Article III: On Positive Divine Law

— A twofold positive divine law is distinguished: the law of the Old Testament, which was; the law of the New Testament, which is.

I. The old law contained moral, ceremonial, and judicial precepts. Of itself it did not confer grace. The Wurzburg Theologians ¹ assign to that law this threefold first and ultimate end: the spiritual and supernatural happiness of the elect people; the peculiar honor of Christ, for whose advent the people prepared itself through explicit faith; the institution of the elect people toward necessary honesty, divine worship, and polity.

One part of the old law was proposed by God to the elect people through the ministry of angels, another part through Moses. The part which the angels dictated is the Decalogue, all of whose precepts are moral, if you except the determination of the sabbath as the time in which one was to be free for God.

Yet the Decalogue does not formally contain all moral precepts. For it does not contain the two highest precepts and principles of the others, which, either through nature or through faith, are known of themselves to human reason, that is, the precept of love of God and of neighbor; nor does it express remote moral consequences which by diligent inquiry are found to be fitting to reason. But it formally enunciates those things which can be known from common principles by modest consideration, and pertain to the three virtues which are especially necessary for human intercourse, that is, to religion toward God, to piety toward parents, and to justice toward others in general.

Yet present usage has it that we refer all moral duties to the ten precepts of the Decalogue, according to the connection which they are shown to have with the individual precepts. Cf. 1, 2, q. 100 art. 3.

Moreover, "the priesthood being transferred... it is necessary that a transfer also be made of the law" (Hebr. 7, 12). Therefore the whole old law has been abrogated. Nor are the moral precepts to be excepted. But these subsist, not by force of Mosaic promulgation, but by force of the initial promulgation in reason and of the more recent promulgation in the Gospel or New Testament.

II. But the New Law imposes no other precepts except those of faith and the sacraments. For the Lord, the author and promulgator of the law of love, left all the remaining things to be defined by the Church.

¹ De Legibus, n. 11.

— I. Divine law is distinguished as eternal, natural, positive.

1. Eternal law is the very reason of the government of things existing in God, with the decree of promulgating it, insofar as it regards rational creatures. Causally it is complete in God, but, as long as subjects do not exist, it is terminatively incomplete. That eternal ordering comprises the hypothetical order of pure nature, the order of elevated nature, and the order of repaired nature.

II. 1. Natural law is the participation, through the light of reason, in the rational creature, of eternal law, insofar as it contains the natural order. This law founds every other law, even positive divine law. It has been promulgated whole in our nature, although its sufficient divulgation now requires revelation. Few things are so proximate to the first principle that they are known by all. The things which are thus plain are established not only deductively from a principle, but also, and more easily, by direct intuition.

2. Natural law is immutable, although by subtraction of matter it is sometimes apparently changed. And cessation of the end can never be alleged so that man may think himself exempt from observing the natural order.

3. The precepts of natural law are founded in that highest principle: Good is to be done, evil avoided. The precepts themselves can be variously distributed. Although the whole order of nature is essential, or founded in the essences of things, nevertheless it has some parts which are substantial, others secondary, or as it were accidental.

4. The subject of natural law is every man.

Natural law has the perfect sanction of happiness and ruin; and, whether it is observed or not, it will attain its primary end.

III. There is a twofold positive divine law: that of the Old Testament, whose most important part is the Decalogue, which nevertheless does not contain all moral precepts, and is wholly abrogated by the promulgation of the evangelical law; and that of the New Testament, which imposes no other precepts except those of faith and the sacraments.