ABSTRACT
The universe is composed of an indefinite number of con stant natures, each one of which is capable of actualizing
itself through the individuals sharing that nature. Nature for the Greeks was a principle of birth and growth, dynamis, an unfolding of treasures which are written initially like prom ises within the scroll of being. Natural law as something spe cifically human involved the recognition of the human spirit by itself and hence the recognition that man alone in the universe can affirm or deny his own nature. This awesome freedom, often frustrated by fate and fortune and by the inscrutability of chance, in a terrible sense involves the whole order of nature: man, when he affirms himself, affirms the whole and when he denies himself he denies the whole. Thus it was that Saint Thomas Aquinas could hold that suicide is a sin against the community of existence; that Chesterton could write that were the trees capable of knowledge they would shed their leaves and wither into hideous stumps when insulted by the same cosmic blasphemy. Nor must we forget that if justice plays a central role within natural law it is because justice does mean more than simply to give a man his due. This last is an impoverishment of the classical un derstanding of justice. Justice harmonizes into unity what otherwise would be chaos, so Plato teaches us in the Repub lic. It follows that natural justice is a condition not only of justice everywhere but of the very order of the cosmos. We can sum up by saying that natural law, as it slowly developed within the Greek tradition, implied three things: (1) natural law was both an extension of, and a crowning of, a dynamic propensity within all nature to develop and become fully itself; (2) natural law was the specific perfection proper to a man who was aware in an adult fashion of the imperatives of his own humanity; (3) natural law was a principle of harmony and of order within society and within the cosmos.
