Natural Law and Evangelization

Natural Law and Evangelization

L. Joseph Hebert, St. Ambrose University

Recently there has been a notable upsurge in adult conversions to the Catholic faith, even amidst a long-term decline in religious affiliation. Heartening as it is, this glimmer of hope raises a question for those already devoted to the practice of the faith: what can we do to collaborate with the Holy Spirit to assist souls in finding their way to the fullness of the truth?

The challenges of evangelization have been with us since Christ instructed his disciples to “teach all nations . . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:19-20). As St. Paul attests when he describes the cross of Christ as “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:23), the commandments of the Lord have always at their corejj run contrary to the wisdom of the world.

Yet the same Apostle gives us hope when he tells us that “the Gentiles, who have not the [divine] law, do by nature those things that are of the law . . . their conscience bearing witness to them, and their thoughts between themselves accusing, or also defending one another” (Rom. 2:14-15).

If we are to preach Christ to “all nations,” there must be a basis of universal receptivity to his message. Since Christ is the eternal Logos, “the true light, which enlightens every man” (Jn. 1:9), his teaching should resonate with the innate faculties of human beings as such. At the same time, if both Jews and Gentiles—that is to say, “all nations”—are scandalized by the commandments of Christ, there must be a barrier to that message that is equally ubiquitous.

That all peoples are simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the Gospel suggests a rupture within human nature itself. The theological tradition explains this phenomenon with reference to the opening chapters of Genesis, speaking in terms of original justice and original sin: in the beginning human nature was created to know, love, and do what is true, good, and beautiful; but having sought per impossible to possess these things without acknowledging their Creator, the human race lost the supernatural aid holding its powers and passions in harmony, and so became divided against itself.

This fall from grace results in a predicament that is well known to philosophers with or without the aid of revelation. As Plato observed, the human soul is drawn in one direction by a golden chain, precious but fragile, toward what is wise and just, moderate and courageous; while the same soul is tugged in the opposite direction by iron links, coarse but seemingly unbreakable.

The only hope, as Plato saw it, was to use every possible means to reinforce that golden chain and slacken those iron links. From this imperative were born what we now know as the liberal arts, whose purpose in education and in public fora, in law and in government, is (as St. Thomas More put it) to turn the hearts of peoples—and especially rulers—toward “right and honest things,” and thereby to make the world better (or at least less bad) one soul, one custom, one institution at a time.

This brings us back to where we began, with Christ sending his disciples into a world that is both guided by the light, and shrouded in darkness. A world in which our consciences bear witness for and against us, and teach us to accuse and defend one another. A world capable of glimpsing the meaning of things, but prone to losing sight of that meaning, betrayed by its “own desires,” as St. Paul puts it, to “turn away [its] hearing from the truth, but [to] be turned unto fables” (2 Tim 4:3-4).

What message does Christ have for such a world? St. John sums it up by proclaiming that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” so that “as many as received him, he gave the power to be made the sons of God” (Jn. 1:12-14). In other words, we are invited into a renewed relationship with God whose effect is to empower us to accomplish what by nature we long and strive for, but which our wounded nature is scarcely able to desire without confusion, much less achieve without assistance.

What kind of power is the evangelist describing? To borrow once again from Plato, true power is not the ability to acquire what one desires, whatever that happens to be, but rather to acquire those things that make one a better human being. In effect, real power is both to desire and to do what is objectively good, and therefore capable of satisfying our deepest needs. This possibility, it can be argued, is at the heart of that natural human longing for happiness that prepossesses every human soul, and it is a point of contact between the quests for meaning taking place outside as well as inside the Church.

If Christianity is a response to a calling that precedes it, then the faith itself must be understood in light of that prior calling if we are to grasp not only its proper context, but even its proper content. Since grace perfects nature but does not destroy it, what the tradition calls natural law is not only an invitation to the Gospel but an integral part of it. This is true in the positive sense that faith helps us to realize our human potential better than we could by our unaided powers; but it is also true in the negative sense that better realizing this potential does not liberate us from certain limitations intrinsic to human nature, this side of paradise.

From these observations it follows that the study of natural law is a permanent necessity in the living and preaching of Christian faith. Yet it must be admitted that what ought to be an aid to the faith has in recent generations often become a practical barrier. This is in large part due to the gradual and now nearly definitive rejection of the concept of natural law in modern societies, under the influence of ethical and political doctrines originating as early as the 16^th century. As we set about the sweet but daunting task of evangelization, it is worth pondering the challenges presented by such theories, and devising ways to respond to them in the context of contemporary culture.

First, the challenge. In 1513 Machiavelli penned The Prince, a treatise in which he outlines a new (or newly repackaged) vision for humankind. Rejecting the notion of the objective good as imaginary, Machiavelli urges us to measure our desires not in light of their moral worth, but rather in terms of their pragmatic efficacy. If we can succeed at acquiring what we desire, we should. Once morality is out of the way, he thinks, the only thing needful for a successful satisfaction of the most powerful human desires—those for material security and pleasure, and for public honors and civilizational glory—is the relentless application of human intelligence and labor to the collective conquest of Fortune, meaning the achievement of absolute control over our environment.

