The following is an exchange between David Novak and Glenn Loury regarding Loury’s article “Tucker and the Right,” which appeared in the January 2026 print issue.
David Novak:
As an American Jew and close friend and colleague of Robert George, it is easy for me to agree with everything Glenn Loury has said in his compelling article “Tucker and the Right.” As a Jew, I agree with Loury’s concern that “the nationalist right” (Tucker Carlson being, not its best, but its best-known spokesman) has grown increasingly hostile to Israel, a hostility “that veers into old patterns of anti-Semitism.” My relationship with George is rooted in (but not confined to) our mutual commitment to natural law (which Aristotle might say is the highest form of friendship).
Loury says that when the universalist natural law type of conservatism “becomes too abstract, too detached from the lived experience of particular communities, it loses its cultural grounding.” He then speaks of “the cultural preconditions of liberty.” Earlier, Loury spoke of “layered identities—cultural, religious, historical.” With Aquinas’s help, I want to argue that culture and religion function differently in natural law universalism, and that history functions differently in relation to culture than it does in relation to religion.
In his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas distinguishes between four types of law (three of which are of concern here), which in my somewhat free translation are: (1) natural law (lex naturalis), (2) human legislation (lex humana), (3) revealed religion (lex divina).
Let us say “culture” is what is called “civic culture,” consisting of human legislation or public policymaking (lex humana) insofar as it is the specific application (Aquinas’s term is determinatione) of natural law standards. Thus, for example, by natural law standards, any just society has the duty to protect its citizens from danger, while simultaneously facilitating social interaction. Yet as the recent COVID crisis showed, panicky concern for protecting the public from danger along with disregard for the need for social interaction, or reckless disregard for protecting the public from danger while dealing with the need for social interaction, are irrational extremes contrary to natural law. The concern for physical safety recognizes that humans are naturally embodied beings of flesh and blood. The concern for social interaction recognizes that humans are naturally political beings who have to live with others in asociety. That is what makes both of them the subject matter of natural law.
When, for example, the principle of public safety is balanced with the principle of social interaction, then natural law is ready to be specified. (In rabbinic tradition, this is called halakhah le-ma`aseh.) How this is to be done is the job of human officials judging the particular situation of their own society and its history. Why this is to be done is to satisfy natural law. Natural law is the essential cause (conditio per quam), the end (telos) or final reason (ultima ratio) of just human legislation. But when the how of human legislation contradicts the why of natural law, when it is patently unjust, there is moral chaos or outright tyranny. To paraphrase Kant (who can be considered a natural law theorist): Natural law without human specification or implementation is empty; human legislation without natural law is blind.
This should be a warning to those who speak of “the natural law” as if it were a definite legal code or written constitution, from which particular conclusions can simply be deduced. Natural law does not exist sufficiently by itself. It is embedded in particular societies and their cultures, namely, the somewhere of real people living in this world. It is not utopian or “the view from nowhere” (in Thomas Nagel’s wording) nor “the view from eternity” (sub specie aeternitatis in Spinoza’s words). Natural law is formulated for human beings whose nature is fallible and mortal. In between natural law and its specifications lies the judgment of persons who have knowledge of and commitment to the current particular situation and the history of their own societies. On the other hand, even ahistorical universalism is better than the ideology of those particularists whose rulings or policies deny universal human nature, instead being rooted or grounded in nothing more than their own sense of entitlement, often including their biased, romantic reading of the history of their own culture or “civilization,” even of their own religion.
The relation of natural law to revealed religions (like Judaism and Christianity), however, is different. Those who see revealed religion and its divinely legislated or authorized practices (hence the name lex divina, or in rabbinic tradition, Torah min ha-shamayim) as being a subset of natural law are (in my view) mistaken. Revealed religion, in fact, transcends natural law. Nor is natural law a subset of revealed religion, which is simply affirmed along with the faith-acceptance of what is taught by one’s religious tradition. Natural law requires rational argumentation to be properly accepted. In the memorable words of the great philosopher-theologian Bernard Lonergan, natural law has “to go through a mind” so that it not be but a period piece, consigned to the “Middle Ages.”
Furthermore, human interpretation of divine law (called in rabbinic tradition de-rabbanan) is somewhat like the relation of lex humana to lex naturalis, that is, maximally applying it; minimally not contradicting it. Like lex humana in relation to lex naturalis, the human interpretation of lex divina is properly done by persons who have knowledge of and commitment to the current situation and the history of their own faith communities (keneset yisrael for Jews; ekklésia for Christians). However, human interpretation of divine law is more circumspect than the human interpretation of natural law. As such, it is best done through the exegesis of sacred texts (called in rabbinic tradition midrash), in order not to confuse even religiously sanctioned human interpretation and legislation with the explicit law of God.
