Abstract

Josef Fuchs’s Droit naturel is a French translation of the German Lex Naturae—Zur Theologie des Naturrechts. The author has taken the opportunity of making some minor alterations and of adding a new chapter on the relation between the natural law and Christian social teaching. Otherwise the work is unchanged. It is divided into two parts. In the first the author studies the natural law in revelation, which, of course, takes him outside the scope of philosophy. What he says is, however, indirectly of interest to philosophy. Christians are sometimes tempted to think of the natural law as, in practice, almost a special preserve of the Catholic Church which has the mission of interpreting it. It is therefore interesting to discover that the term is almost impossible to find in documents of the magisterium before the pontificates of Pius IX and Leo XIII. Fuchs finds only the synod of Aries in 475, echoing St. Paul’s doctrine of Romans. On the other hand Fuchs points out that St. Paul’s reference to the natural law, while by far the most explicit, is not the only one in Sacred Scripture. This is a useful corrective of the view sometimes met with that the natural law is unknown in the Bible; and it is also a corrective of Flückiger’s exegesis of St. Paul.