Page "Natural law" Paragraph 16

In the Twelfth Century, Gratian equated the natural law with divine law.

A century later, St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae I-II qq.

90-106, restored Natural Law to its independent state, asserting natural law as the rational creature's participation in the eternal law.

Yet, since human reason could not fully comprehend the Eternal law, it needed to be supplemented by revealed Divine law.

( See also Biblical law in Christianity.

) Meanwhile, Aquinas taught that all human or positive laws were to be judged by their conformity to the natural law.

An unjust law is not a law, in the full sense of the word.

It retains merely the ' appearance ' of law insofar as it is duly constituted and enforced in the same way a just law is, but is itself a ' perversion of law.

' At this point, the natural law was not only used to pass judgment on the moral worth of various laws, but also to determine what the law said in the first place.

This principle laid the seed for possible societal tension with reference to tyrants.