¹ Cf. Hauerwas, Stanley, Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 43Google Scholar.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid., 44. Elsewhere, Hauerwas notes that natural law (and so our vision of nature) is “bound to be distorted” when moral enquiry excludes the church (45). Furthermore, a “correct” understanding of nature depends necessarily on an account of “the politics of God's law” discretely available in the Decalogue, but only sufficiently interpreted by the Christian community (45).

⁴ Ibid., 58.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Elsewhere, McCabe has noted that, despite natural law's being “inadequate, it is not a false picture and moreover can serve as a basis of discussion with those who do not know of the life of grace.” Cf. McCabe, “Contraceptives and Natural Law,” New Blackfriars 46 (Nov. 1964), 89‐95: at 91. In the remainder of this paper, I am seeking to show how we might read the first two chapters of Law, Love & Language as McCabe's take on why it is indeed so that natural law functions in this way for Christians and non‐Christians.

⁷ Cf. the pristine example in Fletcher, Joseph, “What's in a Rule?: A Situationist's View,” in Norm and Context in Christian Ethics, Outka, Gene H. and Ramsey, Paul, eds. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968), 325–49Google Scholar.

⁸ Herbert McCabe, Law, Love & Language, 21.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia IIae q. 25 a. 2, sed contra, where Aquinas follows Augustine in envisioning love as the cause of all passions. In the corpus, Aquinas notes that the priority of love is a feature of our being ordered – as desiring agents – to necessarily pursue the good: “Good and evil are the object of the concupiscible faculty. Now good naturally precedes evil; since evil is the privation of good. Wherefore all the passions, the object of which is good, are naturally before those, the object of which is evil, ‐ that is to say, each precedes its contrary passion: because the quest of a good is the reason for shunning the opposite evil.” Rather than placing love in a pre‐moral category that requires only something like “responsibility” in action, Aquinas and McCabe place love squarely in the middle of the moral life, necessarily within the matrix of true and apparent goods, means and obstacles, and all the other contingencies that must be navigated if we are to speak meaningfully about what one ought and ought not do.

¹¹ Cf. ST IIa IIae q. 23 a. 1.

¹² McCabe, Law, Love & Language, 12.

¹³ Cf. Fletcher, “What's in a Rule?” at 335.

¹⁴ McCabe, Law, Love & Language, 17.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid., 18.

¹⁷ Ibid., 23.

¹⁸ Ibid., 24.

¹⁹ Cf. ST Ia IIae q. 25 a. 2.

²⁰ Ibid., resp.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Cf. ST Ia IIae q. 28 aa. 1‐5.

²³ Cf. ST Ia IIae q. 26 a. 1, resp.

²⁴ “Dilection” here refers to a specifically rational love that “presupposes the judgment of reason.”

²⁵ ST Ia IIae q. 26 a. 3, resp.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Ibid., 23.

²⁸ Cf. IIa IIae q. 23 a. 1 obs. 1‐3.

²⁹ Cf. IIa IIae q. 23 a. 1, sed contra where Aquinas abbreviates Jn 15:15: “I will not now call you servants…but My friends.” It is surely significant, though beyond the scope of our immediate concern, that this verse lies at the center of one of the richest Johannine passages: from the footwashing in the upper room to Christ's high priestly prayer on behalf of his disciples. Within this broader passage, the themes of God's love for humanity and of the possibility of friendship with the Triune God who dwells in the hearts of his disciples are evocative of the deep import Aquinas's question has for the Christian life.

³⁰ That is, ‘benevolence.’

³¹ Ibid., resp.

³² Ibid.

³³ Ibid., emphasis added. Interestingly, Nygren argues that a human's “love towards God” can really only be effectively understood in terms of pagan eros. Such love is naturally acquisitive and in perfect sync with the human desire for the divine. Because of this acquisitive aspect, “man's love can never be spontaneous and unmotivated” as God's is. Nygren writes, “Man loves God, not because on comparing Him with other things he finds Him more satisfying than anything else, but because God's unmotivated love has overwhelmed him and taken control of him, so that he cannot do other than love God.” Cf. Nygren, Anders, Agape & Eros, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953): 212–14Google Scholar. Rousselot solves this problem by recovering certain aspects of Aquinas's metaphysics to show how a human can spontaneously and naturally love God more than the self. Cf. Rousselot, Pierre, The Problem of Love in the Middle Ages: A Historical Contribution, trans. Vincelette, Alan. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, especially at 82‐93, where Rousselot develops Aquinas's theory of whole/part to show how an individual person naturally loves the good of the whole more than the good of the self.

³⁴ Ibid., 35.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ Ibid., 36.

³⁷ Ibid., 44‐5.

³⁸ Ibid., 45.

³⁹ It is surely significant that McCabe does not explicitly follow Aquinas in beginning his discussion of natural law in terms of participation in the eternal law of the Divine Wisdom. However, given McCabe's focus on the part's relationship to the whole and the natural communication that takes place between the two, it may be possible to see shades of Aquinas's treatment of the Divine Wisdom in its two operations.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 45.

⁴¹ Ibid., 60, quoting Karl Marx, “Economic Studies from Marx's Notebooks” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology.

