Natural Law and the Harmonious City

Joseph Milne

One of the great themes of ancient religion and philosophy was how to live harmoniously as a community. From this concern arose the understanding of natural law, the law inherent in nature which guided all things to their proper ends. This law linked together the cosmos, the human city, and each human soul. A correspondence was understood to exist between them. Where this correspondence was realised in practice, society flourished in harmony with itself and with nature as a whole, and with the Divine Intelligence of the universe. From this harmony the truly just city and virtuous citizenship come into being. The understanding of this natural law was preserved in ancient Egypt and classical Greece and endured in the West until the close of the Middle Ages, after which it has been all but lost.

In our times, when we clearly live out of accord with nature, the study of the natural law tradition can provide insights that may help us restore our place in the providential order of nature.

A distinguishing feature of ancient myth is the sense of a divinely ordered cosmos. Unlike our modern mechanistic conception of the universe, for the ancients the whole world was a living being, peopled with divinities who watched over all the works of nature, and also over the life and deeds of mankind. And if anyone acted in a way that offended the divinities or the natural harmony of nature, retribution would fall upon them. Man is intended to live in accord with the laws of nature, and insofar as he does so the human race flourishes and is happy. One can see these themes in ancient myths and folk tales from all parts of the world. They are present in the epics of Homer, the Greek tragedies, the heroic Norse sagas, the myths and legends of the American Indians, as well as in ancient sacred Creation stories.

And still, for children, and for the storyteller, ‘nature’ is a living being with strange and magical powers. There is no good story without a world full of mysterious powers. The stars, the rivers and the forests are all living beings who watch over human events. Nothing in nature is unseen and without witness. This is the way the imagination apprehends the world, even in our own age where such things are supposed to belong to the previous ages of superstition.

But it is not only imagination that apprehends the world in this way. Our human reason also apprehends an order to the world, and somehow grasps it as a single whole – as a ‘cosmos’ and not mere random entities and events. Reason sees justice in nature, as well as a purposeful order between all living things. Modern ecology is built on this primary rational intuition of order throughout the natural world. It is one branch of science that seeks to escape from the mechanistic vision of the seventeenth century that has limited our understanding of nature’s wisdom and intelligence for so long. Yet it remains difficult now to see nature as itself rational and intelligent because we have banished intelligence from nature. Nevertheless, seeing nature as rational and intelligent was always how she was seen until our age. Insofar as we still acknowledge order in nature, we have limited its ‘lawfulness’ to a mechanistic or mathematical level. Even the ecologists try to do this, perhaps against their better instinct, in order to stay scientifically legitimate.

We find in the ancient world various words for the great order the universe. In ancient Egypt Maat ruled the entire universe with providential wisdom and justice, and this extended down to the order of society and even to the smallest human deed. Whatever one did, it was to be guided and enlightened with Maat. While Maat is the Goddess and symbol for cosmic order, for truth, for harmony and moral conduct, she is in essence the symbol for Egyptian civilisation itself. She is incarnate in the Pharaoh and through him immediately present everywhere and in each citizen. Citizenship is experienced as living in harmony with truth, duty and justice.

In the ancient Hindu writings the great order and harmony of the universe is represented by the word Rta. It is Rta that governs cosmic order and the lawful unfolding of things divine and human. In China the equivalent word is Tao of the Dao which keeps the heavens and the earth in balance and harmony. In ancient Persian it is Arta. In classical Greece it the words Nomos and Harmonia. Nomos is Greek for ‘law’, while Harmonia is the just proportion of all things. For the Romans it is Lex or Right, signifying the just law governing the whole universe as well as human affairs. Each of these words signify an intelligence inherent in the universe, guiding everything to its appointed end. They are not powers outside nature, imposed on things from outside. On the contrary, they are the most intimately present realities shining everywhere out of their essences. The law is at once universal, yet it also belongs to the nature of each particular thing, relating each to the order of the whole.

As the Greek philosophers began to explore nature in a more abstract or rational way, they found that what was expressed in myth and primordial symbols could be seen in more direct ways. For example, in early medicine the order of the body was still connected with the cosmic order. The word physis – the Greek word for nature – referred to the ‘coming to birth’ of things and their growth into completion. So the word physis meant ‘essence’ and ‘coming to be’, and our own word ‘nature’, from the Latin natura once meant the same. This ‘coming to be’ of things brought them to their maturity and their proper place within the greater order. Thus everything in nature seeks to come to full maturity. Even the Sophists who opposed physis with nomos or law, understood nature as prescriptive, as indicating what we ought to do, as we see in Plato’s Gorgias.[1]

This principle of everything seeking its maturity or completion is crucial for understanding Greek thought and philosophy. The technical name for this principle is the telos of things, and it is also called the ‘final cause’ of each thing. For example, dwelling is the final cause of building a house, or cutting is the final cause of a knife. The final cause is really the end for which things come to be, and therefore the reason they come to be. It is through knowing the final cause of things that we really know their nature. Aristotle says that we know human nature from the fully grown and mature human being, which includes the person living a virtuous life. We cannot know the nature of something when it is incomplete.

With the birth of modern science this telos of things was swept aside, and teleology relegated to a superstition of the past. But early modern science was not concerned with the proper ends of things but with gaining mastery over them, of subjecting nature to human will. This break with the teleological understanding of nature wiped out a way of enquiring not only into the natural ends of things, but also investigation into the right use of things. Here is an example. According to Plato and Aristotle the right use of a house is dwelling, or the right use of a shoe is wearing it on one’s foot. But these things get put to a wrong use when used for money-making, for selling at a profit. In other words, the commercialising of things is putting them to wrong uses and replacing their proper end with a false or unjust end. The classic example is usury which is still illegal in some systems of law.

According to Plato and Aristotle, nature of herself provides exactly the right amount of things for man to live on. For example, the right amount of food from the land. But if the farmer seeks to make a profit rather than supply for his city, then the balance of nature will be upset and some will have more than they need while others will have insufficient. In other words, the wrong use of nature produces both poverty and excessive riches, and these in turn divide a society against itself. The art of the right use of things was what was meant by the Greek word oikonomia, the origin of our word ‘economy’. It was the art of knowing the just relation between ends and means. The proper ends and means of things kept them in harmony with nature as a whole. Thus the ‘wrong use’ of anything involves breaking away from the order of nature as a whole. It is significant that only the Catholic Church still teaches the principle of the right use of things in its social teaching on economics. Modern economics ignores it, or at best will mention it as only an ancient theory.

These ideas about ‘nature’ and about telos have universal application. They are keys to understanding the question of natural law and the natural order of a society. For Plato and Aristotle, the city or polis are the natural habitat of the human species. As the social and political species, every community naturally tends towards a self-sufficient city. The constitutions may vary, but the telos is towards a balanced self-sufficiency where each citizen has a clearly defined role or vocation. This idea re-emerges in the twelfth century in John of Salisbury who likens human society to a living organism with its different organs and limbs. Every individual, from the farmer to the scholar to the Prince has a ‘status’ of honour within the whole, where each have reciprocal duties. The craftsmen formed guilds to assure their communal welfare and prevent illegal practices. For a brief moment such cities came into being in France but where eventually overwhelmed by the rise of commerce and trade for money instead of for goods. The demise of the organic city is the beginning of the modern marketised society.

If a society has a natural order, and its natural order forms a part of wider nature and of the universe, then it must also have a natural hierarchy. The proper meaning of ‘hierarchy’ is that mind or divine intelligence descends through the structure of things. The word ‘hierarchy’ literally means ‘divine principle’. It is a further part of the telos of things, guided by the most universal principle of ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ permeating all things. This natural hierarchical order of things is laid out very clearly many times in Thomas Aquinas. For example in his Summa Contra Gentiles he says:

…it is evident that all parts are ordered to the perfection of the whole, since a whole does not exist for the sake of its parts, but, rather, the parts are for the whole. Now, intellectual natures have a closer relationship to a whole than do other natures; indeed, each intellectual substance is, in a way, all things. For it may comprehend the entirety of being through its intellect; on the other hand, every other substance has only a particular share in being. Therefore, other substances may fittingly be providentially cared for by God for the sake of intellectual substances. (SCG 3 Chapter 112: 5)

As always with Aquinas, he is at once very clear but very compact. So it is worth drawing out what he says here. The first part – that everything is ordered to the perfection of the whole – we have already covered. We can see this simply in the organs of human anatomy. But when Aquinas says that “intellectual natures have a closer relationship to a whole than do other natures” we have to pause a moment. What he means here is that ‘mind’ is more universal than other substances, and so mind embraces everything, can take in the whole. The universe is already embraced and held in being by the mind of God. But the human mind, being made in the image of God, can ‘comprehend’ the universe and ‘participate’ in the divine intelligence embracing and sustaining it. That is to say, the truly universal principle of the universe is ‘mind’, and that all things exist by virtue of God knowing them into being. It also means that ‘intellectual substance’ is itself the most unified substance in itself. It is the rational principle of unity in all things. By contrast, every other substances, such as matter or the elements, have a ‘particular share in being’ and therefore providentially serve ‘intellectual substances’ or mind.

This means, of course, that in the order of nature the lower species serve the higher species. We can clearly observe this in nature. The bee pollinates the fruit tree in gathering its honey, the fruit tree nourishes the birds and a host of other creatures, including the human species. The human species returns to the earth the chore and seed from the fruit. Thus nature forms a virtuous circle. That is the natural hierarchy of nature clearly manifest to observation. Yet human society has a higher function. Its place is to manifest the understanding of the great order of things through living in accord with the law than runs through the whole. That means to live virtuously and, ultimately, to contemplate the Divine Goodness itself that has brought all beings into being and to which they naturally aspire to return through their part in the harmony of the universe. Thus the ‘contemplative’ life is the completion of the ‘practical’ life. The contemplative and the active mutually support and sustain each other. They are not merely ‘alternative life styles’ as we say in modern parlance!

From this it follows that each individual citizen has a part to play within the whole, and through making their contribution they bring benefit to all and at the same time fulfil their own nature. It is only through this participation in society that each individual may fulfil their natural talents or vocations. There is nowhere else to fulfil them. It is obvious that if each individual were to live only for themselves they would neither receive any benefit from, nor contribute any benefit to society. In this way we see that society has an underlying fundamental lawful order, and the more closely it holds to that underlying order, the better it will attain its end. Through caring for the whole, each individual is cared for and fulfilled. In that sense, each individual is also an end in themselves. Serving the whole does not mean being subsumed to the whole.

We find this fundamental principle of participation in the whole expressed in Plato’s reflections of the proper ends that the lawmaker must bear in mind. For example, in the Republic when it is suggested that the law should enable one class to live better than others, Socrates says:

You have again forgotten, my friend, that the law does not ask itself how some one class in a state is to live extraordinarily well. On the contrary, it tries to bring about this result in the entire state; for which purpose it links the citizens together by persuasion and by constraint, makes them share with one another the benefit which each individual can contribute to the common weal, and does actually create men of this exalted character in the state, not with the intention of letting them go each on his own way, but with the intention of turning them to account in its plans for the consolidation of the state. (Sourcebook of Ancient philosophy, edited by Charles M. Bakewell) Plato's Republic, Book VII. p. 519e)

Notice the expression “law does not ask itself”. Plato speaks from the essence of law as such and the ends it naturally secures. It is from an understanding of the essence of law and its ends that any good lawmaking can proceed. Laws that spring from the essence of law will not only assure the good of all, they will also “create men of exalted character”, which is to say it will create just citizens, citizens who love justice and delight in acting justly. Citizens who thus live justly will create a city of friendship. For Plato and Aristotle ‘friendship’ is the true end or fruit of law and justice. A city founded in friendship will aim at the higher arts of music and poetry and philosophy, and will be friends with the gods.

Lawmaking must be guided by seeking perfect justice, while bad law is law that favours one part of the city to the disadvantage of another. Lawmaking ought to be guided by divine intelligence rather than by human desire. Aristotle is very clear on this point, saying:

He therefore that recommends that the law shall govern seems to recommend that God and reason alone shall govern, but he that would have man govern adds a wild animal also; for appetite is like a wild animal, and also passion warps the rule even of the best men. Therefore the law is wisdom without desire. (Aristotle Politics 11. 3 – 4)

A just society is therefore governed by law and not by human passion. Law itself is the natural ruler, not man. But this requires an understanding of law as ‘reason’. When Plato and Aristotle speak of reason they have two kinds of reason in mind: theoretical reason and practical reason. These two aspect of reason have been lost in modern notions of reason. The theoretical reason is grounded in a knowledge of universals, or universal principles. For example it knows ‘being’ as a universal in which all beings participate. The theoretical reason therefore goes to the ‘truth’ of things. The practical reason, on the other hand, is grounded in the principles of action, or knowledge of right action. These principles come to light when specific proper actions are called for, so that, for example, justice can be applied to a specific situation. The practical reason therefore goes to the ‘good’ of things. It is the practical reason that knows the natural law. The natural law is known in the immediate demand to act, showing what ought to be done and what is not to be done. Cicero often writes of the practical reason in this sense, for example he says:

Law (lex) is the highest reason implanted in nature, which commands what is to be done and forbids the opposite. When this same reason has been strengthened and brought to completion in the human mind, it is law (lex), and so [the Stoics] they suppose that law is intelligence whose force (vis) it is to command right action and forbid wrongdoing … It is a force of nature; it is the mind and reason of the wise man; it is the rule (regula) for justice and injustice. (Cicero De Legibus, On the Laws 1.18–19)

When Cicero says ‘law is the highest reason implanted in nature’ he means that Nature Herself is imbued with reason and intelligence. The human intelligence shares in this same reason, and when it is perfected in the human mind, it is then the law in human reason. Acting from that law in human reason corresponds with the universal reason of nature, and so right action becomes action according to nature. This is what justice amounts to, acting in harmony with the intelligence of nature.

Notice a connection here with what Aquinas said: that intellectual substances are universal and that in a certain sense the human mind is all things, at least insofar as it has the capacity to receive into itself the intelligence and reason guiding the universe. We find this same understanding expressed is a different way in the third century by the biographer Diogenes Laertius who says:

For our individual natures are all parts of universal nature; on which account the chief good is to live in a manner corresponding to nature, and that means corresponding to one’s own nature and to universal nature; doing none of those things which the common law of mankind is in the habit of forbidding, and that common law is identical with that right reason which pervades everything, being the same with Jupiter, who is the regulator and chief manager of all existing things. (From Diogenes Laertius, Yonge's translation, p. 290. Sourcebook of Ancient Philosophy, p. 274)

That ‘reason’ is a principle shared in all rational beings in common with nature is beautifully expressed in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

The intellectual part is the same to all rationals, and therefore that reason also, whence we are called rational, is common to all. If so, then that commanding power, which shows what should be done or not done, is common. If so, we have all a common law. If so, we are all fellow-citizens: and if so, we have a common city. The universe, then, must be that city; for of what other common city are all men citizens? (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by Francis Hutcheson, Liberty Fund )

The idea that we are all ‘citizens of the universe’ is a distinguishing mark of the Stoic philosophy. Each individual is in a sense a ‘little city’, and the built city each dwells in bears a likeness to the ‘cosmic city’ that all mankind inhabits. What unites the three cities is the one law common to all. But the sense of living in the cosmos, what is called the ‘cosmic sense’, belongs to the human sense of existence as such and may be traced back to the earliest religious and mythic records of human thought, as we observed earlier. Yet with the rise of philosophical reflection the original ‘symbolic’ or ‘poet’ sense of existence shows itself to belong also to the rational sense. This appears most evidently in the sense of the ‘lawfulness’ of things, the fundamental intuition that reality is coherent.

The sense of belonging to the cosmos calls into being the highest human faculties. From this follows a natural hierarchy of things to be most honoured. For Plato the ‘soul’ of man is to be honoured first, bodily health and grace second, and material wealth third. This threefold hierarchy belongs to the individual citizen as well as to the structure of the city or polis. Thus statesmanship consists first in tending the soul, second in the health of the body, and third in the right use of wealth. A city loses its unity and harmony if this hierarchy is changed, especially if it is inverted and wealth becomes more honoured than bodily health or the harmony of the soul. Plato says clearly in the Laws:

The noblest and best thing of all for every city is that the truth be told about wealth, namely, that it is for the sake of the body, and the body is for the sake of the soul. (Plato Laws 870b)

Here we see how wealth has a natural telos or proper end in nurturing the body, while the body has a proper end in serving the soul. The soul is the proper ruler of the body and wealth, and this is the same with the soul of the individual and the soul of the city. When this natural order of honours is established, then the soul is open to the order of the cosmos and the realm of the gods. When this natural order is maintained, the city shapes itself accordingly, with the temple in the centre, the civic life surrounding it, and the cultivation of the land forming the outer circle. We see this natural form in the medieval cathedral cities. It is a form that unfolds spontaneously if the life of the soul and the divine order is placed first in honour. It is exactly what Aquinas means when he says “intellectual natures have a closer relationship to a whole than do other natures”. The soul has an affinity with the cosmic order, the intelligence of the universe personified in the powers of the gods and the providential goodness that guides everything to its appointed perfection.

