Natural Law & the Secular Mythos: What Has Been Left “Unsaid” in Current Debates in Natural Law. By Gregory Morgan. New York: T&T Clark, 2025. 280 pp. $115 (hardback), $39.95 (paper).
The promise of a broad moral consensus founded on Christian natural law principles—said to be universally accessible, irrespective of one’s religious commitments or lack thereof—has been just over the horizon for some forty-odd years now, with dozens of books on the subject being published from the 1980s up to the present day.[1] At no point has this literary avalanche been accompanied by corresponding victories in the American political sphere (or any other Western nation), at least not ones that could be attributed to the kind of natural-law argumentation championed by such books. Nevertheless, the publishing stream continues unabated,[2] and indeed, having already lasted so long without any regard for changing attitudes concerning the assumed ideals of “secular liberalism,” one could easily imagine it going on indefinitely. Yet if there is any hope of this subgenre of Christian scholarship finally being put to rest, it lies in Gregory Morgan’s Natural Law & the Secular Mythos.
Morgan makes his purpose clear from the very first sentence, setting out his position in no uncertain terms:
This book argues that natural law – when construed as an epistemological and trans-cultural lingua franca, adjudged capable of legitimating the rational intelligibility and universal applicability of specific Christian moral principles within contemporary ‘secular’ discourse – has failed. (ix)
In defending this position, Morgan closely analyzes the work of three scholars who have engaged extensively with the Thomistic natural law tradition, whom he refers to collectively as the “three voices”: John Finnis, Jean Porter, and John Milbank. Specifically, Morgan proposes that
The interpretive fragmentation that is taking place among those ‘friends’ who have sought to revive the tradition of natural law (particularly according to St Thomas Aquinas) is linked to the fragmenting way in which these same ‘friends’ interpret the ‘enemies’ or ‘interlocutors’ of the natural law, particularly under the category of the secular. (4)
In short, he raises the following question: “Could the apparent dialogical failure of natural law…be a consequence of the discoursal failure and fragmentation of the secular mythos?” (4)
To say much more would require a level of detail unsuitable for a brief review. Suffice to say, Morgan’s discussion of the “three voices” is substantive and insightful, reflecting a deep familiarity with their work. This familiarity enables him to demonstrate that although these three purport to recover the Thomistic tradition of natural law for the modern day, in their accounts of that tradition they “acknowledge that this recovery involves repressing, or reformulating, or re-narrating the tradition for some other purpose.” He goes on to say, more pointedly, that “Finnis, Porter, and Milbank are all interpreting the language of the tradition to promote systems of thought that either go well beyond or even contradict Aquinas’s intentions” (171). The fact that the “three voices” offer accounts of natural law that are only “inspired” by Aquinas rather than directly adopting him is made manifest throughout the book, but Morgan makes it startlingly clear in the last few pages:
In what is a seldom discussed passage in his Commentary on Romans, Aquinas states explicitly that ‘by nature’ [from Rom. 2:14] is always to be understood theocentrically as ‘nature reformed by grace’ – ‘Christ’s grace.’ Theologically speaking, thence, the identification of reason’s ‘limit’ is actually the ‘condition for constructive creativity because it is a shared limit of embodied human existence.’ Soteriologically, it is an affirmation that we cannot grasp the natural law by our own efforts of reason, law, or any other agency for that matter. (233–34)
Thus, at a stroke, the foundations of our contemporary natural law “renaissance” are utterly destroyed. That such a fundamental element of Aquinas’s understanding of natural law could go unaddressed for decades by those who would invoke his name for their own modern-day political purposes is nothing less than stupefying. It can perhaps only be explained by supposing that, in their determination to construct a natural law account based entirely on Aquinas’s “secular” thought, they studiously avoided any “religious” sources where he might have something to say on the subject. What is therefore truly common to all people, Morgan concludes, is the “desire to know the law and to know justice” even if “we do not (yet) know what they are” (234). Once we have reached this degree of self-awareness, God must enter:
When we allow God – the theological ‘unsaid(s)’ – to come into the dialogue and hence into memory, not as a threat or as some coercive sovereignty but as an abiding soteriological promise, the immanence of the supernatural order ensures us that our hope in, and our search for, justice is not in vain. (235)
All in all, it is no exaggeration to say Morgan has written the most important book on natural law in decades. He shows, through exhaustively careful analysis, why those who have sought to make natural law into a tool of political utility were bound to fail. Where the discourse might go from here is difficult to say, but it is enough of an achievement to have established “where the discourse should not go – or, more precisely, where it should not persist” (231). Anyone who is interested in a sober assessment of contemporary natural law discourse should read it.
Notes
- Some representative examples include Robert P. George, In Defense of Natural Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); David VanDrunen, Politics after Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020); Jesse Covington, Bryan T. McGraw, and Micah Watson, Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2025); and Melissa Moschella, Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025). ↑
- This year’s addition to the pile comes from Benjamin B. Saunders, titled Recovering Natural Law: A Guide for Protestants (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2026). The usual emphasis on natural law as “accessible to reason…and capable of providing a basis for ethical and political reasoning that all people—regardless of their faith commitments—can engage with honestly” is advertised front and center in the promotional copy. ↑