⁴² Ibid., 60.

⁴³ Ibid., 61.

⁴⁴ Cf. Ibid., 65‐6: “The idea that discovering and expressing our real selves, doing, as I say, what we really want to do, will result in happiness and contentment in any immediate sense is simply infantile. Yet there must be some kind of happiness or contentment at a deeper level. The use of the natural law is to say ‘this is what you really want – isn't it?’ You may take this to a certain extent on trust even though you are not conscious of wanting this at all, but in the end the proposal of the law must correspond to what you recognize as your real desires. We can only expect happiness when we arrive at the stage of fulfilling our deep desires not because we have been told what they are, but because we personally feel them. Such genuine freedom can only be the result of a long period of investigation into our true wants.”

⁴⁵ Cf. Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae q. 94 a. 2, resp.

⁴⁶ McCabe, Law, Love & Language, 63.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 62, quoting D.H. Lawrence in Apropos of Lady Chatterly's Lover.

⁴⁸ Cf. Ibid., 63, where McCabe briefly describes his sense of the lawgiver in this natural law theory: “The natural law thus does not require a lawgiver, except in the sense that we may regard our humanity as given.” I read this as an affirmation of Aquinas's treatment of the Divine Wisdom, which we have already seen (n. 20 above) is the ground of our ordering to, choice, and pursuit of any goods whatsoever, including our natural inclinations. That is, the way our humanity works is most intelligible within the created order established by the wisdom of the Blessed Trinity. More on this below.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 67.

⁵⁰ Cf. ST Ia IIae q. 94 a. 4, resp, where Aquinas notes that the general principles of natural law are indeed the same in all persons with regard to “truth and rectitude” and are equally known by all. “But as to certain matters of detail, which are conclusions, as it were, of those general principles, it is the same for all in the majority of cases, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge; and yet in some few cases it may fail both as to rectitude, by reason of certain obstacles […], and as to knowledge, sinc in some the reason is perverted by passion, or evil habit, or an evil disposition of nature […].” In other words, Aquinas and McCabe appear to share a sense that something else is necessary in order to overcome the obstacles of sin and vice. Natural law, then, may serve pedagoically to expose to us our own need of aid, even at the heart of our freedom.

⁵¹ Ibid., 63.

⁵² ST Ia IIae q. 91 a. 2, resp.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ McCabe, Law, Love & Language, 63.

⁵⁵ For my interpretation of q. 91 a. 2, I rely on the work of Long. Cf. Steven A. Long, “Speculative Foundations of Moral Theology and the Causality of Grace,” Studies in Christian Ethics 23.4 (2010): 397‐414, at 412‐13: “All creatures receive from God their being, their natures, the ordering of their natures by way of natural motion/inclination, the application of natural motion to act, and of course the hierarchy of ends which specifies these acts. If any part of this passive participation in the eternal law is excised, then just so far does one subtract it from the governance of the eternal law. Given the Molinist and subsequent [to Aquinas] libertarian formulations of the nature of human liberty, it is inevitable that the rational creature be understood as beyond divine providence. On such an understanding, neither law nor grace can coherently retain pertinence to the practical life, because the free voluntary perfections of man qua man are understood to lie outside the divine causal providence and accordingly as a domain wholly separated from God and eternal law. […] Historically speaking, both Molinism and ensuing enlightenment negations of metaphysics have contributed to nourishing the great Ur Myth of Modernity: the fable that, alone of all the known cosmos, the rational agent is demiurgically self‐activating and in no essential dependence upon God in the use of its freedom. Accordingly that which constitutes our deepest need – for aid in our free choices – comes to be viewed as something simply impossible, and the domain of human freedom comes to be construed as utterly autonomous.” Incidentally, McCabe's suggestion that natural law doctrine can be read as an austere reduction to the first principle of practical reason may be somewhat misleading. For if our relationships to goods and evils can be characterized as our being ordered to freedom by a providential Creator, then the first principle of practical reason is neither austere nor unhelpful, but rather the first inkling that being is participatory.

⁵⁶ ST Ia IIae q. 93 a. 5, resp. Here, Thomas reflects on whether or not natural contingents are subject to the eternal law, providing his reader with the material necessary to interpret his treatment of an “inward motive principle” in a. 6.

⁵⁷ Needless to say, our sharing in this mode of participation remains analogical. It is not as if there is a 1:1 correspondence between human and animal biological life with human rational capacities forming the sort of icing on the cake or a really useful add‐on. Rather, as we saw above with McCabe's treatment of the human as an irreducibly linguistic being, human capacities transform even biological life.

⁵⁸ ST Ia IIae q. 93 a. 6, resp, quoting Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics ii.1.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Ibid. Corruption by vice and darkening by sin are the reasons, for Aquinas, that the natural law can remain universally valid with regard to the knowledge and rectitude of general principles but simultaneously fail with regard to knowledge and/or rectitude in the practical application of the principles to specific circumstances (cf. a. 4).

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² Cf. Ia IIae q. 85.

⁶³ Hauerwas, Sanctify Them in the Truth, 43.