Burke, Anglican Thomist

Despite the deeply inaccurate portrayal of Burke's Anglicanism ("semi-detached adhesiveness") in Peter Stanlis's Edmund Burke and Natural Law - a view that owes something to the fanciful, unstable imaginings of the extreme Tractarian Froude - this description of his vision of Natural Law coheres with J.C.D. Clark's magisterial account in which Burke's defence of the Anglican settlement in Church and State is an expression of classical Anglican political theology:

Certainly Burke's interpretation of the Natural Law was identical with the Catholic principle, taught by all the Scholastic philosophers, that sovereignty lies in God's reason and justice, rather than, as the Calvinists held, in His private will and power.  On this essential point Burke was in the mainstream of the High Church Anglican tradition of Hooker, Laud, Lancelot Andrewes, Bramhall, Jeremy Taylor, and many other seventeenth-century Anglican divines.

As John Milbank emphasises, Burke, and the wider High Church tradition of political theology flowing from Hooker, is here thoroughly Thomist:

he speaks of the power of ruling as something “which to be legitimate must be according to that eternal immutable law, in which will and reason are the same.” Here, in striking agreement with Aquinas, Burke both insists that the test of the legitimacy of the positive law is its consonance with natural equity and (unlike Suarez) identifies will and reason as coinciding sources of legality in the divine.