Augustine’s idea of Natural Law
Other than Christian understanding of God, Augustine, is close to the Stoics and Cicero in
many ways. Augustine’s idea of Natural Law is supported by the Biblical text, both in what it
says and in what it takes for granted. Augustine considers the Christian scriptures to constitute
the standard against which political philosophy must be examined, his world view necessarily
includes the Christian tenets of the Creation, the Fall of man, and the Redemption. In stark
contrast to the pagan philosophers who preceded him—who viewed the unfolding of history as a
cyclical phenomenon, Augustine conceives history in strictly linear terms, with a beginning and
an end. According to Augustine, “the earth was brought into existence ex nihilo by a perfectly
good and just God, who created man” (Schaff 1956).
On the Christian versions of the law “there was not detailed Christian political theory
present in the city of God. There were to construct an early version of Christian covenantal
statesmanship. The Christian statesmen were to help the church but not to lead, Augustine said
that was to be left to the Ministers of the church” (Chupp 2021).
According to Augustine; Within this framework of political and legal systems, the state is
a divinely ordained punishment for fallen man, with its armies, its power to command, coerce,
punish, and even put to death, as well as its institutions such as slavery and private property. God
shapes the ultimate ends of man’s existence through it. The state simultaneously serves the
divine purposes of chastening the wicked and refining the righteous. Also, simultaneously, the
state constitutes a sort of remedy for the effects of the Fall, in that it serves to maintain such
modicum of peace and order as it is possible for fallen man to enjoy in the present world (Gilson
1960). Also, the Augustinian notion of justice includes what by his day was a well-established
definition of justice of “giving every man his due.” However, Augustine grounds his application
of the definition in distinctively Christian philosophical commitments: “justice,” says Augustine,
“is love serving God only, and therefore ruling well all else.” Accordingly, justice becomes the
crucial distinction between ideal political states (none of which exist on earth) and non-ideal
political states—the status of every political state on earth (Bainton 1960).
Augustine would still call this law "natural" in much the same way as the stoics though
because the mind of the Christian God is both rational and the source of the knowledge of the
Natural Law in the human mind. Because Augustine locates the source of knowledge of
universals and the moral law in the mind of God, he comes the closest to saying that the nature of
Natural Law is God's nature. This is significant because Augustine is commonly regarded as one
of the most widely accepted Christian theologians - being often cited by the Protestant reformers,
and still being regarded as a doctor of the church by Roman Catholics, (Benjamin 1956)
At first Augustine thought that human law could contribute substantially to man’s
itinerary toward perfection, in that it reflects the eternal law, and as a principle in nature is
accessible to men through reason. The order of nature and the order expressed in human choices
and enacted in human action could, thereby, constitute two streams of divine providence in the
world. He observed that Christianity provides a new orientation in that it posits that the natural
law (lex naturalis) is anterior to both Mosaic and New Testament law. But Christianity also
insists that God has his law written down to prevent men from invoking the excuse of ignorance
of its precepts1. Augustine came to deny the unaided capacity for good in man, and he also
refused to accept the philosophical position that a few, wise men have such a capacity and that
having this capacity is all that matters.
1 Psalm. 57:1
Augustine saw the mind of God to be the source of all ideas, including order, law, truth,
meaning, and thought. God is the originator of the natures. This idea was a Christian font of a
Natural Law theory. It gave an epistemological basis for the knowledge of Natural Law, the
existence of reason in humans, the human ability to learn language, and human understanding of
universals' (Deane 1969, 282).
According to Augustine, Man, on the other hand, was brought into existence to endure
eternally. Damnation is the just desert of all men because of the Fall of Adam, who, having been
created with free will, chose to disrupt the perfectly good order established by God. As the result
of Adam’s Fall, all human beings are heirs to the effects of Adam’s original sin, and all are
vessels of pride, avarice, greed and self-interest. For reasons known only to God, He has
predestined some fixed number of men for salvation (as a display of His unmerited mercy—a
purely gratuitous act altogether independent even of God’s foreknowledge of any good deeds
those men might do while on earth), while most He has predestined for damnation as a just
consequence of the Fall. The onward march of human history, then, constitutes the unfolding of
the divine plan which will culminate in one or the other outcome for every member of the human
family. In addition, Augustine did not see God's creation of moral law as a mere arbitrary act of
will. Instead logic, law, order, and meaning flow from the nature of God himself and are
provided to man by God through the image of God in man and through the direct influence of
God on the human mind-what Augustine called the divine light” (Nash 1982, 79).
Finally, according to Augustine’s imagery from The City of God (412-426), Christians
live as citizens of two cities. He also wrote on promoting the character of good citizenship,
which according to him, requires the qualities of uprightness, integrity, and respect for authority.
As Augustine says, "The doctrine of charity and brotherly love is able to unite men in a and
peaceful society” while addressing the Church he says that "you unite citizens to citizens, and in
memory of our first parents you men among themselves making thereby not merely a society
fraternity. The various duties fulfilled by the Church Augustine recounts in his De Moribus
Ecclesiae are of the greatest value to the state.2
2 De Moribus Ecc1esiae I, 49, P1L. 32, 1332.
Bibliography:
Augustine. City of God [De civitate Dei]. Translated by Marcus Dods, in The Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers. Edited by Philip Schaff. First Series. Vol. II. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1956.
Augustine. On Christian Doctrine [De doctrina christiana]. Translated by J. F. Shaw, in The
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Edited by Philip Schaff. First Series. Vol. II. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1956.
Augustine. On Free Choice of the Will [De libero arbitrio libri III]. Translated by Anna S.
Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1964.
Augustine. Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount [De Sermone Domini in Monte secundum
Matthaeum]. Translated by William Findlay, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers. Edited by Philip Schaff. First Series. Vol. VI. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1956.
Bainton, Roland. “Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical
Re-evaluation”. Nashville: Abington Press, 1960.
Chupp, Jesse. Early Christian Natural Law: Augustine. Liberty University. 2021
Chroust, Anton-Hermann. "The Philosophy of Law of St. Augustine." The Philosophical
Review 53, no. 2 (1944): 195-202. Accessed April 8, 2021. doi:10.2307/2182025.
Deane, Herbert. “The Political and Social Ideas of Augustine” 282-83 N. 48 (1963)
Gilson, Etienne. “The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine”. New York: Random House,
1960.
Nash, Ronald. “The Word of God and The Mind of Man: The Crisis of Revealed Truth in
Contemporary Theology. 79-84, 1982.
Smith, Steven. “Believing Like a Lawyer”, 40 B.C. L. Rev. 1041 (1999).
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