Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Ideas.
Mattes, Mark C.
Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity and
Discontinuity in the History of Ideas. By Francis Oakley. New York:
Continuum, 2005. 143 pages. Cloth. $39.95.
This book comprises four lectures given by Oakley at the University
of Wisconsin Madison, which examine the secularization of political and
social theory. Counter to political theorist Leo Strauss, Oakley sees
the development of a secular social theory not in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, with Hobbes and Grotius, but much earlier in the
thirteenth century with the thinking of William of Ockham. Now, Ockham
was no secularist. However, Oakley contends that his thinking as
volunteerist in orientation makes him the "grandfather" of
later thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke. Hence, it is not a stretch to
see Ockham as the "father of subjective right," what we
Americans would call individual liberties or the rights of the
individual.
Natural law affirms that humans have access to norms of justice
that are natural and universal rather than conventional and provincial.
Such norms of justice are species-centered, then, and not
ethos-centered. Natural law, as it developed from the Stoics and through
the Middle Ages, assumes some form of "ontological
essentialism" or realism, that is, that such law is grounded in
cosmic, ultimate reality. Most importantly for Oakley, the Middle Ages
offered no monolithic viewpoint on such realism; there were a plurality
of natural law theories for medieval thinkers and this fact bears upon
theories of natural rights in early modernity. The break with the
essentialist bias was with the Nominalists who, with their commitment to
the untrammeled freedom of God, pushed a volunteerism that Neoplatonic
thinking inherent in Thomism could not accommodate.
This view of late antiquity drew an analogy between the macrocosm
and the microcosm, between nature and humans. For the Stoics, then, the
concept of law could envelop both prescriptive and descriptive
propositions. Likewise, Augustine reconciled the Neoplatonic god with
the God of the Bible. In this light, we encounter a specific conundrum:
if the universe is rational, is God willful?, but if God is willful, is
the universe rational? The Thomists accentuated God's reason, while
the Nominalists accentuated God's will. The latter's
affirmation of God's absolute power underscored the contingency of
order in nature. In this regard, they hearkened back to the scriptural
Yahweh who limits his power by means of establishing a covenant. For
Ockham and the Nominalists, unlike the Thomists, it is God's will
which is the only immutable and objective standard of morality. Acts are
good, then, not because they are analogous to truth, beauty, and
goodness as such, but because they conform with God's will. A
secondary strain which helped to secularize modern social theory was
Machiavelli's position that reoriented people from the question of
how we ought to live to realistic approaches to how people actually
live.
This short book is meaty, but offers a relevant critique of the
rise of the modern views of ethics. It suggests that modernity is not
anti-medieval, but an extension of a certain form of medievalism,
Nominalism. While there is no direct correlate between his thesis and
ministry, Oakley offers an important theory about how we are to
understand the context in which we do our ministries.
Mark C. Mattes
Grand View College
