Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2013
Abstract
The paper is concerned with the reception and transformation of Augustine’s concepts of eternal and natural laws in Aquinas’s doctrine of law. The author shows that Aquinas’s concept of eternal law is strongly inspired by Augustine who himself drew the term from Stoics in order to transform it according to the Neo-platonic doctrine of divine intellect.
Aquinas followed also Augustine’s concept of natural law as the rational creature’s participation in eternal law. Nevertheless, Aquinas’s concept of natural law is his original synthesis between Augustine’s concept of eternal and natural laws and some elements of Aristotle’s ethics and of Aristotelian-Neo-platonic metaphysics of Arabic provenance.