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MacIntyre in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry provides an overview of Thomistic interpeters influenced by modern philosophy presuppositions, including Rosmini, Kleutgen, Marechal, and even Maritain. His remarks on the priority of divine law for human rights are worth posting here, I think. He notes especially the modern interpretations of Aeterni Patris, and remarks that their interpetations open the way for Thomism to be just one more possible points of view that compete for ascendancy, the very thing that Nietzsche attributed to the will to power. Thomism as such, says MacIntyre,

"by epistemologizing itself after Aeterni Patris, proceeded to reenact the disagreements of post-Cartesian philosophy. Thus there were generated in turn a number of systematic Thomisms, each in contention both with whatever particular erroneous tendencies in modern secular philospohical thought that particular Thomism aspired to confront and overcome and with its Thomistic rivals. Often enough these two kinds of contest wre closely connected. So Marechal, the most distinguished philospher in the Thomistic school founded by Cardinal Mercier at Louvain, made out of Aquinas a rival and corrector of Kant, the work of interpretation being inseperable from that of philosophical apologetics . . . So Maritain at a later date would formulate what he mistakenly took to be a Thomistic defense of the doctrine of human rights enshrined at the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, a quixotic attempt to present Thomism as offering a rival and superior account of the same moral subject matter as do other modern nontheological doctrines of universal rights alleged to attach to individual persons.
What Maritain wished to affirm was a modern version of Aquinas's thesis that every human being has within him or herself a natural knowledge of divine law and hence of what every human being owes to every other human being. The plain prephilosophical person is always a person of sufficient moral capacities. But what Maritain failed to reckon with adequately was the fact that in many cultures, and notably in that of modernity plain persons are misled into giving moral expression to those capacities through assent to false philosophical theories. So it has been since the eighteenth century with assent to a conception of rights alien to and absent from Aquinas's thought. For on Aquinas's view the rights which are normative for human relationships are derived from and warranted only by divine law, apprehended by those without the resources afforded by God's self-revelation as the natural law. Law is primary, rights are secondary. But for Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment modernity, human rights provide a standard prior to all law.
For Maritain this was an uncharacteristic lapse.

On a separate note, the interview above mentions Protestant theologians only by label. I'll name Herman Dooyeweerd as one, and hopefully that bibliography was sufficient enough to include him. In any case, Dooyeweerd in Roots of Western Culture blames Roman catholic social thought and thomism for accepting the Aristotelian (rather than Kantian) influence on Aquinas. The point of issue for Dooyeweerd is this: even though Divine Law is primary for natural law, ("rooted in the creation motive of revelation") the language of subsidiarity in catholic social teaching implies a dualistic motive and casts in doubt the contingency of natural law on divine law. All the same, both reject the epistemological primacy afforded to modern rights ideology and that's a good start.

both reject the epistemological primacy afforded to modern rights ideology and that's a good start.

14 posted on 12/28/2002 3:49 PM PST by cornelis

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..........................................Specific Laws .....................................................................STENBERG v. CARHART

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.......................................Constitutional Law ..................................übermenschlich interpretation...by this Court...is the supreme law of the land

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General Philosophy Þ Jurisprudence ............................... Nietzsche's Truth Þ Nihilism and the End of Law

...Ý ..........................Ý

Theology/Religion .......................................................... The Delusion of Darwinian Natural Law

The Reappearance of Natural Law

...This subtle form of juridical positivism(sometimes referred to as juristic monism or analytical jurisprudence), though it does not deny the absolute character of the moral law, maintains that legally the state can do anything, since positive law as the will of the state does not find a legal limit in the moral law.

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Totalitarianism has indeed proved how far a modern tyrannical regime can legally go in declaring lawful any act which it ddeems advantageous to its arbitrary aims, from the suppression of religious freedom to the shooting of guiltless hostages and the killing of innocent persons in the interests of scientific research or of purity of the racial stock. By applying all the means at the disposal of the modern state with its intricate compulsory mechanism(propaganda, terror, fear, indoctrination, and control of economic life), the totalitarian state is comparatively or even practically certain of the obedience and conformity of its subjects. For the life and fortune of these would be at stake should they fail to conform. In addition, the totalitarian state will always find, among the citizens, individuals who by reason of indoctrination, perversion, or brutalization will serve as its agents and actively compel all others to conform.