught that the distinction between human intellect and human will was somewhere in between--was neither real nor merely intellectual--but was formal but with a reference to reality: distinctio formalis a parte rei, what Broadie calls a "formal objective distinction." Broadie, L. 2. Ockham, of course, went even further than Scotus, indeed, went further than Henry of Ghent, in ascribing a sort of identity between will and intellect and in erasing any real distinction and almost any distinction at all between the two. Obviously, the more these two faculties are distinguished, the more important the question becomes over which has primacy. If will and intellect are one-and-the-same, the question of primacy becomes irrelevant. However, since Scotus rejects a merely rational or logical distinction between will and intellect, and retains an objectively-based distinction between will and intellect, albeit one weaker that St. Thomas, it remains intelligible for him "to ask which of them has primacy." Broadie, L.3.

In understanding Scotus's doctrine that the will is preeminent over reason, we must also recognize that this doctrine applies to what Scotus calls the free will, related to the affectio iustitiae, and not what he calls the natural will, which is related to the affectio commodis. There are natural imperatives, natural desires or wills, over which man has no freedom. Thus, the urge to eat, prompted by hunger, is something over which we have no control. Fear, which is the natural will's desire to avoid death, arises, as it were spontaneously, determinatively, unelicited. Christ's desire that the cup of suffering be taken from him. These are examples of natural will. They are essentially no different than the gravitational desire in a rock to the center of the earth.

On the other hand, there is within us a principle that can overcome the natural will, and it is this other principle which Scotus identifies as free will.

[T]he natural will is really not will at all, nor is natural volition true volition [quia voluntas non est voluntas nec velle naturale est velle], for the term "natural" effectively cancels or negates the sense of both "will" and "volition." Nothing remains but the relationship a power has to its proper perfection. Consequently, it is the same power that is called "natural will" [naturalis voluntas] as regards the necessary relationship it has to its perfection as is called "free" [libera]. The latter term expresses the proper an intrinsic relation that is specifically the will. . . . [The] "natural will" [may be taken] to men the will insofar as it elicits an act in conformity with its natural inclination, which would always be aimed at its own advantage. The will is called free, however, insofar as it lies in its power to elicit an act opposed to this inclination, for it possesses the power to elicit or not elicit and act in conformity with this inclination.

Ordinatio III, dist. 17 (Wolter, 154-55)

Man's free will can overcome his natural will, and he can continue his fast despite his hunger. Likewise, man's free will can overcome his natural will which prompts his of fear death and desire to flee, and face enemy fire. Christ, despite his desire that the cup of suffering be taken from him, can also say, as a result of his free will, that he desires not his natural will, but that his free will conforms to the Father's will. It is this free will, and not the natural will, that Scotus says has primacy over the intellect.

Now given all this, where does the Scotist doctrine of primacy of the will over the intellect lie? To try to locate Scotus, Broadie defines the two extreme positions of pure intellectualism and pure voluntarism.

The extreme intellectualist position is described by Broadie in his third Gifford Lecture:

According to [the extreme intellectualist position, the] will by itself is blind, and requires a judgment of intellect if an act of will is to occur. Thus intellect presents will with an object, a plan of action, and will wills that plan into reality. A corollary of the doctrine that will is blind is that it can do nothing by itself, and requires direction from intellect if it is to act. We are not to think here of a blind act of will as an act which is somehow performed though not directed to any particular goal. The intellectualist would say that on the contrary a will that wills blindly is a will that wills nothing. To will nothing is not to will at all. Hence blind willing is not one form of willing among others; it is instead not any form of willing.

Broadie, L. 3

Scotus finds such intellectualism (which is how he construes St. Thomas) problematic because it seems to rob will of its freedom. If intellect drives will, then it would appear that the will is determined by the intellect, and "intellectual determinism is not the less determinism for being of the intellectual variety." Broadie, L. 3. The intellect is not free: it is ordered to truth, and cannot make truth. Therefore, if freedom is to be found at all, it must be found in the will. Yet if the will is governed, determined by intellect, then free will seems to have disappeared.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have extreme voluntarism, a doctrine which Broadie defines as follows:

For extreme voluntarism declares that will acts freely to the extent that it is not responding to the deliverances of reason.