Although this lawful order of things is natural and spontaneous, nevertheless it belongs to man to respond to it and to enquire into it. Unlike the other creatures, man has an innate sense of duty to educate and develop himself. The seed of this sense of duty is the inborne love of truth and goodness. There is a beautiful passage in Cicero’s De Finibus which describes the progressive development that follows from this sense of duty in the soul:

The primary duty is that the creature should maintain itself in its natural constitution; next, that it should cleave to all that is in harmony with nature and spurn all that is not; and when once this principle of choice and rejection has been arrived at, the next stage is choice, conditioned by inchoate duty; next such a choice is exercised continuously; finally, it is rendered unwavering and in thorough agreement with nature; and at that stage the conception of what good really is begins to dawn within us and be understood. Man’s earliest attraction is to those things which are conformable to nature, but as soon as he has laid hold of general ideas or notions and has seen the regular order and harmony of conduct, he then values that harmony far higher than all the objects for which he felt the earliest affection and he is led to the reasoned conclusion that herein consists the supreme human good. In this harmony consists the good, which is the standard of action; from which it follows that all moral action, nay morality itself, which alone is good, though of later origin in time, has the inherent value and worth to make it the sole object of choice, for none of the objects to which earlier impulses are directed is choiceworthy in and of itself. (De Finibus, III, 20-21)

Let me draw to a close with some brief thoughts on the virtues. When Cicero says ‘morality itself, which alone is good’, he means the virtues, not our modern idea of moral ‘values’. Plato and Aristotle likewise say that the virtuous life is the one good that alone is an end in itself, even though it must be cultivated. The four cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Courage and Temperance are for the ancients the ground of ethics. Each of these virtues is a skill practiced in following the natural law.

Prudence, the Greek virtue of phronesis, is really the virtue of right discernment, of seeing without illusion, with good judgement. It is a part of the practical reason we spoke of earlier. It discerns what ought to be done. A good translation of the Greek phronesis is ‘practical wisdom’, as distinct from ‘theoretical reason’.

Justice is the power to act in harmony with the true or natural order of nature. It is at once a kind of outward action and an inner condition of the soul. The just soul is a soul in harmony with itself.

Courage is part of what Plato calls the ‘spirited’ aspect of the soul, the part roused to take action in defence or in opposition. It must be guided by prudence and justice, the rational part of the soul, otherwise it becomes either rash or cowardly.

Lastly Temperance is the virtue of self-knowledge and self-command. In Greek it is Sophrosyne. This virtue is prized by Plato above all other virtues. For a man may be just, prudent and courageous yet lack self-governance. Temperance is the condition and skill of the soul with self-knowledge in command of itself and therefore immune to all the vices. Sophrosyne is distinguished from the other virtues in that it runs through the rational, the spirited and the appetitive parts of the soul. Later philosophers tended to associate it only with the appetitive part, and so its original meaning was last. According the Plato, only the temperate man is fit to be a statesman or a ruler of a city. Likewise, a city where the virtue of sophrosyne is established in its citizens will live in justice, peace and friendship with itself, and also with its neighbours. Sophrosyne is the natural law fully embodied in citizenship.

It is clear from all we have said that the ancient understanding of natural law has been lost in our age along with the primordial ‘cosmic sense’ in which the universe is experienced as intelligent and divinely ordered. Owing to this loss, the ancient virtues have also lost their ground since they are the actions of the practical reason that bring human life into accord with the cosmic order. Thus only a virtuous people living in harmony with the cosmic harmony can create a ‘natural society’ and so flourish as nature originally intends.

[1] See G. B. Kerferd, The Sophist Movement (Cambridge University Press, 1981) p. 112.

Talk given to Fintry Trust 2024