So the title of this paper, Natural Law, Natural Inclinations and Divine Grace,

The Trinitarian Pattern of Man's Ordering to God.

It's a common trope that St. Thomas Aquinas' approach to natural law

supposes a fixed, static human nature,

whose purposes are set into the physical reality of who we are with a little room for the more human dimensions of our personhood.

So to take just one influential example of this, Carl Ronner proposed an existential ethics

as an alternative to pre-modern theories of natural law,

precisely because he thought that analyzing a moral

life by means of human nature and universal commands of the law did not take a full account

of the dynamic power of human freedom by which human beings participate in the creative

will of God. But this common trope, when it's applied to Aquinas, is false and misleading.

Aquinas, following Aristotle, understands nature not as something static, but precisely as a principle of dynamism,

a principle of motion, of activity, and rest.

What is more, it is an architectonic principle

for Thomas Aquinas that the pattern of the Trinitarian processions

in God is at the very foundation of the world,

characterizes creation itself,

and marks all of the triune God's actions in it,

and is likewise the pattern by which the rational creature

is ordered back to the Trinity by nature and by grace.

This principle is rarely treated by contemporary commentators when they speak of natural law in Aquinas,

and often it's not even acknowledged.

...