Broadie, L. 3. In other words, to be free, must freedom be entirely autonomous, autonomous even from the demands of reasons itself? This would be the logical position of extreme voluntarism. Obviously, this extreme voluntarism runs afoul of experience, of revelation, of reason itself. Moreover, such a view is impossible unless one holds will and intellect to be two completely different and distinct faculties. Scotus in no wise advocates such an autonomy, and his notion that the will and intellect are only formal distinctions of one-and-the-same soul would naturally put a brake on any advocacy of such a position. The reason for this is that espousal of such extreme voluntarism requires either that one maintain that man is essentially all will (like Ockham) or that will and reason are entirely separate faculties (such as Aquinas held). It is not possible to adopt an extreme voluntarist position when the will and intellect are formally though objectively distinct, though in reality one in the human soul. As a result of his particular doctrine of will and intellect as distinctiones formalis, Scotus could not advocate such extreme voluntarism because in every human act both will and intellect act, since they are only formal distinctions within one soul acting.

In adopting his notion of the primacy of the will over the intellect, Scotus situates himself, therefore, somewhere in between an extreme intellectualism and extreme voluntarism

That an act of will cannot occur without a prior exercise of intellect, and cannot occur without due account being taken by will of the content of the intellectual act, does not . . . imply that the act of will is fully determined by that prior intellectual act. There are degrees of influence that fall short of full determination, and it is such a limited influence that is at issue in this context. Scotus's phrase is pondus et inclinatio. The deliverances of intellect carry weight with will and incline it; but not more than that. No such deliverance can carry so much weight that will finds it irresistible. When the weight is irresistible will is simply not engaged at all, because for will to be engaged is for it to act as will, and an act of will is a free act. In this context to speak of will as free is to say that it has the power to produce opposite effects. Thus whatever it does now it could in these very same circumstances have done otherwise.

Broadie, L. 3 (citing to Collationes XVI, n. 3, in Scotus, Opera Omnia, ed. Wadding, vol. V, p. 209b-210b)

We shall look more deeply into the interaction of reason and will in the Scotus model.

___________________________________
*Alexander Broadie, The Shadow of Scotus, Gifford Lectures (1994-95). These series of six lectures are available on-line. Quotations in this post are to that on-line text and are referenced by lecture number. The lectures were also published under the title Alexander Broadie, The Shadow of Scotus: Philosophy and Faith in Pre-Reformation Scotland (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995).
**Broadie attributes the tendency of nominalists in metaphysics to be voluntarists in ethics to the translation of the metaphysical doctrine into the area of values (though the tendency also goes the other way: one's moral doctrine may also impinge upon one's metaphysical view of reality, and therefore "the voluntarist tends to be nominalist on the subject of universals"). Nominalists tend to apply their metaphysical views to the "existential status of values," the result of which is to minimize the extra-mental or intellectual reality of these values, ascribing them therefore to will, rather than intellect. Broadie, L. 2. In this view, voluntarism is therefore nominalism applied to values, whereas intellectualism is realism applied to values. The danger with voluntarism in ethics is that it threatens the rationalism of morality, making morality a matter of divinely revealed will, a will which has not foundation in reason, and therefore is potentially (if not actually) arbitrary. "The moral law is relative to the will which produces it." Broadie, L.2. Without a firm foundation in the Divine Will, moreover, voluntarism in ethics can easily corrupt into relativism, when the act of will is transferred from God to man. Broadie, L.2. For example, a "secular version of the divine command theory is to be found in certain writings of Sartre, and it is even on the title page of John L. Mackie's book on moral philosophy: Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong." Broadie, L.2.
**This is how Scotus understood it: Opus Oxoniense II, d. 16, quaestio unica, in Scotus, Opera Omnia, ed. Wadding, vol. XIII, pp. 23a–59b.

Natural Law's Modern Cousin Germain: Voluntarism and Law

VOLUNTARISM IS THE NOTION THAT law and perhaps even all reality is, at its kernel, an act of will, and not an act of reason. The debate is perennial, though the answer, while fraught with difficulty, is plain enough. While frequently categorized as a dilemma (e.g., the Euthyphro dilemma)* or a fight among equals--Avicebron v. Averroes, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham v. St. Thomas Aquinas--the sound opinion, and certainly the Thomist solution, appears to be on the side of reason. The Thomist will say that the intellect recognizes being and being as good, and the will is then naturally attracted to the good recognized by reason. For a man, reason, then is the ultimate source of action, of value, of reality. Those opposed to St. Thomas will say that it is the will which determines what is good, and the will determines itself, as it is not determined by reason. Do we love something, desire it, because it is good? The Thomist will answer yes, the Ockhamite no. Is something good because we love it, desire it? The Thomist will answer no, the Ockhamite yes. Some, like perhaps Suarez, try to straddle both sides of the issue.

Is Moses holding God's Will or God's Reason?

The question of whether reality or law is principally will or reason extends out to the very basis of reality and of law--to the eternal truth to the eternal law, and the participation of eternal law we called the natural law. Is moral obligation ultimately predicated upon God's will or God's reason? For Finnis, the answer is plain:

The grounding of ethical obligations in God's will becomes a prize specimen amongst conceptual fallacies collected for exhibition in elementary philosophy books.

NLNR, 343.

But the question persists, and moderns still ask the question and align themselves on either side of the watershed, with all positivists--Bentham, Austin, and Kelsen among them--on the wrong side.

_________________________________________
*Plato, Euthyphro, 10a (ἆρα τὸ ὅσιον ὅτι ὅσιόν ἐστιν φιλεῖται ὑπὸ τῶν θεῶν, ἢ ὅτι φιλεῖται ὅσιόν ἐστιν: Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?)

Universal Ethic-Convergences 7-Further Evolution

1.5. Further evolution

28. The modern story of the idea of natural law presents itself in certain aspects like a legitimate development of the teaching of medieval Scholasticism in a more complex cultural context, marked particularly with a greater sensitivity to subjective morality. Following these developments, we may point to the work of the 16th century Spanish theologians who, in the manner of the Dominican Francesco de Vitoria, resorted to the natural law to battle the imperialist ideology of some Christian States of Europe and to defend the rights of the non-Christian peoples of the Americas. In fact, such rights are inherent in human nature, and do not depend on any concrete circumstances or upon the Christian faith. The idea of natural law, moreover, concurred with the Spanish theologians’ efforts in finding the basis, that is, a universal norm, which regulated the relationship between peoples and States


29. But, from another perspective, in the modern period the idea of the natural law assumed an orientation which contributed to making it difficult to accept today. In the last centuries of the middle ages, there developed in the Scholasticism a voluntaristic current, whose cultural hegemony changed deeply the idea of the natural law. Voluntarism aimed at valuing the transcendent nature of the free subject in relation to all other contingencies. Against naturalism, which tended to tie God to the laws of nature, voluntarism sought to highlight the unilateral and absolute freedom of God, at the risk compromising His wisdom and of rendering His decisions arbitrary. In addition, against rationalism, suspected of subduing the human person to the order of the world, it exalted an understanding of liberty of pure indifference, one of pure power to choose the opposite, and thus risked detaching the person from his natural inclinations and the objective good.(34)

30. The results of the voluntarism on the doctrine of the natural law were numerous. First of all, while in St. Thomas of Aquinas the law was understood as a work of reason and an expression of a wisdom, voluntarism resulted in binding the law to the will alone, and to a will detached from its intrinsic ordination to the good. Following that reasoning, all the force of the law was seen to reside solely in the will of the lawgiver. So the law was expropriated of its intrinsic intelligibility. Under such conditions, morality was reduced to obedience to the commandments which disclosed the will of the legislator. Thomas Hobbes would therefore declare: "It is authority, not truth, that makes law” (auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem).(35) Modern man, in love with autonomy, could not rise up against a such vision of law. Thus, on the pretext of protecting the absolute sovereignty of God over nature, voluntarism lost any inner intelligibility. The thesis of the potentia Dei absoluta [absolute power of God], according to which God could work independently from his wisdom and goodness, relativized all existing intelligible structures and weakened the natural knowledge man was able to comprehend. Nature ceased to be a criterion in which one could recognize the wise will of God: man could receive such knowledge only from revelation.

