205 Law in Time: Legal Theory & Legal History types of law – eternal, natural, human, and divine – differentiated by the wills that enact them, their proper jurisdiction, and the mode and stringency of their efficacy. 11 Aquinas defines eternal lawas divine will’s rule over “the whole community of the universe […] by Divine Reason.”(AQUINAS, 1972, Q. 91, Art. 1) . Eternal law includes all laws of nature ruling over the entire realm ofphysis . The laws of nature have absolute efficacy, as nothing can escape them except per special divine dispensation in the form, for example, of miracles. Nature, passive and unconscious, blindly submits to its governing laws, and in so doing displays the normativity of God’s reason. In contrast to the universal jurisdiction of eternal law over nature, natural lawhas jurisdiction over humankind. It is, strictly speaking, still a subsystem of eternal law, albeit a specialized one for it commands upon legal subjects that, unlike the rest of nature, are active and conscious. Humanity’s agency is explained by its limited yet significant partaking in God’s rational attributes: “the rational creature is subject to divine providence in the most excellent way […]. [w]herefore it has a share of the eternal reason.” (AQUINAS, 1972, Q. 91, Art. 1). Natural law is a discovery of practical reason and binding in human conscience, as required by a humanity whose comprehension of the divine is only deep enough to develop a conscious awareness of human imperfections in comparison to divine perfection. Natural law comes to the assistance of fundamentally imperfect creatures who nonetheless long for the good. It is precisely humanity’s use of rational faculties to discover norms that directs agency toward the common good, which uncovers the natural laws of humanity – “and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law.” (AQUINAS, 1972, Q. 91, Art. 1). Thus it is the “imprint” on people of a “divine light” that entrusts in them, as the rational segment of God’s creation, coresponsibility for the government of the cosmos according to the good. In their possession and use of this natural reason, individuals join God as active participants in the government through law of the universe, although restricted to a small but all-important segment of it: human 11 I here draw from a relatively more detailed study of Aquinas’s natural law in BARROZO, supra note 106.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjEzNzYz