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Why did Gratian equate natural law with divine law?
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natural law
Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, oil on canvas by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1653; in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In the 12th century, the Italian monk Gratian equated natural law with divine law to align legal principles with the revealed teachings of the Old Testament and New Testament.12
By identifying natural law as divine law, Gratian specifically linked it to the Christian interpretation of the Golden Rule. This conceptual framework was central to his work, the Decretum Gratiani, which sought to harmonize the diverse and often contradictory rules of canon law into a systematic, authoritative body of church discipline. By grounding natural law in divine revelation, Gratian provided a moral and theological foundation for the legal standards that would govern the Roman Catholic Church for centuries.1234