The Heavely Order and the Lawful Society

Talk given at Temenos Conference 2013

Joseph Milne

Just as the primary purpose of human law is to cause friendship between men, so the purpose of the divine law is to establish friendship between men and God. Thomas Aquinas

Nothing is due to anyone except in virtue of something that has been given to him gratuitously by God. Thomas Aquinas

We find in all ancient cultures an understanding of a heavenly order that holds all things in their proper place and guides them to their proper ends. The earth and the heavens are bound together, with man dwelling in the earth and under the heavens. Thus man is seen as part of a greater whole, a participant within a cosmic order he is called upon to contemplate. Through this contemplation arises insight into the way of life proper to man, into the nature of society and into the laws and customs that enable society to flourish within the wider order of the earth and the heavens.

From this understanding of a heavenly order arise religious veneration, poetry, architecture and the crafts, agriculture, philosophy and jurisprudence. These are all rooted in the understanding of the heavenly order, and so the heavenly order is woven into that natural life of society.

This ancient view is grounded in an understanding that the universe is supremely intelligent. For example, Cicero writes in The Nature of the Gods,

Now we see that in parts of the universe (for there is nothing in the entire universe which is not a part of the whole), sensation and reason exist. These qualities must therefore exist, and exist more vividly and to a greater extent, in that part in which the ruling principle of the universe resides. Consequently the universe must be intelligent, and the element which holds all things in its embrace must excel in perfection of reason; the universe, therefore, must be divine, and so must the element by which the whole strength of the universe is held together. (The Nature of the Gods, Book 2, XI)[1]

Following Plato and the Stoics, Cicero goes further and says that the universe is also virtuous:

As there is nothing more perfect than the universe, and nothing more excellent than virtue, it follows that virtue is an attribute of the universe. Human nature is not indeed perfect, yet virtue is attained in man, so how much more easily in the universe! Virtue, then, does exist in the universe, which is therefore wise, and consequently divine. (The Nature of the Gods, Book 2, XIV)

Is this so different from what the Psalmist says in Psalm 8? ‘O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens,’? In The Third Ennead Plotinus personifies the cosmos speaking of its own nature in this way:

I am made by a God: from that God I came perfect above all forms of life, adequate to my function, self-sufficing, lacking nothing: for I am the container of all, that is, of every plant and every animal, of all the Kinds of created things, and many Gods and nations of Spirit-Beings and lofty souls and men happy in their goodness.

And do not think that, while earth is ornate with all its growths and with living things of every race, and while the very sea has answered to the power of Soul, do not think that the great air and the ether and the far-spread heavens remain void of it: there it is that all good Souls dwell, infusing life into the stars and into that orderly eternal circuit of the heavens which in its conscious movement ever about the one Centre, seeking nothing beyond, is a faithful copy of the divine Mind. And all that is within me strives towards the Good; and each, to the measure of its faculty, attains. For from that Good all the heavens depend, with all my own Soul and the Gods that dwell in my every part, and all that lives and grows, and even all in me that you may judge inanimate. (Plotinus The Third Ennead).[2]

We could cite many examples from other ancient cultures and traditions that express in different ways this vision of the cosmos as divinely ordered or as manifesting the divine mystery beyond itself, or as infused with providential intelligence, and ordered toward the divine and the good. Eliade, for example in his famous study The Sacred and the Profane, traces a history through religious symbols of how man naturally lives in a sacred cosmos. He writes,

Every world is the work of the gods, for it was either created directly by the gods or was consecrated, hence cosmicized, by men ritually reactualizing the paradigmatic act of Creation. This is a s much as to say that religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has real existence. This religious need expresses an unquenchable ontological thirst. Religious man thirsts for being. (The Sacred and the Profane p. 64)[3]

This consecrated world, this world made cosmos, Eliade contrasts with the ‘profane’ world which has no order and exists in mere empty space where no place has meaning or offers a home for man. The profane world, which is equivalent to the modern ‘secular world’, is a world without purpose or direction, of homogenous space and time as two dimensions of emptiness where all objects and beings exist indifferently and arbitrarily. The secular or profane world is where man must strive to render meaning to things that have no meaning in themselves, or a moral order where no natural good belongs to anything in itself, or a rational order where things have no reason or intelligence in themselves. Thus Eliade says, the world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos, in the measure in which it reveals itself as a sacred world. (p. 64)

This is a remarkable assertion of Eliade. Since it is the sacred that gives order to the world, order will be seen only insofar as the sacred is perceived. Such perception Eliade calls ‘religious perception’. It is not a theory about things, but a way of abiding with things. As Cicero says, the universe must be divine and ordered by a divine intelligence. Once this is grasped, then the question of how man ought to live may be raised. It is only when the human race is seen as part of the whole universe that the real nature of society can be explored and reflected upon. This is because the question of the nature of society is part of the wider question of the truth of all things, and because the right order of society is accomplished when man lives in harmony with Nature as a whole. It is from this perspective that the questions of ethics and law arise. Thus we find in Plato and Aristotle that the question of the truth of things and the question of virtue arise together, since to seek the truth of things is also to seek the good. Really the love of truth and the love of the good cannot be separated, and if they are they both give birth to distortions. For the Greek philosophers the beautiful may be added to the true and the good. Thus if we reflect on human culture widely we can see that the true, the good and the beautiful are the real ground of scholarship, of the arts or the crafts, and the law.

From that perspective we can begin to see that all scholarship is ordered towards finding and articulating the sacred order of things. Likewise all the crafts which support human life, beginning obviously with agriculture, are ordered toward living in accord with the life of Nature, of nurturing the earth. And again with the creative arts of the imagination, which study and bring to visibility the underlying order and beauty that infuses all things, or which act as a mirror to the interior order of nature. That the study of law and ethics might also belong the study of the sacred order is perhaps the most difficult for our secular age to grasp. We have become so used to the understanding of law in terms of positive law, of mere legal obligation, and as historically conditional, or as the arbitrary dictates of governments, that its roots in the sacred are greatly obscured. Even the divine law in the great religions has now generally been reduced to mere rules and obligations, or moral platitudes, what in theology is known as the decline into juridicalism.

Yet for the ancients the study of law was the study of the relation of the sacred to reason. The sacred order addresses all parts of human nature – the physical, the rational and the spiritual. It is when these realms of our being become separated or isolated from one another that the study of law becomes confused. To quote Cicero again, he says:

Now if nature hath given us law, she hath also given us justice,—for as she has bestowed reason on all, she has equally bestowed the sense of justice on all. And therefore did Socrates deservedly execrate the man who first drew a distinction between the law of nature and the law of morals, for he justly conceived that this error is the source of most human vices. (Cicero, Treatise on The Laws, Book I)[4]

For the classical Greek and Roman thinkers the perception of the order of Nature is always connected with the perception of justice. Indeed, one of the meanings of the Greek word kosmos is ‘justice’, and so the enquiry into the natural order of things is at once the enquiry into the ethical order of Nature. With Plato and Aristotle the enquiry into the order of Nature leads inevitably to enquiry into human nature and the into the nature of the polis or the state, the proper study of politics.

It is interesting that justice is at once given by nature and is a human virtue. That is to say, the law of Nature is the natural law of all things, while the human virtue of justice is the knowledge of right action in accordance with the truth of nature. Thus everyone has the sense of justice, the sense that there is a proper way of life in harmony with the cosmos or universal justice. Cicero sums this up very beautifully by quoting the Stoics as collected in Diogenes's Lives of Eminent Philosophers:

For our individual natures are parts of the whole cosmos. And this is why the end may be defined as life in accordance with nature, or in other words, according to our own human nature as well as that of the cosmos, a life in which we refrain from every action forbidden by the law common to all things, that is to say, the right reason which pervades all things, and is identical with this Zeus, lord and ruler of all that is (Lives, 7. 87-88)

Here we notice not only ‘the law common to all things’ but also ‘the right reason that pervades all things’ which is ‘identical with Zeus, lord and ruler of all that is’. The reason that pervades all things is the cosmic dimension of the reason the belongs to human nature. This view of reason is not the modern view, which restricts reason to representative conceptions of things. The ancient view of reason is that of the intelligence that pervades all things, and that human reason may participate in this universal reason. Thus the knowledge of things comes about through the mind being receptive to the nature that belongs to all things. The human mind receives the forms of things, and it is this receptivity that is unique to the human race. From this receptivity is born the capacity to reflect on the truth of things. From this reflection is born the philosopher and the contemplative life of the monk.

It is on the basis of this reflective capacity that Aristotle in his Politics, for example, understands the meaning of citizenship. The citizen is one who has the ‘foresight’ necessary to make laws aimed at the common good. Thus the art of lawmaking originates in the capacity to see the ‘law common to all things’ and to judge the consequences of lawmaking. Plato likens this capacity to that of the physician knowing the effects of prescribing medicines. It is a very apt analogy, for while the physician cares for the health of the body, the lawmaker cares for the health of the city or the state. Both are grounded in the knowledge that ‘health’ is the natural condition. The natural health of the body lies in right diet and exercise, while the natural health of the city lies in right reason and the practice of virtue. Thus for Plato the whole object of lawmaking is to establish virtue, since only the virtuous society can live in peace and friendship. Strictly speaking, only the virtuous society is actually a community of citizens. So the person who seeks only their own advantage in a society is not really a citizen.

It is worth noting that our modern notion of the industrial society, in which each seeks a share in the material exploitation of Nature, would not be regarded as a society at all by Plato or Aristotle, but a form of political degeneration. Or, to put that more gently, it would be regarded as a kind of social order, but not citizenship. A genuine society actively seeks the common good through reflection and virtue, just as the physician seeks health through proper exercise and diet.

Yet it is also clear that for the ancient philosophers the virtuous society must be rooted in the sacred. We recall what Eliade said: “the world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos, in the measure in which it reveals itself as a sacred world”. This is true for all the great religious and philosophical traditions. Thomas Traherne speaks of this in his beautiful Centuries of Meditations:

You never enjoy the world aright, till you see how a sand exhibiteth the wisdom and power of God: And prize in everything the service which they do you, by manifesting His glory and goodness to your Soul, far more than the visible beauty on their surface, or the material services they can do your body. Wine by its moisture quencheth my thirst, whether I consider it or no: but to see it flowing from His love who gave it unto man, quencheth the thirst even of the Holy Angels. To consider it, is to drink it spiritually. To rejoice in its diffusion is to be of a public mind. And to take pleasure in all the benefits it doth to all is Heavenly, for so they do in Heaven. To do so, is to be divine and good, and to imitate our Infinite and Eternal Father. (Centuries of Meditations, First Century)

Traherne presents here a remarkable correspondence between the ‘mystical’ perception of nature and true citizenship. To see the wine that quenches the thirst as flowing from God’s love is to ‘drink spiritually’ and to ‘rejoice in its diffusion is to be of a public mind’. And ‘to take pleasure in all the benefits it doth to all is Heavenly, for so they do in Heaven’. This heavenly pleasure is the happiness that comes with virtue and ‘is to be divine and good’. For Traherne the mystical vision is not in any way a private experience. It is to participate in the universal good, or the heavenly order, that manifests in all things when they are seen as they truly are in the mind of God.

This understanding of citizenship wholly transcends the prevailing secular notion of society in which each seeks their own good out of self-interest. A society is not yet a society if each member does not seek the common good. As Thomas Aquinas puts it ‘Man cannot possibly be good unless he stands in the right relation to the common good’. The only way in which this may be practically established is through each citizen understanding their work as a contribution to the common good. Josef Pieper asks about the nature of distributive justice and of the meaning of the ancient definition of justice: to render to each their due. He says:

It means: to make sure that the individual members of the population are given the opportunity to add their contribution to the realization of the common good (bonum commune) that is neither specifically nor comprehensively defined. This participation according to each person’s dignitas or capacity and ability—this is precisely each person’s rightful “due”.[5]

He suggests that there is no need to define the ideal society in detail since the common good emerges spontaneously from the free association of citizens in the realization of their natural talents and vocations. In other words, given the foundation of law and justice in the natural citizenship of man, the common good emerges spontaneously as the proper end or flowering of society or the state. This natural flowering of society or the state is at once in accord with human nature and with the whole of Nature.

In the different ways that Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, or Traherne approach the question of law one thing is common to them all: the understanding of man as a participant in the greater whole and the greater good. Man is called beyond himself in order to be himself. Man is lost if he does not find his home in the unfolding meaning of the cosmos, as Eliade brings to light so clearly.

This understanding of man as participant in the greater order of things is the key to the ancient approach to education. In Plato’s Republic, and more specifically in his Laws, the concern for the cultivation of the virtues through gymnastics and music is in order to bring about the individuals’ capacity to respond wisely and courageously to the trials of life and to serve the common good. All the true benefits of society arise through virtue and may be enjoyed only by the virtuous – friendship, honour, trust, peace, constancy, wisdom. For Plato the poor man is one without these things, and without these things the individual capacities or talents are stifled.

This understanding of education may be traced right through the Middle Ages. The aim was to integrate the individual into greater and greater spheres of society, so that the functions engaged wider and wider scope and responsibility. This ideal of education is what Paul Tillich calls ‘inductive’. It aims to induct children into the family, with its traditions and symbols, and gradually into ‘the group, the life and spirit of the community’, the ‘tribe, town, nation, church’. (Tillich Theology of Culture, p. 147). One can see how this extends to the transmission of a people’s history, in honouring the ancestors, and in laying down the foundations of the future.

This has even deeper significance in Christian monasticism, where the individual becomes part of the community of prayer and contemplation, and ultimately of mystical union with God. This was precisely the purpose of the study of Scripture and scholastic learning in the Middle Ages. Nature, mathematics, grammar, music and so on are studied in order to refine the soul so that it can participate in the essence of all created things, and so come to know them in the mind of God as God knows them. Once one sees how the medieval scholars were concerned to ascend to God through meditation on the created order, and thus to experience the cosmos spiritually, the differences between what they regarded as the knowledge of things and our modern secular or materialistic notion of knowledge becomes perfectly explicable. For example in his Journey of the Mind into God Bonaventure says:

We may behold God in the mirror of visible creation, not only by considering creatures as vestiges of God, but also by seeing Him in them; for He is present in them by His essence, His power, and His presence. And because this is a higher way of considering than the preceding one, it follows as the second level of contemplation, on which we ought to be led to the contemplation of God in every creature that enters our mind through the bodily senses. (Journey of the Mind into God Chapter 2)[6]

For Bonaventure, as for the great Maximus the Confessor before him, the creation, or Nature, in a special way manifests God. Contrary to the widespread view that regards the medieval Christians as ‘world-negating’, for the medieval scholar or mystic the cosmos makes the invisible visible. Nature is theophanic. In seeing God through Nature the mystic sanctifies the world and returns it to its true meaning in the Creator. Aquinas puts this in a more philosophical way, saying, ‘All things, in so far as they have being, are like to God, who is being in the first and highest manner’ (Summa contra Gentiles I, 80). And elsewhere he says,

All creatures participate in the divine goodness, with the result that they pour forth to others the goodness that they themselves possess. For it belongs to the nature of goodness to communicate itself to others (Summa Theologica I, 106, 4).

In these Christian mystics we see how the cosmos has its order from participating in its divine origin, and thus how each created thing, by virtue of the goodness of its origin, goes out of itself for the good of all others. In this sense the cosmos strives to be like God. We might call this the first law of nature. In a similar way the human mind naturally goes out of itself embracing all things. The virtue of the human soul, paradoxically, lies in its receptivity to God’s creativity. Thus Aquinas, taking the insight of Aristotle further, sees the human soul as ‘potentially all things’. This receptivity of the soul, however, is as much for the sake of the things as it is for the soul itself. Through receiving the truth of things the soul sanctifies them, or grants to them their true dignity as divine manifestations, and through this granting the soul attains its own true dignity and proper end, which is the contemplation of truth.

