Natural Law and Natural Right in Hugo Grotius and Gabriel Vásquez

• In Event: Natural Law and Natural Rights

Abstract

Throughout his works, Leo Strauss draws a sharp distinction between natural right and natural law. In Strauss’s telling, the pre-modern tradition of natural law theorizing which began with the Stoics and was further developed by Christian thinkers represented a break with the doctrine of natural right formulated by classical philosophers, a break that Strauss suggests is often underemphasized by contemporary Catholic proponents of natural law. The German political philosopher outlines several important differences between the doctrines of natural law and natural right, and one in particular is especially important for him: the fact that pre-modern natural law presupposes a divine lawgiver whose command is the ultimate source of the obligatory character of the lex naturalis. Natural right, on the contrary, entails no such supposition. It simply denotes the naturally just as opposed to that which is just by convention, or that which is merely said to be just. Natural right in this acceptation is thus compatible with the absence of a providential lawgiver, as Aristotle’s thought shows.

Strauss’s analysis raises the question of the continuity of natural law with natural right. Are they really as divergent as Strauss supposes? In my paper, I propose to examine this question in the context of late scholastic theories of natural law, chiefly those of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and the Spanish Jesuit Gabriel Vásquez (1549–1604). In my view, Grotius’s understanding of natural law comes much closer to the doctrine of natural right than the Straussean narrative allows. While Grotius certainly accepts the existence of a divine lawgiver who exercises providence over the cosmos, natural law does not essentially depend on any act of this divine lawgiver for its existence and validity. As Grotius says, natural law would be valid even if there were no God. This is because the obligatory character of the prescriptions and proscriptions of natural law is derived exclusively from the “fittingness” or “unfittingness” of certain actions with rational nature and does not in any way depend on the command of a divine lawgiver. Such a view more closely approximates classical natural right than has generally been conceded.

Grotius’s view of natural law, moreover, is not without historical precedent. Indeed, its essentials are already found in Vásquez, who wrote a generation earlier than Grotius. As with the Dutch jurist, Vásquez locates the source of natural law obligation solely in the fittingness or unfittingness of certain actions with rational nature. Though he does not go so far as to affirm explicitly that natural law would be valid even if God did not exist, he shares the underlying assumptions about the foundation of natural law obligation that justify Grotius’s bold assertion. What is of particular historical significance, moreover, is the fact that Vásquez understood himself as a follower of Aquinas working within the mainstream of Thomistic thought; indeed, he develops his views in a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. The conclusion to be drawn, then, is that the late scholastic period witnessed a profound change in the understanding of natural law that rendered the doctrine considerably more akin to classical natural right than is often admitted, and, what is more, that this change developed within the Thomistic tradition, a tradition which Strauss largely portrays as monolithic in its acceptance of a divine lawgiver as foundational to lex naturalis.

Author

• Steven Waldorf, University of Chicago