The Perspective of Love. R. J. Snell

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Even noting the distinction between common sense and theory engages in a distinct mode, namely, to advert to the way(s) one’s own intellect operates and functions to make and control meaning. Consequently, one “is confronted with the three basic questions: What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I do it?”33 In asking questions like this, one’s intelligence turns from the objects of common sense and theory to oneself as an “object” of study, or at least to one’s own intellectual performance and operations as “objectified,” and thus the realm of interiority, the third stage of meaning.34 Interiority is noetic exegesis, when consciousness becomes explicit to itself, when one’s own consciousness is studied from within, so to speak, from the perspective of oneself as a knower, and when one’s inquiry is about inquiry itself in a process of self-interpretation.35

The distinction between common sense and theory is significant in natural law, for that distinction separates naïve physicalism and naïve psychologism from a theoretical anthropology.36 So, too, does the realm of interiority distinguish contemporary versions of natural law, rooted in a first person perspective, from the classical versions rooted in theoretical anthropology and its concomitant metaphysics of the person. Upon these distinctions all my arguments rest, and so much more explanation is to be expected in the following chapters.

As much as I borrow from contemporary natural law’s use of interiority, the thrust of the book is to sketch an outline for natural law from a fourth realm of meaning, what Lonergan terms transcendence.37 His articulation of this realm is somewhat brief, written after severe illness and more hinted at than actualized. He does tell us, though, that such meaning moves “beyond the realms of common sense, theory, and interiority and into the realm in which God is known and loved,” or into a realm of what he terms “religious conversion,” the “flooding” of our hearts by God’s love and the fundamental remaking of our very selves and our consciousness.38

Consequently, we find not one natural law account but many, and those accounts can be differentiated not only by variations of content or articulation—this thinker says that, but that thinker says this—but more fundamentally by the realms of meaning in which differences operate and are formed. Such differentiation is, of course, fairly complex and demands “a rather highly developed consciousness” or phenomenological attunement.39 One has to have appropriated one’s own intellect.

      The Argument

      Following the hints made by Feser and Anderson, I suggest that many of the disputes in contemporary discourse about the natural law suffer from a lack of differentiation, thus confusing and conflating various accounts, merging together what should be distinct, and using arguments which may very well respond to one account as if they respond to another, even though they operate in widely different modes of meaning.

      I claim, too, that the usual Protestant objections against the natural law are similarly undifferentiated, thus not particularly responsive to contemporary natural law, and can be accepted by natural law in the mode of interiority, and sublimated in transcendence.

      To summarize the arguments I hope to demonstrate:

      1. Natural law operates within stages of meaning, and thus there are natural law accounts articulated from the standpoint of common sense, theory, and interiority. Each mode of meaning brings different emphases and implications for the account.

      2. The usual Protestant objections to natural law—the “Protestant Prejudice”—are objections directed towards natural law as it developed within the theoretical mode of meaning, and as such are reasonable and sensible objections, even if not entirely persuasive.

      3. Contemporary natural law—here I’ll include the work of John Paul II, Martin Rhonheimer, the so-called new natural law (NNL), and the cosmopolitanism of Bernard Lonergan—have moved beyond the theoretical mode into interiority, although the various thinkers express this in various ways: perspective of the acting person, first person accounts, subjectivity, internal point of view, phenomenological experience, intentionality, and so on. While these versions are not reducible to each other, and in fact disagree on several important issues, particularly in application, all operate from within the mode of interiority rather than theory.

4. Natural law understood from the mode of interiority is quite able to include the effects of sin on intellect and will, the role of grace, the importance of community, history (including salvation history), and the centrality of the Gospel. For Protestants to continue the usual objections without differentiation is to commit a straw man, attacking natural law as theory as if this defeats natural law as interiority.40 To be sure, there are able and competent proponents of classical or theoretical natural law and by no means do they admit defeat to either the Protestant objections or those of contemporary natural law. In no way will I claim to have answered or refuted classical positions, but insofar as Protestants continue to argue the way they have, they will not be responding to natural law as it is currently understood by many schools.

      5. An account of natural law incorporating history, sin, grace, and Gospel remains natural law, but it is natural law opening to a further mode of meaning beyond interiority. I am here attempting to articulate the broad outlines of natural law in a new mode, namely, from transcendence, the perspective of love.

      A Final Word

      In the following pages thinkers from quite distinct modes of thought and vocabularies are placed into conversation. In all of this, I can claim to represent no particular school, for while I am indebted to classical natural law accounts, I’m more sympathetic to the work of John Paul II, Martin Rhonheimer, and the NNL theorists, borrowing heavily from them all; but I don’t claim any of these schools or thinkers would endorse my arguments or understand the modes of meaning as I do. My thought is enriched by them all, and I gratefully acknowledge my debts, just as I would be delighted if they found my arguments helpful, but in the end I take their arguments down different paths. Of course, the major influence in all my work is the late Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), a Jesuit theologian-philosopher whose work on noetic exegesis governs the entirety of this project. As in my previous writings, I assume that Lonergan is not well known, and so I view this as a brief introduction to some aspects of his work, even as I take his thought into new conversations and directions.

      In the end, I want to claim that natural law is more complicated in its varieties than is often thought, but that since the natural law is a work of human reason, and since human reason is also governed and ordered by love (ordo amoris), natural law is best grasped insofar as love is grasped. The human person can best be understood in terms of love, and since love is bent by sin and healed only by grace, an account of natural law can certainly include those very aspects which the usual Protestant objections find lacking. But before we get to that love which reveals the very meaning of the human, we start with common sense and with theory.

1. Hart, “Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws,” 71–72.

2. Ibid., 72.

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