From all that we have said it is clear that the ancient philosophers and the medieval scholastics understood that there was a relationship between the laws of nature and divine law. Yet these two orders of law are not identical. The law of nature is observed through reason and justice, while the divine law is known through grace. From these two orders of law human law is derived. By human law is meant the codes of law communities or nations make for themselves. These are distinct orders of law, even though ultimately they serve the final end of law, which is the common good or perfection of all things. Aquinas, drawing upon the philosophical tradition, medieval jurisprudence and divine revelation sums up the ends of the two orders of law this way:

Just as the primary purpose of human law is to cause friendship between men, so the purpose of the divine law is to establish friendship between men and God. (Summa Theologica I-II, 90).

I think it is very important to observe here that law is not rules or commands that a society ought to submit to in order to avert chaos or curb selfishness – the Hobbesian idea of law – but rather law exists to bring about friendship. Its aim is to foster amity between citizens, since only through amity can the real potential of society be realised – that is to say, only through mutual goodness can a society actually become a society in reality and not only in name. Plato says the same in his Laws. In enquiring into how legislators should go about their task he says:

They should have considered something like the following: that a city should be free and prudent and a friend to itself, and that the lawgiver should give his laws with a view to these things.

By the way, let’s not be surprised to find that we have often before laid down goals which we’ve asserted the lawgiver should look to when he lays down his laws, but the goals don’t appear to be the same for us each time. One should reason as follows: when we asserted one should look toward moderation, or toward prudence, or friendship, these goals are not different but the same. (Laws 693b)[7]

For Plato the virtues and friendship cannot be separated, and so when law aims to make citizens moderate or prudent or peaceful or harmonious or good, these all amount to the same thing. Friendship is the natural relation of good citizens, and therefore the condition for the flourishing of the proper human life.

This concern for the true end of law is a most important thing, and Plato returns to it again and again in the Laws. Where the proper end of law is overlooked or neglected, it not only degenerates, it becomes tyrannous. The same insight is to be found in the Bible. This is what Jesus accuses the Scribe and Pharisees of doing when he says “Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man”. Where law is made into bondage it is no longer law, but the opposite of law. This holds for both human law and divine law. When spiritual law becomes oppressive it is no longer spiritual law.

It is at this point that we come to the most challenging aspect of the study of law and human society. Although the divine law and the natural law spring from the natural order and telos of all things, causing each to seek its natural end within the universe as a whole, for man this is possible only through reflection and understanding. That is to say, while for the realm of nature and for living creatures generally the law acts spontaneously through them, so that all follow the law of their own being, for man this does not happen spontaneously. Man, or society, may attain their natural end only through reflecting on the truth of things and bringing that knowledge to articulation through culture – through the arts, religion and the institutions of society. This is because the natural goal of the human person is the contemplation of truth, and action born out of that contemplation. This, we might say, is the burden of man being the thinking being – his life will not go well if lived thoughtlessly. Yet, if man would be free, then he takes on the burden of responsibility for his thoughts and actions. The question of freedom lies at the heart of Plato’s concern for the way to establish a just and peaceful society. Freedom is possible only through wisdom or prudence, which is knowledge of the true and the good at once. Such wisdom comes about only through the exercise of intelligence and justice, just as bodily strength comes about only through physical discipline. Remarking on this Aquinas says:

God moves all things in their own manner. Hence some things participate in the divine movement in a necessary way, but the rational creature is moved freely. (Questiones quodlibetales I, ad 2)

In the realm of livings things, each moves by necessity according to its nature, the nature created by God. But for rational creatures, that is the human race, the intelligence is free to move or not to move, even though its natural end is the apprehension of truth. Again, Aquinas draws this distinction between man and the other creatures clearly:

God’ providence cares for all things in their own manner. . . . Voluntary action, and mastery over that action, are peculiar to man and to spiritual creatures. To this compulsion is opposed. Hence God does not compel man to act rightly. (Summa contra Gentiles 3, 148)

Thus human freedom may be experienced either as a gift or a burden. This is a theme we often find in the novels of Dostoyevsky. The most famous example is in The Brothers Karamazov where Ivan says to the Christ that the people want bread, not freedom.

