The last two decades or so have seen a marked resurgence of interest in natural law thought, a movement in which Russell Hittinger has been a major figure. The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World reveals the power and subtlety of Hittinger's philosophical work and cultural criticism. Whether discussing the nature of liberalism, the constitutional and moral problems posed by judicial usurpation, or the dangers of technology, Hittinger convincingly demonstrates that in our post-Christian world it is more crucial than ever that we recover older, wiser notions of the concepts of freedom and law - and that we see that to place these two concepts in opposition is to misunderstand both profoundly. Russell Hittinger teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa, where since 1996 he has held the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies and an appointment as Research Professor of Law. Since 2001 he has been a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas. He is the author of A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory . The First Grace Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World By Russell Hittinger ISI Books Copyright © 2007 Russell Hittinger All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-933859-46-0 Introduction The title of this book is taken from the letter of a presbyter named Lucidus who recanted of certain doctrines condemned at the second Council of Arles (A.D. 473). Lucidus and others in southern Gaul taught that after the sin of Adam no work of human obedience could be united with divine grace, that human freedom was not weakened or distorted but totally extinguished, and that Christ did not incur death for all human beings. In the letter of retraction, the natural law is mentioned twice. The natural law is said to be the "first grace of God" ( per primam Dei gratiam ) before the coming of Christ ( in adventum Christi) . Lucidus also affirmed that, according to Romans 2:15, the natural law is "written in every human heart." The point at issue for the thirty bishops at Arles was how the human creature is located in an order of divine providence. On the one hand, the bishops wanted to avoid the heresy of Pelagius, who held that man's natural gifts are sufficient for salvation-a position that makes the economy of divine law and revelation superfluous. Thus, Lucidus confessed that humans "were not set free from the original slavery except by the intercession of the sacred blood." On the other hand, the bishops worried that an overly severe doctrine of predestination would imply that God removes some creatures from the gifts of providence, leaving the human race, as Rousseau would later say of the state of nature, as "if it had been left to itself." The quote from Rousseau indicates the theme of the subtitle of this collection. For, beginning with the state-of-nature scenarios imagined by Enlightenment philosophers, natural law came to mean the position of the human mind just insofar as it is left to itself, prior to authority and law. Natural law constitutes an authority-free zone. The influential jurisprudent H. L. A. Hart accurately summarized the post-Christian estate of natural law discourse: Natural Law has ... not always been associated with belief in a Divine Governor or Lawgiver of the universe, and even where it has been, its characteristic tenets have not been logically dependent on that belief. Both the relevant sense of the word "natural," which enters into Natural Law, and its general outlook minimizing the difference ... between prescriptive and descriptive laws, have their roots in Greek thought which was, for this purpose, quite secular. Indeed, the continued reassertion of some form of Natural Law doctrine is due in part to the fact that its appeal is independent of both divine and human authority, and to the fact that despite a terminology, and much metaphysics, which few could now accept, it contains certain elementary truths of importance for the understanding of both morality and law. For Hart, the "core of good sense in the doctrine of Natural Law" need not be entangled in "theocratic" premises. Rather, it is reducible to certain "truisms concerning human nature and the world in which men live, [and] as long as these hold good, there are certain rules of conduct which any social organization must contain if it is to be viable." Reminiscent of Hobbes, Hart's natural law is neither a higher law nor a lower law. It represents those contingent but pervasive aspects of the human predicament which provide the background problems and motivations for positive law. Hart's assertion that natural law has an "appeal" that is separable from the premises of either natural or revealed theology has its own appeal to many, if not most, contemporary proponents of natural law. The leading American critic of legal positivism, Lon Fuller, who maintained a long-standing debate with Hart over the moral bases of