Book Review: Human Rights and the Image of God

Abstract

Roger Ruston’s Human Rights and the Image of God examines what it is to be an individual in the liberal and natural law traditions. He seeks to compare the natural image of a social being, imbued by nature and grace with a teleological spirit with the more traditional liberal rights-bearing agent characteristic of the twenty-first century. Moving beyond the particular account of creation in the Book of Genesis, Ruston first criticizes the notion of universal human rights in the contemporary era including an examination, and open questioning of, the interrelated notion of rights in the institution of the Catholic Church. Aware of the distinctly Christian framework in which he is writing, Ruston seeks to bring into the fold those who divorce religion from politics and theology from philosophy by way of an alternative understanding of justice and liberty, intermingling the works of Aquinas and the Scholastics with the dominant secular liberal international paradigm. Aquinas’s account of liberty originates in the status naturae integrae, an incorrupt state of nature. He envisions a politics of paradise and, contra Hobbes, does not theorize from the opposing state of nature. For Aquinas and the Scholastics grace does not corrupt nature but rather helps to perfect it. Through one’s connaturality one can initiate the transition from a latent to an active intellect and build on one’s dominion naturale (natural dominion) and pursue one’s natural teleology. Natural dominion is, in contemporary discourses, akin to philosophical and political notions of agency. Guided by the intellect and will, component parts of the individual’s potential intellect, natural dominion is integrally tied to the natural freedom of nature’s creatures. It is this conception of naturalness that Vitoria was to pick up on in his Relectionnes on the American Indians arguing that as God’s and therefore nature’s creation, the Indians demonstrated a degree of dominion over their affairs thereby evincing the necessary capacity and capability to know God. Ruston seeks to illustrate that through this particular conception of nature, Vitoria synthesizes Aristotelian and Thomist assumptions offering to the Indians the protection of the natural law. Aided and