Earlier this week, I offered my own take on the enthralling conversation that took place at the Public Discourse over the past few months. Its subject: the nature of America's philosophical foundation and the worthiness of said foundation (summed up quite nicely here by PD's managing editor, Gabby Speach). Most notably, I took issue with Hillsdale College professor Nathan Schlueter's insistence that the American founders were cognizant successors of the pre-modern Western tradition of natural law, successfully fusing the thought of Aquinas and Aristotle with that of the Enlightenment thinkers, the end result being an internally consistent "natural law liberalism."

My disagreement with Schlueter's reasoning was two-fold: first of all, the fact that the founders used language also found in the natural law tradition, such as "virtue," "laws of nature," and the "common good," does not mean that they understood or meant these words in the same way as pre-modern Westerners did (Professor Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, Schlueter's sparring partner, makes a pretty convincing case that they, in fact,  did not).

tao2earth

Secondly, I found Schlueter to be guilty of "moving the goalposts." While he initially maintained that the founders' conception of natural law (and, therefore, its implications for governance and politics) were exclusive to the lineage of Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas, he subsequently broadened his scope, equating natural law tradition with "the Tao" that C.S. Lewis describes in The Abolition of Man. While Lewis certainly believed the Western tradition of natural law was an illustration of the Tao, it is by no means the only illustration, a fact attested to by the Chinese origins of the concept "Tao" itself. Therefore, making the argument that the founders' thought is illustrative of the Tao is demonstrably different than claiming their thought is exclusive to the tradition of natural law found in the pre-modern West.

I certainly stand by my conclusions. However, I also realize that there is a need for a more in-depth explanation of the Tao, and how it includes, but does not equate to, the natural law tradition of Aquinas. Put another way, I would do well to explain why the Tao's basic foundation of reason and objective good, is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for inclusion in the Western tradition of natural law, specifically as it relates to governance and society.

A probing, thoughtful email from a good friend (who clearly knows more about the finer points of natural law theory than do I) cemented my hunch that further clarification on this distinction between St. Thomas and the Tao is needed. Here is what he wrote:

Schlueter sees natural law/"Tao" as being “basic orientation of practical reason toward the discovery and achievement of basic goods.” You say in your EP piece that this broadens the definition of natural law to be so inclusive a concept that it can't mean what is meant by Aristotle and Aquinas in the western traditions of natural law.

For "Politics and Conscience" we've been reading a lot of stuff on conscience, and one of the things we read by Thomas defined synderesis, (which he considers to be the first part of the two "parts" of conscience, the other part being conscientia itself) the natural habit whereby man perceives the self-evident first principles of practical reasoning, as dictating that "good is to be pursued and chosen, evil is to be avoided." Thomas says this habit is universal, and that the first practical principle that it perceives is not innate but is self-evident, underived.

Since Thomistic natural law theory considers the first principle of practical reasoning to be the seat of natural law, and since the habit by which that first principle of practical reason is perceived as universal to all men, I guess my question is: given the congruence between the Tao and this concept of the seat of natural law, how does Schlueter's claim invalidate his argument that the Tao is a legitimate form of natural law that the Founders share?


My friend raises a valid point, and provides me with an opportunity for some much needed elaboration and clarification. First of all, I readily acknowledge that Lewis' Tao and Aquinas' natural law theory share many fundamental premises, to the point that the two appear nearly identical. In fact, in The Abolition of Man, Lewis recognizes that what he chooses to call the Tao, "others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes." Lewis defines the Tao as "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are." Like St. Thomas, Lewis maintains that these truths are rationally deducible and objective, universally applicable and recognizable to all mankind. On this fundamental level, there is much in common between the thought of St. Thomas and the tenets of the Tao, including this element of self-evidence.

However, it is important to remember why Schlueter chooses to invoke the thought of C.S. Lewis in the first place. Acknowledging that natural law theory comes in a number of "varieties and versions," Schlueter maintains that he is not necessarily advancing any particular understanding of the concept. Instead, Schlueter calls upon the Tao, a tradition of inquiry that includes the thought of Aquinas and Aristotle, but also that of the Stoics, Confucius, and, at least according to Lewis, John Locke.

