The Law

'Good and evil have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among Elves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house,’ Aragorn.

When we think about law, we think about arbitrary rules relegated to us by some foreign and fanciful entity; I do, at least. This is how many people view the law described in the Bible.

But, there is a type of law that is fundamentally different than the bedroom requests of Monica Lewinsky. The schools of thought to which I subscribe are founded upon principles of Natural Law. This type of law is not written by human beings, but it is rather discoverable in nature. The concept of Natural Law is closely interwoven with Christian history and the Christian worldview, as well as the history of science, empiricism, and positivism.

The oldest (non-Biblical) descriptions of this concept are contained within the Greek myth of Antigone, the name meaning either “opposed to bending” (unbending) or “opposed to motherhood” (she was said to be the daughter of Oedipus). Antigone’s tale revolves around her efforts to provide an honorable burial for her brother, Polyneices, even though he was a traitor to Thebes. The King of Thebes, Creon, attempted to prevent this burial, to which Antigone argued that the law of Thebes is not capable of denying a person burial; she claimed that a higher law, laid down by Zeus before humans developed legal institutions, guaranteed him burial by virtue of his innate human dignity. The concept of innate human dignity, bestowed on all humans by something non-human, is an incredibly powerful concept. Yet, it is rarely voiced outside of cultures marked by a Christian influence.

Innate dignity converged with local common law in what became the UK and other parts of Europe. It was developed through a long Ecclesiastical tradition (combined with Aristotle’s vision of a single Prime Mover and other metropolitan Meditteranean classics) into the cohesive theories of law of popular thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson, Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and Ghandi. This last example is astounding, as a belief in the dignity of the individual as an entity separate from his class, culture, and collective flies in the face of many east Asian traditions and dogmas. Ghandi claims that his beliefs in individual dignity were largely influenced by the writing of Henry David Thoreau.

During the development of the American colonies, earlier Christian movements were allowed to reach their most extreme. These were manifested in the Puritans, with their infatuation with the “Law” as many think of it today, as arbitrary legislation, and in the Quakers. The Quakers were an unusual breed, without leaders, without institutions, often stateless, shameless, provocative, independent, and rebellious. Their law was love, as according to Romans 13:10; their leader was the holy spirit, as according to the word of the Christ. While largely responsible for the inception of the campaigns for womens’ rights and abolition, they also pioneered the art of streaking through gated Puritan communities. The Natural Law philosophy, applied to political and social theory, found great expression in the early Quaker church.

The concept was extended beyond law, and into the physical and social sciences. Just to qualify, science is not a purely western phenomenon; the word “algebra” (obviously not Latin) comes from Arabic, along with the decimal system and many of the forerunners of modern anatomy and physiology; the Chinese are thought to have created Pascal’s triangle before Pascal, and are recorded to have been the progenitors of modern banking and minting (brought to the west by merchants). The west is also notorious for anti-scientific (no one expected the Spanish Inquisition!) and pseudo-scientific (Ptolemy’s epicycles and Newton’s alchemy) movements. But, the concept of [primarily western] natural law subtly imbued something very important within scientific thought. This is difficult to put your finger on, until you contrast Christian monotheism with what has historically been more normal.

Even in east Asia, where a form philosophical pseudo-religious Atheism has grown to be prevalent, Theistic localism has been the historical norm. A religion, a diety, a theory of right and wrong, a creation story, and entire world-view was contained within a single culture, within a single nation state, within a single society. Your entire outlook on life extended only as far as that ridge, that line of trees, that river. It was proto post modernism. Prior to the work of E.O. Wilson and Paul Ekman, this belief was still over applied within the social sciences. The Theistic localism style of thought creates an academic culture that not only allows and tolerates inconsistencies and non-universals, but whole-heartedly support them. The Christian Natural Law philosophy’s permeation of the natural sciences did away with Theistic localism. Aristotle’s Prime Mover was not a regionally localized phenomenon that could only be observed within narrow parameters, but his edicts were universal and consistent phenomenon that could be observed through out all time and all space. Discovering God became something became something that could not only be discovered within decaying monastic texts, but within all nature, for the universe declares his majesty. If the universe has one God, then it must also be governed by a universal set of consistent principles. This fundamental assumption of Natural Law formed the underpinning of the empiricist revolution that Francis Bacon has come to symbolize.

Those of you that have studied any science know that a few simple principles can be applied to make pretty complex systems. But, we only see the complex systems. It can be very difficult to figure out the guiding principles of a system, and it is easy to assume there are none. It is easy think that your math teacher is simply filling you with arbitrary approaches to meaningless problems. A good math teacher will show you how they are all interconnected, and driveable from a few simple axioms. But, it took mathematicians millennia of hard labor to find those simple axioms and those connections in the complicated cornucopia of numbers. In the discovery of unifying principles, scientists have unlocked immense power.

But, we needed to be looking for these principles in order to find them. They wouldn’t have been looking for them without if they did not have faith in the Prime Mover, and the corresponding theory of a universal and consistent natural law that is imbued uniformly in all of nature.

The Biblical law is dissimilar from the subjective laws of fragile men. Biblical law is a natural law, written in to the very fabric of our bodies. It is also, as all natural law, derivable from simple principles. I should say, a single simple principle, as described in Luke 10:27.