Escribe Tracy Rowland en "The Case against the Marriage of Natural Law and Natural Rights, by Tracey Rowland"

p. 84 An issue not so much on the surface of the debates, but embedded within them, is that of whether or not there is an order within nature, what Ratzinger called a human ecology. Pierre Manent’s works address this issue. As he observes: ‘Modern freedom was born as nature liberated, as nature unbound: freedom, for the moderns, is first of all the removal of impediments to nature.’60 Manent argues that ‘it is because human rights are attached ultimately to a nature without qualities, because they promote an equality that ignores differences, that such rights are the moving force of an indefinite social, moral and political movement that ceaselessly sets an undefinable and ever-deferred equality at odds with the inclinations and differences that human beings experience’.61 Manent concludes that ‘even if we consider the notion of the state of nature to be scaffolding that is no longer needed once the edifice of rights has been constructed, a little attention to the stones of this edifice will force us to admit that we cannot speak of human rights without referring implicitly but directly and concretely to “nature”’.62 In other words, a debate over the nature of the humanum is unavoidable. The idea that a truce might be effected if the parties agree to not talk about nature but only about ‘goods’ and ‘practical reasonableness’ misses the point that depending on what position one takes on human nature, there may or may not be any room for a belief in ‘goods’ and ‘practical reasonableness’. A similar point about the indispensability of the scaffolding was made by Yves de Montcheuil SJ. He wrote:

"It was Christianity that taught humanity how persons deserve to be treated in a truly human society. The paganism of antiquity had no concept of this. Modern paganism has forgotten it. It is the greatest of illusions to imagine that the Church is nothing but a pedagogue who, having once taught humanity what civilization is, can henceforth be dispensed with, as if man could take hold of that heritage and then walk on by himself.  It does not take long to squander that heritage. Cut off from the Christian roots out of which it grew, the idea of the human person is rapidly distorted and corrupted".63

A corollary argument is that secularized Christian concepts are rarely ever neutral in relation to Christianity. They provide the DNA for many strains of anti-Christian ideology. For example, the concepts ‘liberty’, ‘equality’, and ‘fraternity’ mean something quite different when used within the contexts of Christian theology and liberal political theory. For this reason, Robert P. Kraynak argues that the subversive powers of rights have been vastly underestimated and that ‘the culture of rights and democratic levelling also turn against the hierarchical authority of the church’.64 As an example, Kraynak views the pressure for women’s ordination in the Catholic Church ‘as a consequence of thinking that the Church is a mere protector of the rights of the people of God rather than the mystical body of Christ which cannot be measured by political standards because it is divinely ordained by Scripture and tradition’.65 He concludes:

"Even when rights are accompanied by clear directions to higher ends and the human ‘person’ is distinguished from the selfish individual, the doctrine of rights will not lead to the intended results. The rights to personal satisfaction and to personal identity – driving by the self-love that is part of our fallen nature – take over. Rights eventually swallow up higher ends and subvert all higher authorities, including the churches and theologians who defend them while trying to avoid their negative side effects".66

As a consequence, Kraynak recommends that the highest priority of religious believers should be that of replacing Kantian Christianity with Augustinian Christianity in one form or another.67 This is a very similar proposal to Milbank’s vision of a Dominican modernity that rests on an Augustinian Thomism, not an Aristotelian Thomism that has had the theological components filtered out of it.

60 Pierre Manent, Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason, trans. Ralph C Hancock (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 86.

61 Ibid., 11.

62 Ibid., 8.

63 Henri De Lubac, Three Jesuits Speak: Yves De Montcheuil 1899–1944, Charles Nicolet 1897–1961, Jean Zupan

1899–1968 (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1987), 55.

64 Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 177

65 Ibid., 178.

66 Ibid., 171.

67 Ibid., 181.

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