4. Response to the Objection

32. To this objection one can reply in three ways.

In one way as follows: that the commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God etc.” does not simply belong to the law of nature as it is affirmative, but as it is negative, prohibiting the opposite. For ‘not to hate’ belongs simply to the law of nature, but whether one is ‘to love at some time’ was doubted above in the third article [n.23]. Now from the negative command it does not follow that one must want love of God for one’s neighbor; but it would follow from the affirmative command, about which it is not certain that it belongs, strictly speaking, to the law of nature [n.22].

33. One can reply in a second way that from the commandment ‘Thou shalt love the Lord they God’ it does not follow that I would want my neighbor to love God.

34. And when it is proved that zealous love cannot be ordered and perfect love [n.31], I reply: I ought not to want the common good to be the good of another and then not to be loved by that other. But there is no need for me to want that good to belong to another - namely because it is not pleasing to that good that it belong to another, in the way that God, in predestinating one and not another, wants to be the good of one predestined person and not of someone else.

35. And the same point makes plain the answer to the claim that ‘he who loves perfectly wants the beloved to be loved jointly by another’ [n.31]. It can be said that this is true of everyone whose love is pleasing to the beloved. But from the law of nature it is not certain about anyone that his love is accepted by God as beloved or as loving.

36. In a third way it can be replied that, although it belongs strictly to the law of nature that one’s neighbor should be loved, as was expounded before [n.31], that is, that ‘one must simply will for one’s neighbor that he love God, because this is to love one’s neighbor’ - yet from this it does not follow that the commandments of the second table belong to the law of nature. I mean these: that ‘one must not want to kill one’s neighbor, as concerns the good of his person’, and that ‘one must not want to commit adultery, as concerns the good of the person joined to him’, and that ‘one must not want to steal, as concerns the goods of fortune that he uses’, that ‘reverence is to be shown one’s parents in honors and in help and in support’, and so on about the other commandments of the second table. For it is possible for me to want my neighbor to love God and yet to refuse him, or not want for him, bodily life or the preservation of his wife’s fidelity and so on about the rest. And consequently it is possible for the following two things to cohere together: a) that it would be a certain necessary truth, drawn as a conclusion from practical principles, that ‘I should want my neighbor to love God in himself just as I ought to want myself to love God’; and yet b) this other would not be a necessary truth, ‘I should want for my neighbor this or that good of the sort expressed in a commandment of the second table’.

37. And then as to the authorities of Paul and of Christ [n.30], one could say that now God has in fact explained love of neighbor beyond what it includes as following from the principles of the law of nature. Thus, although as to what follows from the principles of the law of nature it only contain ‘to will to love one’s neighbor in himself’, yet as now explained it includes ‘one should will those goods [n.36] for one’s neighbor’, or at least ‘one should not will the opposite evils for one’s neighbor’ (as that one should not want him unjustly to have bodily life, fidelity of spouse, temporal goods and the like).

38. It is therefore true that he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law [n.30], in the way that the law has been explained as needing to be kept [nn.32-36], though not in the way in which love of neighbor follows from the first principles of the law of nature [n.36].

39. And similarly, the whole law (as to the second table) and the prophets depend on this commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’, when the understanding of that commandment is not however of it as it follows from the practical first principle of the law of nature, but as the legislator intends that that commandment among those belonging to the second table should be kept (as explained [n.37]).