The question of the nature of natural and divine law is difficult because for man it arises with the question of the nature of freedom, and the question of the nature of freedom arises with the question of responsibility. Because man is free to act according to his own decisions, he is therefore responsible for his actions, and this means he falls under the lawful consequences of his actions. It is for this reason that Aristotle says lawmaking involves foresight, a capacity only of rational creatures.

Man’s freedom lies in the capacity to reflect and act according to the nature of things. In this way ‘right action’ is a free and skilful conformation to truth. Freedom arises only through knowledge. This is not so strange. The farmer sows according to the season and gains a delicate sense of nature’s ways. It is the same in developing any skill. It comes only with intelligent observation and practice. Seen in this way the mechanisation of industry and farming, which came with the Industrial Revolution, removes man from his natural place in nature and takes away the freedom of his intelligence. It places man under lower laws and diminishes the opportunity to live the contemplative life. Man becomes there mere sentinel of the machine.

Unlike other beings, man is not compelled to fulfil his natural vocation, yet he is drawn towards it by the attraction of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. That is how the classical philosophers saw it. Thus he stands at the threshold of his natural habitation, but must take the step over that threshold by himself. This is what Eliade means by the sacred, where man discovers his natural home in the sacred order of nature. In the Christian tradition this step is into the realm of Grace – which means to see how Nature is infused by Grace. That is where the law begins, and it descends through grace to the natural realm as justice. Justice is Grace given form. In essence it is mercy, as Shakespeare shows us.

At the beginning I said that from an understanding of the heavenly order comes not only the knowledge of the nature of society, but of religion and all the arts. In her essay The Underlying Order: Nature and the Imagination, Kathleen Raine writes:

It is the part of the poet to present to us that total view and experience of reality which includes all aspects of our humanity in the context of every age. Or that situates every age, rather, in the context of the everlasting. (The Underlying Order and other Essays p. 51)[8]

Her phrase ‘in the context of the everlasting’ sums up the way in which man is called to see himself and the world. It is a glimpse of the ‘everlasting’ that truly defines poetry, and all the arts, and what Kathleen Raine and Blake call the Imagination. But the arts also embody the human response to the everlasting, and in this sense they are the natural fruit of man’s contemplation of the truth of things.

Plato asks, what is the knowledge that is key to all other kinds of knowledge? In reply he points to an art that contemplates the unity that enfolds all things, and from which all branches of knowledge spring. What becomes visible from this unity may be the eternal numbers that give form and beauty to nature, or to architecture or music or the motions of the heavens. The artist unites the temporal materials of his craft with the eternal numbers of the heavens. This work is what Eliade called ‘consecrating’ the world, re-establishing it in its heavenly origin. Or it is what Aquinas calls returning creatures to God through human knowledge. Such work is the work proper to man. It is the natural human vocation, and it is the only work that truly inspires and which brings delight and nourishment to society as a whole.

[1] Translated by Francis Brooks (London: Methuen, 1896)

[2] Plotinus The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna (Faber, 1969)

[3] Mircea Eliade The Sacred and the Profane (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969)

[4] Cicero Treatise on The Laws, translated by Francis Barham (London: Edmund Spettigue, 1841)

[5] Josef Pieper, An Anthology, (Ignatius Press, 1989)

[6] Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, translated by Philotheus Boehner (Franciscan Institute, 1956)

[7] Plato, The Laws of Plato translated by Thomas Pangle (Basic Books, 1980)

[8] Kathleen Raine The Underlying Order and other Essays (Temenos Academy, 2008)