On this basis, it is easy to see how Schlueter comes to his conclusion that the American founders, deeply influenced by Locke, could be adherents to natural law tradition (although, interestingly enough, he does not count Locke himself as a proponent of "natural law liberalism"). The Tao, this great tradition of inquiry that unifies all systems of universal, rationally deducible, objective values predicated on a self-evident premise, contains within it both the fathers of the pre-modern Western tradition of natural law and the intellectual antecedent of the Founding Fathers. Through the Tao, Schlueter believes he has found a bridge between Rome and Washington, the pre-modern West and the American Founding.

But Schlueter is wrong to do so, for the same reason that one would be wrong to consider a Muslim (and Thomas Jefferson, for that matter) a Christian solely on the basis that all involved parties share the fundamental characteristic of believing in one God. Basic similarities may be grounds for inclusion in some greater category, such as "monotheists", but obviously not all monotheists belong to the same tradition. Similarly, claiming that the founders belonged "inside" the Tao, and therefore shared basic premises concerning objective values and reason with pre-modern Westerners, does not necessarily mean that the founders carried on the pre-modern Western tradition of natural law.  This becomes apparent when we delve just a little deeper into the natural law theory of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas' understanding of natural law is fundamentally teleological. That is to say, it is inextricably connected to the concept that  mankind has a divinely ordained end. Natural law, which Aquinas said was "nothing more than the rational being's participation in the eternal law," is the framework by which man moves towards his natural telos. Actions that conform with its prescriptions lead man to his proper end, and are therefore considered good and right; those that diverge from the natural law inhibit man from reaching his telos, and are wrong and immoral. Natural law, therefore, serves as the basis of the human law of any given society, as society naturally exists in order to orient man toward fulfillment, however imperfectly.

Liberalism, in all its forms, rejected the teleology of man. In what Columbia professor Mark Lilla calls "the Great Separation," liberalism sought to solve Spinoza's "thelogico-political problem" by limiting the horizons of politics, denying or refusing to acknowledge man's transcendent end. Society was no longer ordered towards the achievement of Aquinas' summum bonum, or greatest good, but towards those goods necessary for individual man's physical and material well-being. In doing so, a political and legal order was created in which man was free from all natural and divine restraints. In the words of James V. Schall, Aquinas' conception of  natural limits and obligations, rooted in human teleology, was replaced with the goal of recreating the naturally given world for the sake of human emancipation and mastery over nature. In fact, Schall argues that liberalism is best understood as a rejection of Aquinas' philosophy.

Obviously, this was no minor break from the pre-modern Western tradition of natural law. It was a significant rupture, necessitating the need to understand what followed as being utterly distinct from what preceded it, just as Islam marked a fundamental departure from Christianity (though its adherents claimed they were "correcting" the mistakes of their predecessors). And despite Schlueter's insistence to the contrary, the thought of the Founding Fathers likewise represents a break from the teleological natural law tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. Though Jefferson appeals to "the laws of nature," the natural rights described in the Declaration of Independence are derived from a hypothetical, fundamentally unnatural account of "the state of nature." Furthermore, the preservation of these rights is seen as an end in and of itself, instead of properly conceiving both rights and obligations as derived from the natural law that leads men towards their ultimate, divinely ordained end. As I observed in my original response to Schlueter's argument, there is a fundamental difference between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of Happiness; our founders favored the former, while creating a political and legal system that could not address the latter.

As I must so often do at the end of essays such as this one, I assure the reader that I am not out to portray the American founders as "bad men" who created a fundamentally anti-Catholic country. I acknowledge the inherent goods contained within the liberal democracy, and I also recognize that, faced as they were with the challenge of creating a political order capable of governing such a pluralistic body of people, the founders did remarkably well. I do sincerely question whether they displayed any real acquiescence to natural law, properly understood, but I do not particularly care if Schlueter decides to include them within his Tao. However, to claim that the thought of the American founders is best described as "natural law liberalism,"  and therefore represents a continuation of the natural law tradition of Aquinas, and Aristotle before him, is, as Professor Deneen so aptly put it, nothing but "wishful thinking;" as farcical as casting Muhammad as a Christian Muslim.