31. From another angle, several factors led to the secularization of the notion of the natural law. Among these, one may mention the increasing divorce between Faith and Reason that characterized the end of the medieval age, and also some aspects of the Reformation, (36) but above all the desire to overcome the violent religious conflicts that bloodied Europe at the dawn of the modern age. There was a desire to find a source for the political unity of the human community, putting between parentheses so to speak, religious confessions. Now the doctrine of the natural law prescinds from any particular religious revelation, and therefore from every confessional theology. It claims to base itself only on the light of reason common to all of men and, presents itself as the ultimate norm in the secular field.

32. Additionally, modern rationalism made the existence of an absolute and normative order of intelligible essences accessible to reason, and entirely relativized their reference to God as the ultimate foundation of the natural law. The necessary order of essences, eternal and immutable, were certainly actualized by God, but, it was believed, they already possessed such coherence and rationality. The reference to God ought to be therefore optional. The natural law may be imposed upon all men "even if God did not exist (etsi Deus not daretur).”(37)

33. The modern rationalist model of the natural law is characterized by: (1) the existential belief in an unchanging and ahistoric human nature, of which reason can select perfectly the definition and the essential properties; (2) the placing between parentheses the concrete situation of the human persons in salvation history, marked by sin, and by grace, whose influence on the knowledge and on the practice of the natural law is however decisive; (3) the ideal that it is possible for reason to deduct a priori the precepts of the natural law from the essential definition of the human being; (4) from the expansive extension given to the principles so deduced, the natural law appears as if it were a code of laws already known, which rules govern almost the entirety of behavior. This tendency of extending the field of the determinations of the natural law existed at the origin of the serious crisis when, particularly with the progress of the human sciences, Western thought became much more conscious of the historicity of human institutions and of the cultural relativity of numerous behaviors that at times were justified by referring to the evidences of the natural law. This difference between a maximalist theory of natural law and the complexity of the empirical data explains in part the disaffection with the idea of a natural law. Because the notion of natural law can serve to elaborate a universal ethic in a secularized an pluralistic society like ours, it is necessary therefore to avoid presenting it in the rigid shape that it assumed, particularly in modern rationalism.

(34) Cf. Benedict XVI, Lecture at Regensburg on the Occasion of the Meeting with the Respresentatives of Science. (12 September 2006), in AAS 98 (2006) 733: "In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach . . . the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions."

(35) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part II, c. 26 “In the constituted state, the interpretation of the laws of nature do not depend on doctors, on the scribes who address issues of moral philosophy, but on the civil authority. In fact the only possible doctrine that is true is, that authority, not truth, is what makes law.” [Editor's note: the statement auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem is found only in Chapter 26 of Hobbe’s Latin version of Leviathan, not in the English]

(36) The position of the Reformers with regard to the natural law is not monolithic. Those like Martin Luther and John Calvin, being based on St. Paul, recognized the existence of the natural law as an ethical rule, even if is radically incapable of justifying man. "Nothing, indeed is more common, than for man to be sufficiently instructed in a right course of conduct by natural law, of which the Apostle here speaks. . . . .The end of the natural law, therefore, is to render man inexcusable, and may be not improperly defined--the judgment of conscience distinguishing sufficiently between just and unjust, and by convicting men on their own testimony depriving them of all pretext for ignorance." (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, c. 2, 22) (Henry Beveridge, trans.). In the three centuries following the Reformation, for the Protestants, the natural law served as the foundation of jurisprudence. Only with the secularization of the natural law in the 19th century, did Protestant theology keep a distance from it. From that time forward there arose an opposition between Protestant and Catholic opinions on the question of the natural law. But today, Protestant ethics seems to be displaying a new interest in the notion of natural law.

(37) This expression has its origin in Hugo Grotius, De iure belli et pacis, Prolegomena: "Haec quidem quae iam diximus locum aliquem haberent, etsi daremus, quod sine summo scelere dari nequit, non esse Deum."