Natural Law and Christian Communities in Early Modern Europe: Reflections on a Colloquium
As Sarah Mortimer indicated in her recent post this colloquium brought together a group of scholars from a variety of different methodological perspectives for a day of discussion focused on the theme of “natural law and Christian communities.” In recent years, there has been a great deal of scholarship about the development of early modern natural law theory. Although Christian ideas about the natural and the supernatural, and about sovereignty and community, often provided important context for the development of natural law theory in early modernity, these elements are sometimes understudied, or are only considered in relative isolation by disparate methodological groups. In planning this colloquium, it was our hope that this event might enable a truly interdisciplinary conversation that would bring together a wide profile of current perspectives from different fields. In this regard, our hopes were not disappointed, and I can say that in my view this colloquium was a great success!
For my own part, this colloquium provided a unique opportunity to explore the implications of the developing connection between natural law and reason in early modernity. During early modernity, European understandings of law and nature underwent a series of important developments that would have lasting implications for the way in which modern approaches to law, reason, and the human person would be subsequently articulated. Although the intellectual landscape of early modernity continued to be marked by continuities with its pre-modern past, the increasingly globalized perspective that resulted from the empiric expansions and missionary aspirations of the period also caused the academy and society at large to wrestle increasingly with the implications of those cultural, geographical and religious pluralities that were encountered. Within this context, the idea of natural law developed alongside other important early modern conceptual developments like human rights and the law of nations.
Fundamentally, the ideas of law and nature are not new to the Western tradition, of course. With roots in the pre-Christian classical past, as a concept law played an important role in the medieval cosmologies of the Latin West. In these contexts, the relationship between divine and human realities was often structured by a characteristic set of approaches to the concept of reason (as ratio), that positioned human nature in relation to both positive and natural species of law. Although these pre-modern perspectives would continue to provide a degree of context for the developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the work of figures like Suárez, Grotius and others, the outlines of a distinctly modern approach to reason and the communal aspect of the human person would also begin to emerge.
Framed against the backdrop of these larger trends, my own paper focused on a particular set of developments within the sixteenth century Salamanca school, and within the broader context of early modern Iberian scholasticism, that highlight the evolving interplay between reason and revelation in Christian accounts of the academic discipline of theology. Of particular interest for me was the influence of the so-called “Indes” controversy on the development of Christian accounts of revelation during this period. These well-known debates, which took place during the mid sixteenth century against the backdrop of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, were the occasion for important developments within the Salamanca school on subjects like human rights, natural religion, and international law.
In addition to providing context for developments in natural law theory later in the sixteenth century, these mid-sixteenth century conversations also had implications for a range of other topics as well, including the academic study of theology. For the original scholastic thinkers of the thirteenth century, theology or ‘sacra doctrina’ was understood in conjunction with those pre-modern approaches to the function and scope of the concept of reason that were characteristic of the Middle Ages. However, because of the continued role of medieval texts like Peter Lombard’s Sentences and, increasingly, the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, responses to the new questions that arose during this period were often articulated within the textual context that was of medieval, rather than early modern, origin.
Fra Angelico's Madonna and Child with St Dominic and St Thomas Aquinas c. 1435
The interplay between these new early modern textualities and their original medieval sources has been a particular research interest of mine, and at this colloquium I was happy to have the chance to explore some of the broader implications of the rise of natural law reasoning, especially for the relationship between philosophy of mind and the academic discipline of theology. Although the connections between second scholasticism and those influential early modern philosophies of mind fond in thinkers like Suárez, Descartes, and Spinoza is relatively well-studied (see, for example, the work of R. Ariew), in the research that I presented at this colloquium I argued that, even in the mid-sixteenth century Salamanca school, natural law reasoning was already being applied in ways that already displayed identifiable features of a modern approach to reason and the human person, in which the autonomy of ‘natural’ reason was increasingly framed in contradistinction to the so-called ‘supernatural.’ By contrast, although Aquinas and other medievals certainly distinguish between rational demonstration and the contents of divine revelation, both were able to coexist within the life of the mind as habitual intellective species, each playing unique and mutually complementary roles in the fulfillment of the teleological whole of human nature. Although many iterations of post-modernity have sought to rehabilitate those aspects of human life and experience that were disenchanted by the self-reflexive autonomy of early modern rationalism and its conceptions of human nature, it is my view that the textual intersections between the medieval and the early modern world that can be found in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, particularly in Iberia, remain a fruitful resource for scholarly reflection even today.
As I reflect on this colloquium, my own participation in the conversations that took place at this event has underscored for me the importance of natural law as a subject of further research, and strengthened my own appreciation for the multifaceted way in which accounts of nature, reason, and the human person, developed and evolved in the early modern West. Each of the other speakers at this colloquium offered important insights in this regard. Among the many contributions, I was particularly intrigued by the way in which a number of speakers explored the relationship between reason and biblical textuality. For example, while Anna Becker and Tim Stuart-Buttle approached scripture as an individual source among others, Sam Head and Sarah Mortimer identified a more normative role for scripture; in a similar vein, Hanna Dongsun Lee’s paper identified the different roles played by the Church in establishing the authority of scriptural interpretation. Based on my own research, my view is that developments in early modern thinking about the concepts of reason and nature often influenced the way in which the textuality of scripture was positioned in relation to the personal and communal dimensions of human nature—these trends are visible in some Salamancan authors like Vitoria, who engage with Aquinas’s approach to reason and revelation (see ST Ia Q. 1) through the lens of individual human obligations under the natural law. By using the personal legal obligations of natural law as a point of departure for the project of theology, for many later Iberian thinkers like Cano and Bellarmine both scripture and ecclesial authority effectively function as supernatural dialectical sources that inform the fulfillment of these legal obligations. (On tensions between speculative and dialectical models of reasoning in early modern approaches to theological method, see my The Cleansing of the Heart (2017), especially chapter four).
By bringing together a methodologically diverse group of scholars all working on different aspects of these themes, I believe this colloquium has effectively highlighted the value of interdisciplinary work, especially in this area, and has reinforced for me the need to continue to pursue collaborative projects of this kind in the future. Although in many ways early modern scholarship is currently flourishing, the possibilities for future research in this area remain vast. From my own perspective, within the history of Christianity subfield early modern theology—and its broader intellectual and cultural contexts—remains understudied. By continuing to explore these themes, it is my hope that the scholarly community can continue to deepen its understanding of this unique and influential period of Western intellectual history.
Reginald Lynch is the Associate Professor of Dogmatic Theology and Historical Theology at The Dominican House of Studies