For Machiavelli and those influenced by him, nature is not a guiding star but rather an enemy to be defeated and a resource to be exploited. The problems with this formula are of course legion. From concerns about environmental degradation and the dangers of artificial intelligence to the alarming uptick in deaths of despair, prevailing trends prompt us to wonder whether our obsession with control itself needs to be brought under control.

In his 1950’s classic, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper aptly describes the vicious circle initiated by this Machiavellian logic in both personal and political life. That man is destined to be his own savior is a doctrine capable of inflaming the pride and justifying the crimes of any totalitarian dictator or party. That man has no other savior than himself means that he is tasked with doing the impossible, a doctrine leading to every form of nihilism and despair.

It’s easy enough to enumerate such problems, but harder to acknowledge where we may be tempted, despite our best intentions, to give into the same seductive calculus of control.

In Thomas More’s 1516 masterwork Utopia, we meet a fictional character who delivers a scathing critique of numerous social injustices in the Europe of his day. There can be little doubt that More is using Raphael Hythloday as a mouthpiece for his own critique of the violence, greed, and arrogance blinding the vision of renaissance kings and courtiers, nobles and merchants, lawyers and clerics. Yet the question of Utopia is not whether or how society is off track, but rather what can be done about it.

Raphael, who considers himself one of the only true Christians, insists that all such problems are susceptible to simple solutions with the application of enlightened administrative power. Take for example the death penalty, which he denounces as elevating material things above human life. At the time England was hanging thieves by the thousands, though as he relates most of them were farmers driven off their land by grasping landlords who derived more profit from the pasturing of sheep.

We can safely infer that More concurs with his fictional character’s complaint about the inequities of this policy. Yet despite these sympathies he depicts Raphael as ignoring the complexities of scriptural and traditional treatments of capital punishment as he proclaims such punishments offensive to God in all circumstances and entirely to be abolished. In order to achieve this well-meaning end, Raphael must posit a society in which all human activity is strictly monitored and controlled, robbing everyone of the human dignity he claims to be defending. And in order to make that plan stick, he is forced to threaten anyone who resists such monitoring and control with the very punishment he sought to obviate—the death penalty!

More’s point here is highly nuanced, but at its core is an insight similar to Solzhenitsyn’s observation that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.” No matter how horrified we are at the troubles of the world, and no matter how ardently we burn to see them corrected, More cautions us that “it is impossible for everything to turn out well, unless all human beings are good, and I don’t expect that to happen for some years to come.”

But how do human beings become good? This is precisely what natural law seeks to explain. Its core premises are relatively simple: that good is to be done and evil avoided; that goodness is defined by the preservation and perfection of a being within its proper environment; that human life is therefore to be preserved and perpetuated through the procreation and education of children; and that the uniquely human faculty of reason is to be employed to understand things as they are and treat them accordingly—that is, to pursue truth and justice, and indeed all of the intellectual and moral virtues.

Finally, natural law teaches that it is this realization of our potential by knowing and doing what is good that fulfills us. As William Blackstone put it, in a passage echoed in our Declaration of Independence, the whole of natural law can be reduced to “one paternal precept, ‘that man should pursue his own happiness.’”

In his brilliant book, Human Rights: Fact or Fancy?, the 20^th century Aristotelian Henry Veatch examines contemporary attempts to salvage the discipline of ethics without reference to natural law. As he aptly summarizes them, leading theories attempt to provide life meaning with reference to desire alone, or duty alone. As Veatch persuasively shows, desire without duty is anything but moral, and duty without desire is anything but human. Only the reality of objective goods can unite duty and desire, making possible a genuine happiness consistent with and indeed inseparable from a love of the common good.

In dialogical form, Veatch engages the most common objections to orientating our lives on an objective and common good. To those who fear that objectivity suppresses creativity, he stresses that the end proposed by natural law—a life lived in accordance with reason—is compatible with a wide variety of activities and ways of life. So long as one avoids a few intrinsic evils and fulfills a few universal duties, one may perfect one’s human nature in ways that express one’s unique and unrepeatable character. Veatch illustrates this point with characters from secular history and novels, but it can also be verified by examining the lives of the saints, each one of whom glorified God in his or her humanity, without any two of them doing so in precisely the same way.

To those who assert that modern science has shown nature to be without purpose, Veatch’s answer is complex but insightful. In a nutshell, he points out that one cannot prove the nonexistence of a thing (purpose) by methodologically excluding its consideration. As for the fruits modern science has achieved while ignoring the question of natural ends, Veatch notes that its achievements are stronger in the realm of technology than in that of comprehension. Even as what we call the natural sciences give us more control over the things (and people) around us, the thinking behind these techniques becomes increasingly obscure to nonspecialists.

Classical science, by contrast, is more intent on describing the world in terms that may take effort to master, but which are always anchored in—and capable of enriching—the way human beings experience that world. This includes the commonsensical notion that just as the potential of a tiny acorn is realized in a towering oak, so too is the potential of a humble babe realized in a life of heroic virtue.

Veatch is one of many figures who have striven to make the natural law accessible to a contemporary audience. This kind of work was once understood to be an integral part of Catholic education and evangelization, and should be so again. By helping us to recover an understanding of what is best in our natures, natural law not only has the power to put us back in possession of ourselves, but also to open our hearts to the invitation of our Creator.

A version of this essay was presented at the “From A(mbrose) to (Gen.) Z” conference at St. Ambrose University on April 26, 2026.