Natural Law & the Secular Mythos What Has Been Left "Unsaid" in Current Debates in Natural Law
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Gregory Morgan is Parish Priest of St Catherine Labouré Catholic Church, Australia. He is also Adjunct Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, and at the Catholic Institute of Sydney.Gregory Morgan's volume makes a cunning contribution to T&T Clark's <i>Ressourcement Catholic Theology and Culture</i> series. Less about finding ignored golden nuggets in the long tradition of Christian thinking, Morgan takes natural law and plays it off against contemporary thinkers in both Analytic and Continental philosophical theology. The upshot is that he usefully expands the types of questions one can pose about the framework of natural law reflection.
Graham McAleer, Loyola University Maryland, USA
This book defends a bold thesis: that the most preeminent contemporary defenders of natural law theory in fact carry water for the secular <i>mythos</i> they otherwise seek to outwit. The author makes the compelling case that most attempts to defend natural law today remain spellbound by the modern requirement that law remain unpolluted by any theological <i>a priori</i>. But this merely ties any prophetic possibility of the natural law to the secular pragmatism of pure reason or to political and ecclesiastical monisms. The alternative is exciting: through a deconstructive “work of memory,” Morgan proposes a way to hear anew the soteriological and eschatological voice of natural law untranslated, unnarrated, and unfictionalised by present prejudices. An absolute must-read read for any scholar hopeful that natural law might again find relevance beyond the reign of artificial foundationalisms.
Conor Sweeney, Christendom College, USA
This book argues that natural law – when construed as an epistemological and trans-cultural lingua franca, adjudged capable of legitimating the rational intelligibility and universal applicability of specific Christian moral principles within contemporary “secular” discourse – has failed.
Through a detailed analysis of the contributions of three prominent natural law theorists who are located within a shared philosophical-theological tradition, namely, John Finnis, Jean Porter, and John Milbank, the text illuminates the extent to which this failure is as much intramural as it is extramural.
Morgan explores how new horizons open up for natural law if the theological “unsaid(s)” are allowed to surface and the disremembering power of the secular mythos is overcome. The final chapter(s) of the book addresses one such horizon— that the theoretical fulcrum of the natural law lies not in its perceptual self-evidence or in its immanent secularity; but rather in its subtle provision of an immanent eschatology.
Part One: Deconstruction
Introduction
Chapter One
The “Windy Mysticism”
Chapter Two
On (“New”) Natural Law: John Finnis’ Analytical Response to its ‘Cultured Despisers’
Chapter Three
Jean Porter’s Scholastic Defence of Ethical Naturalism: Natural Law as a Theological Locus for Contemporary Moral Reflection
Chapter Four
John Milbank’s Genealogical Riposte: Natural Law as a Hylozoistic Re-Narration of Divine Government
Part Two - Reconstruction
Chapter Five
Deconstructing the Secular Mythos
Chapter Six
An Eschatological and Anamnetic: Re-narration of Natural Law
Bibliography
Index
In our time, Catholic political and sacramental theology are hot-spots of controversy. The question of the Church's relationship to public life and to nation-states has been a vexed one in particularly modern forms since the French Revolution. Some of the most important and controversial documents of Vatican II treat this domain, including Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes. The issue of how Catholic Social Doctrine--itself a relatively recent development--relates to Marxism and to other political and populist movements is a perennial one, as are questions regarding how to conceive of the inaugurated kingdom on earth in relation to the particular cultures in which this kingdom takes shape and how to conceive of the inaugurated kingdom in relation to the eschatologically consummated kingdom.
The present series invites work in a wide variety of Catholic theological areas related to political and sacramental theology, including public theology, Catholicism and culture, Christ and inculturation, religious freedom, history and Spirit, eschatology, the 'political' or public significance of baptism and the Eucharist, reconciliation and the theology of peace, pacifism and just war, sacramentality, religious violence and modernity, truth and tolerance, the problem of ideology, and so on. This series will promote the publication of Catholic works from around the world (not confined to the Anglosphere) that centre upon the work of grace in human, including political, history and institutions.