God and the Natural Law: Reading of Thomas Aquinas

It seems that to retain credibility in a post-Kantian and analytic world, contemporary natural law theory has tried to show its independence both from God and from human nature. But can there be a natural-law theory without the “natural” – not grounded in facts of nature – and without “law” – not in need of a Legislator? In God and the Natural Law, Fulvio Di
Blasi begins with an original analysis of the current debate in ethics, jurisprudence, and politics in order to set the stage for a sound understanding of the concept of natural law. This leads to the heart of the book: a recovery of the authentic meaning of the two main concepts of classical natural-law theory as synthesized by Thomas Aquinas – the will of God and the order of nature.
 
The wide revival of practical philosophy and ethics of objective-values in recent decades has involved a robust rediscovery of classical natural-law theory. This rediscovery is marked by two main traits: an emphasis on the autonomy of practical reason (as a reaction to modern voluntarism centered on the external will of the legislator); and an emphasis on the originality of practical reason (as a reaction to the idea of a rational deduction of
moral truths from the facts of nature). Without denying an autonomous character to ethics, or the need for a strong critique of moral rationalism, Di Blasi argues that Aquinas’s thought remains unintelligible if we remove from it either God or the metaphysical understanding of
nature.