Yet the main reason for the eclipse of the theology of natural law was the theologico-political problem. What better way to solve such a problem than to imagine men's appealing to no authority other than what is first in the mind? Virtually all of the Enlightenment "state of nature" scenarios make this move. In Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, man is considered in an "original" position, under the authority of no pope, prince, or scripture. If there is a God, he governs through no mundane authority. Authority will have to make its first appearance in the covenants of individuals constrained to reach a consensus on the basis of what is (or seems) self-evident. The twelfth-century summist Johannes Faventinus declared: "The streams of natural rectitude flow into the sea of natural law, such that what was lost in the first man is regained in the Mosaic law, perfected in the Gospels, and decorated in human customs."28 The modern myth of the "state of nature" rejects this scheme of divine pedagogy—not directly, but indirectly, by rendering it superfluous to the quest for first principles of the political order. Indeed, the "state of nature" was meant to be a secular substitute for the story of Genesis. Never a pure science of morality, it was rather a merely useful one, designed for the political purpose of unseating the traditional doctrine of natural law.

The fact that a proposition is pellucid, knowable without logical need of a middle term (e.g., "life is good," which can be grasped without a set of theological inferences or authorities), is supposed reason enough to conclude that logical independence means ontological independence; and the "state of nature" mythology had the aim of representing that independence. Since no orthodox Christian theology holds that God and his orders of providence and of salvation crop up as what is first in untutored cognition, to force natural law into that one understanding is bound to destroy moral theology on the reefs of half-truth. The half- truth is that there are principles of practical cognition that are proximate to the natural functioning of the intellect. But they are only the beginning (the seminalia) of practical reason. When the starting points are made autonomous, the human mind declares independence not only from the deeper order of divine tutoring but also from the tutoring afforded by human culture, including human law.

This is why natural rights, for so many modern advocates, turn out to be nothing other than immunities against the order of law. Thus, what began for the Christian theologians as a doctrine explaining how the human mind participates in a higher order of law is turned into its opposite. The natural law becomes "temporal," the temporal becomes "secular," and the secular becomes the sphere in which human agents enjoy immunity from any laws other than those they impose upon themselves.

For a time, Catholics were not confused by the new ideologies of natural law, for these conceptions were expressed by political movements vehemently hostile to the Church. But once political modernity became the "normal" state of affairs, and once the Church found a way to respond to modernity in something more than a purely reactive mode, it was almost inevitable that the new conceptions of natural law would begin to color moral theology.

Natural Law and Catholic Moral Theology, p. 8