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      The Perspective of Love

      Natural Law in a New Mode

      R. J. Snell

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      The Perspective of Love

      Natural Law in a New Mode

      Copyright © 2014 R. J. Snell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Pickwick Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      isbn 13: 978-1-62032-713-5

      eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-343-1

      Cataloging-in-Publication data:

      Snell, R. J., 1975–

      The perspective of love : natural law in a new mode / R. J. Snell.

      xii + 208 pp. ; 23 cm—Includes bibliographical references.

      isbn 13: 978-1-62032-713-5

      1. Religion and law. 2. Natural law. 3. Natural theology. I. Title.

      BL65.L33 S62 2014

      Manufactured in the USA

      For all in the Templeton Honors College,

      Fellows in the Apostolate of the Further Question

      Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This . . . is why Christ the Redeemer “fully reveals man to himself.”

      —John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis

      Preface

      Oddly, however, it is the doctrine of the Fall which renders natural law a non-starter, a dead end theologically and culturally for so many Christians, mainly but not only Protestants. Culturally, the argument goes, the natural law fails to persuade anyone not already on board because it relies (generally under deep cover) on theological commitments about creation, design, purpose, and human identity. Theologically, natural law downplays the Fall, overlooks the noetic effects of sin, ignores salvation history, makes the Gospel non-essential to the moral life, confines grace to a heavenly or spiritual domain, and thinks that the human can know and act well without first knowing and acting like Christ and being formed by his Church and its sacraments. Not only does natural law smuggle in theology, it’s bad theology (likely Pelagian).

      But if the denial of natural law by non-believers justifies metatheory, so does friendly fire from Christians, which is now almost a barrage. This text engages metatheory in an attempt to show that the “Protestant Prejudice” should be incorporated into natural law theory, but also that the usual objections fail to distinguish the varieties of natural law theory; while the arsenals of the Protestant Prejudice may score direct hits on some modes—what I’ll term the common sense and theoretical—they are far less troubling to what I’ll term the modes of interiority and transcendence.

      After a brief introduction explaining the project and its context, Part One differentiates natural law as common sense, as theory, and as interiority, explaining how the Protestant Prejudice tends to overlook interiority. Part Two examines interiority in more detail, grouping together a range of contemporary thinkers beginning from the first person perspective of ethics. As opposed to earlier, or classical accounts, these thinkers do not begin with theoretical anthropology, metaphysics of the person, or metaphysical biology but share a methodology of noetic exegesis—adverting to the performance and intentionality of the concrete person’s practical reason—and so can be grouped together, despite their differences: (1) John Paul II and Martin Rhonheimer, (2) contemporary natural law, or the so-called “new natural law” of Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, and others, and (3) the methodological phenomenology of the Canadian Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan. While these three “schools” do not agree on every detail, they provide a broadly similar starting point from which to address the usual Protestant concerns.

      In Part Three, I outline natural law in the mode of transcendence, explaining how concrete subjects undergo both the reign of sin and the transformation of love. Without negating the natural, the Holy Spirit allows the proper function of natural reason again, and natural law operates as a normative account of human authenticity—an account of natural law rooted in value. Rather than denying the Protestant objections, I provide a non-abstract, non-conceptualist account of the natural law that (1) incorporates the Protestant objections, (2) avoids the usual philosophical problems, and (3) allows a normative and publically accessible account of human flourishing genuinely adequate to human nature.

      This is natural law in a new mode, the mode and perspective of love.

      ❂

      My

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