ABSTRACT
In its zeal to bear witness to the congruity obtaining between grace and nature Catholic social teaching often neglects the role that the revelation of God through Moses, the prophets, and the New law of Jesus play in constituting the natural. Although the congruity of grace and nature must be maintained if Christianity is to be credible, so must the possibility remain that we are frustrated in both our assent to, and our understanding of, the natural. The meaning present in the natural order is not self-evident, and cannot become so by objective human reasoning because such investigation itself participates in the natural. In fact, that the natural will always in part be open to revision is neither a modern nor a postmodern insight. St Thomas himself argued that because our recognition and assent to the natural is also always dependent on social and political promulgations, it can be revised at the level of secondary prescriptions; those that affect us most directly.1 Although they do not constitute the natural, human speech and action participate in its possibility. Thus the natural cannot be appealed to without there being at the same time a recognition of those social and historical contexts that make such appeals possible.
