lei natural, Rommen (I)

Pelo tempo, tenho de deixar citações em estrangeiro.

Na introdução:

"Heinrich Rommen is known in the United States primarily as the author of two widely read books on political philosophy, The State in Catholic Thought: A Treatise in Political Philosophy (1945) and The Natural Law (1947), and as a professor at Georgetown University (1953–67). Yet, before 1938, when he fled the Third Reich for the United States.

Rommen was neither a scholar nor a university professor, but a professional lawyer—trained in civil and canon law—who had devoted considerable energies to Catholic social action during the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi Party. The two books that secured his academic reputation in the United States were written in Germany in the midst of his legal and political work, for which he was imprisoned by the Nazis.

(...) For Rommen, natural law thinking has always thrived in the lex-ratio tradition. According to this tradition, law binds by way of rational obligation. To use the older scholastic terminology, law is neither force (vis coactiva) nor mere advice (lex indicans) but is rational direction (vis directiva). The lex-ratio position contends that the intellect’s grasp of what ought to be done comes first; the force executing that judgment comes second, after the directive of reason. Interestingly, Thomas Aquinas insisted that command is principally a work of reason. He believed that without the measure of action grasped and communicated by the intellect executive force is blind and arbitrary"

"Besides the obvious fact of their religion, the Catholic thinkers had at least three things in common that distinguished them from the other émigrés.

First, Rommen, Simon, and Maritain shared a philosophical vocabulary that was rooted in scholastic thought, specifically in the work of Thomas Aquinas.

Second, for the Catholic thinkers the philosophy of natural law was a living tradition: that is to say, it was not only a concept to be expounded according to the philosophy of the schools, it was a tradition formed by centuries of application to a wide array of intellectual and institutional problems.

Third, the Catholic thinkers were more confident in building and deploying a system of natural law."

"Thus, for the intellectualist tradition, law and liberty are not necessarily in opposition, because they are grounded in the same source, namely the intellect’s measuring of action.29 The lex-ratio tradition holds that only on the ground of the primacy of reason can we make sense of law as obligation rather than as a literal binding in the fashion of force."

PS: É altamente curioso como a "acção" aparece aqui, o elemento central da epistemologia "austríaca", o elemento que liga a reflexão à realidade, quebrando o circulo metafísico puro ("razão pura" em vez de reflexão sobre a acção), que aqui neste blogue, inúmeras vezes se atribui a Kant, e desaquadamente se pretende associar à tradição austríaca, na verdade, conectada em várias formas, com os escolásticos.