Natural Law

The Fall, 2008 issue of Communio is dedicated to the theme of “Natural Law.” In his Letter to the Romans, Paul writes that “when Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves. . . . They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts” (2:14–15). . . .

“How are we to understand the famous passage from Veritatis splendor telling us that the body is a ‘sign’ and an ‘expression and promise of the gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator’?”

“Natural law thought can never be understood as outside history and neutral either philosophically or theologically. We only approach the world through a specific language and discourse, through a genealogy.”

“Catholic scholars need to go beyond a theologically neutered conception of natural law as a lingua franca with which to engage proponents of hostile traditions.”

“We are not our own. . . . Belonging to ourselves at its root is always anteriorly a belonging to God and to others, to the entire community of being.”

“The state’s openness to God, far from leading to theocracy, is actually the only thing that enables the state to distinguish itself properly from the Church.”

“Intimacy demands the acceptance of the other’s personal subjectivity and all that it implies: that is, the acceptance of the person in his entirety, and the offer of a space in which he can be himself, in the totality of his identity.”

“His truth exposes the lie of Soviet literature, but because he is totally a part of it, he converts the ‘Soviet’ into Russian. Having brought forth a national writer, Soviet literature ends, but it also acquires in itself the principle for its rebirth as Russian literature.”

“Thus from the very beginning the organic unity of ‘investigation’ and ‘literature’ was experienced by Solzhenitsyn as something given to him, as the inner law which was to determine his work, and which indeed governs the whole of it and not only Gulag .”