Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:2 (Fall 2020)
Article: On Being Fitted Together
Author: Adeline A. Allen

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 142

On Being Fitted Together

Adeline A. Allen

Adeline A. Allen is Associate Professor of Law at Trinity Law School.

“It doesn’t matter who you click with,” declared a 2017 tweet from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in 2017. Accompanying the tweet were three pairs of rainbow-colored seat belt ends: the first pair had two female ends facing each other, the second two male ends, and the third a male end and a female end. The tweet was fired off with the hashtag “Happy #PrideAmsterdam.”

Natural law has a res ipsa loquitur quality to it that, paradoxically, can make articulating it challenging. That is, articulating common sense or truth-accessible-to-all-by-reason can be difficult. But here is a try.

To begin with the tweet under consideration, one does not need to be a Christian to see that only one combination of seat belt ends will do. Special revelation through Scripture is not required to know no “click” is possible for any other combination. One end is made for the other — fitted together, just so — and that arrangement is exclusive. This we can know through natural law.

Natural law is accessible to every human being because each person is made in God’s own image as a reasoning being. Man participates in the awesome powers of reason and creativity of God the Logos when he exercises and cultivates his faculty to reason.1 Every human being has this root (Lt. radix) and radical capacity for reason, even the smallest or sickest among us — those whose mental faculties are not yet

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 143

mature or whose mental faculties have deteriorated.2 “Thus God made man in his own image,” St. Augustine says, “by creating for him a soul of such a kind that because of it he surpassed all living creatures, on earth, in the sea, and in the sky, in virtue of reason and intelligence; for no other creature had a mind like that. God fashioned man out of the dust of the earth and gave him a soul of the kind I have described.”3

Thomas Aquinas teaches that natural law is man’s participation in God’s eternal law.4 It is our sharing in the truth woven into the fabric, or “deep grammar,” of the created order.5 It is law “written on [the] hearts,” about which the Apostle Paul writes, while the “conscience also bears witness,” knowable to the Gentiles apart from special revelation.You must have a subscription and be logged in to read the entire article.
Click here to subscribe