What, then, is natural law’s proper relation to revealed religion? Natural law functions as the necessary precondition (conditio sine qua non) of revealed religion. That is, individuals and societies whose lives are not ordered according to natural law standards, which are addressed to humans according to their human nature-in-the-world, would be in no position to accept the higher, directly revealed law of God (see Exodus 18:20 and 20:19). That higher law includes, yet recontextualizes, already known natural law norms governing interhuman relationships, plus presenting new norms that govern the divine-human relationship. This addresses the third aspect of human nature: humans as the image of God (imago Dei), which can mean the capacity of humans to be in a direct relationship with God. That relationship (which in the Bible is called a berit or “covenant”) is alone constituted by revealed religion. Nevertheless, revealed religion does not obliterate these two earlier aspects of human nature: humans as embodied beings, and humans as political beings. Instead, it presupposes them. As Aquinas well stated: “Grace doesn’t take away nature, it fulfills it” (gratia non tollit sed perficit naturam). (Of course, Judaism and Christianity diverge on what exactly constitutes “grace”.) Revealed religion without the “accompaniment” (what Kant called Begleitung) of natural law is always in danger of sinking into immoral fanaticism or otherworldly sectarianism: the former being in the world to the point of being too much of the world; the latter trying to be out ofthe world altogether.
The best way to elucidate this is to ask: Would the Israelites, either as an anarchic mob or as slaves of Pharaoh the God-imposter, have been in any position to rationally choose to accept the higher law of God revealed at Sinai? In either case, they would simply have been unprepared for this theological elevation. On the other hand, the particularists, criticized by Glenn Loury, erroneously subsume divine law like they subsume natural law into human law, which is of their own making or of their own liking.
I can’t deal here with the metaphysical question of whether natural law requires acknowledgement of the divine lawgiver—as taught by Maimonides and Aquinas—or whether that is only a requirement of revealed religion—as taught by Nahmanides (Maimonides’ greatest theological critic) and Hugo Grotius and Karl Barth.
I thank Glenn Loury for his excellent, thought-provoking article, which, like all such writings, invites its readers to be proactive in their reading of it by responding to its truth.
Glenn Loury responds:
David Novak’s thoughtful response to my essay exemplifies the kind of serious moral reasoning that our present moment badly needs. His Aquinas-inspired distinctions among natural law, human law, and divine law clarify how universal moral principles can—and must—be specified within particular cultures without being reduced to them. I am grateful for the care with which he articulates this framework, and I agree that much confusion in contemporary conservatism arises from a failure to distinguish properly among these levels of normativity.
Yet the issue that motivated my essay, and that I believe Novak’s response only partially addresses, concerns not merely the conceptual relation between universalism and particularism, but the political and moral drama now unfolding around minority status, loyalty, and belonging—especially as these questions attach to Jews and to black Americans in different but revealingly parallel ways.
My comparison between blacks and Jews was not intended to suggest equivalence of historical experience, nor to collapse religious, racial, and national identities into a single category. Rather, it was meant to illuminate a shared predicament: how groups marked by particular histories and durable forms of difference come to be regarded, in moments of national anxiety, as standing uneasily within the civic “we.” For black Americans, this unease has long taken the form of doubts about full citizenship, moral standing, and social trust. For Jews, especially in the current climate, it increasingly takes the form of suspicion about dual loyalty, cosmopolitan influence, or alien moral commitments—suspicions that, as I noted, veer disturbingly close to older patterns of anti-Semitism.
Novak is right to insist that revealed religion must not be subsumed under human law or nationalist politics. But what concerns me is that, in the present populist moment, Jewish particularity is not being rejected because it confuses divine and human law; it is being rejected because universal moral constraints themselves are coming to be seen as instruments of elite domination. In that setting, Jews are cast not simply as religious outsiders, but as emblematic carriers of a universalism now widely resented. The hostility toward Israel that I described is best understood in this light—not as a carefully reasoned critique of state policy, but as a symbolic revolt against the moral vocabulary that has long structured liberal democratic legitimacy.
This is where the black–Jewish comparison becomes indispensable. Black Americans know well what it means to be told, implicitly or explicitly, that appeals to universal rights and moral equality are abstractions imposed from above, detached from the “real” culture of the nation. They also know the cost of a politics in which particularity hardens into exclusion, and universalism is dismissed as either naive or manipulative. The tragedy of our moment is that some on the nationalist right now deploy against Jews a logic once used, and still used, against blacks: that difference signals disloyalty, that moral claims mask power, and that belonging must be proven rather than presumed.
Novak’s philosophical account shows us how universalism and particularity can be coherently ordered in principle. My worry is that this ordering is no longer culturally secure. When universal moral commitments lose their taken-for-granted status, minority groups become tests of loyalty rather than fellow citizens. The black experience in America is a long record of what follows from that shift. The Jewish experience today suggests that this pattern is not confined to any one group.
For that reason, I see the task before us as more than conceptual clarification. It is the recovery of a moral synthesis that allows thick identities to flourish without casting suspicion on those who bear them. Philosophy can tell us why such a synthesis is possible. History—and our present politics—remind us of what happens when it fails.
I am grateful to David Novak for helping us see more clearly what coherence would require. The urgency of the moment lies in whether our political culture still has the will, and the moral confidence, to sustain it.
