God and the Natural Law: A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas, by Fulvio Di Blasi, trans. David Thunder. South Bend, IN: St. Augustin’s, 2006. Hardcover. 264 pages. $37.50.
Fulvio Di Blasi graduated Summa cum Laude in Law from the University of Milan in 1994. He then received a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Law from the University of Palermo in 1998. Since 2000 he has occasionally been a visiting scholar and research associate at the University of Notre Dame. In this book, entitled God and the Natural Law, Di Blasi critically interacts with the arguments of “the new natural law” theorists and belies their theoretical details. With much accuracy, Di Blasi covers the main arguments of contemporary ethicists that have tried to preserve the credibility of their philosophies in constructing a natural law theory. In order to have credibility in the post-Kantian and analytical world, contemporary natural-law theorists have attempted to gain independence both from the will of God and from human nature. However, in liberating the natural law from both God and human nature, two conundrums arise: 1). can there be a natural-law theory without the “natural” component?, and 2). can there be a natural-law theory without “law” given by a legislator? After all, natural law (lex naturalis) is an ethical theory that posits the existence of a law of nature whose content is everywhere valid. Natural law can be used synonymously with natural justice or natural right (ius naturale), though most contemporary theorists separate the two.
Di Blasi gives an original analysis of the current debate in ethics and politics in the early chapters. Di Blasi does this at the beginning in order to give the background for an adequate understanding of the concept of natural law. These two movements build the foundation for the key contribution of the book, which is the recovery of the meaning of both the will of God and the order of nature, which were main concepts of natural law theory as posited by Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas insists that natural law has an independent derivation, asserting that human reason could approach but not fully comprehend the eternal law and needs to be supplemented by divine law. Because knowledge and the love of God were, for Aquinas, the most basic presuppositions of natural law, all human laws are to be judged by their conformity to the natural law. Natural law, according to Aquinas, is inherently teleological in that it aims at goodness (For more discussion about teleology, see Oskar Gruenwald, “The Teleological Imperative,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies XIX [2007]: 1-18). So then, natural law and human action both imply a harmony and interaction between nature and the will of God. Di Blasi maintains throughout that, for Aquinas, humanity’s moral sense is not only inseparable from the knowledge of God, but also coextensive with it.
God and the Natural Law is a welcome addition to Thomistic studies. Within it, Di Blasi clearly shows that natural law is nothing other than the encounter between God and humanity. In fact, Di Blasi supports the notion that natural law is the way in which we discover ourselves as part of the project of God’s creation. Di Blasi also makes important contributions to Thomistic understandings of God’s causality. For example, Di Blasi notes that, according to Aquinas, God is present in reality as the first, uncaused cause of all things (102). Moreover, Di Blasi recognizes that Aquinas held that God was “in” all things, both from their inception and in their sustenance. Di Blasi approvingly references Aquinas in his contention that the effect preexists virtually in the efficient cause (105). Di Blasi’s recounting of Aquinas’ view of causality is, if there be one, the weak point of this book. I would like to have seen from Di Blasi how Aquinas would have responded to newer causality theories, in particular to that of emergence. Emergence theory strongly denies, for example, the preexistence of the effect within the cause. The remainder of this book review will focus, then, on the emergence theory of causality, and suggest questions – by implication – of how it could fruitfully be engaged in the future by Aquinas scholars (of which I am not), because Thomistic understandings of God as the primary cause and creatures as secondary causes seemingly result in unnecessary bifurcations. Pointedly, I would like to see from Aquinas scholars, therefore, how Aquinas would have reacted to the notion that natural law could be an emergent system, of which the whole is greater than the parts.
Emergence is the view that novel and unpredictable occurrences are naturally produced in nature, and that said novel structures, organs and organisms are not reducible to their component parts. Emergence radicalizes the immanence of God within creation, much in the same way that Aquinas held that God was “in” all things. In brief, emergence is the “theory that cosmic evolution repeatedly includes unpredictable, irreducible, and novel appearances” (Philip Clayton, Mind & Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness [Oxford: Oxford University, 2004], 39). Emergence is insistent that the “whole” has an active non-additive causal influence on its “parts.” Aristotle’s principle of entelechy foreshadows the rise of the emergentist position.
Emergentists argue that the reductionary and bifurcated tendencies within natural science are not tenable. No longer can one seek to explain all things as being merely reducible to their physical entities or microphysical causes (i.e. physicalism). Although substance dualism was probably the dominant metaphysical view in Western history from Aristotle to Kant, one cannot to hold to a bipartite construction of physical components and spiritual components. The revolution in metaphysics wrought by Kant undercuts physicalism and dualism.
The resurgence of emergence in the twentieth century has done much to deflate the bottom-up “new synthesis” within evolutionary thought. The “new synthesis” posits that the behavior of organisms – and even ecosystems – can be explained by referencing the gene interactions that underlie them (mere efficient causality). This “new synthesis” is in process of being replaced by an “interactionist consensus” in which neither genes nor environments, neither nature nor nurture, suffice wholly for the production of phenotypes. The earth, then, is an active, empowering environment – even an empowering agent – that brings forth life by various independent processes. At the same time, the earth is an environment of various heterogeneous life-processes. So then, the earth brings forth, but it does not bring forth itself.
All in all, God and the Natural Law is an enjoyable and profitable read. Those individuals who consider themselves “traditional” natural law theorists will find much support for their interpretation from Di Blasi, who has positioned himself as a formidable and competent scholar for Thomistic studies in the twenty first century. In this book, Di Blasi makes contributions to the renaissance of natural law theory by highlighting the two basic presuppositions of it, according to Aquinas: knowledge and the love of God. I suggest that, going forward, Thomistic scholars would be well-served by engaging the manner in which God is present in “all” things, perhaps thereby adding to the discussion regarding the causal joint between God and nature. In conclusion, I look forward to the next installment from Fulvio Di Blasi.
Bradford McCall
Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA.