Leo Strauss and Natural Right: Hidden Nature, Hidden God

PHILOSOPHY DISCOVERS BOTH NATURE AND ITS MAKER, the contingent and the necessary, permanent, eternal First Cause--God. Nothing comes from nothing. De nihilo nihil. Nature--the first things or the right way--comes from the necessary, permanent, eternal. Philosophy thus leads us from phenomena to nature and unto God.

Nature would not have to be discovered were it obvious, were it not hidden. God is Deus absconditus. Nature is likewise recondite, hidden: natura abscondita. In part, nature is hidden by convention, by human custom, by human law--nomos.

Man cannot live without having thoughts about the first things, and, it was presumed, he cannot live well without being united with his fellows by identical thoughts about the first things, i.e., without being subject to authoritative decisions concerning the first things: it is the law [nomos] that claims to make manifest the first things or "what is." the law, in its turn, appeared to be a rule that derives its binding force from the agreement or the convention of the members of the group.

Strauss, 91.

Here, perhaps, is the germ of animosity between politics, especially arbitrary power, and philosophy and the natural law. Both philosophy in general, and the natural law in particular, challenge the artifice, the convention that man seeks to impose, perhaps first as an expression of the first things and the right way, but later, often in a sort of creeping challenge or perhaps a slow ossification or sclerosis, in substitution of, or in contradiction to, nature. So philosophy in general and the natural law in the area of morals in particular, seek to go beyond or behind convention to the mother of all customs, the custom of all customs, the tradition of all traditions:

Nature is the ancestor of all ancestors or the mother of all mothers. Nature is older than any tradition; hence it is more venerable than any tradition. . . . By uprooting the authority of the ancestral [and a fortiori the conventional], philosophy recognizes that nature is the authority.

Strauss, 92. It is an authority, but Strauss clarifies, perhaps better referred to as the standard, as it is reason or understanding that discovers nature through abstraction of reason from sense perception, and so nature is never known except through reason. It is the latter that may be said to be the authority that both discovers and then applies the standard.

As Strauss observes the discovery of nature, which means also the distinction between nature and convention, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the discovery of natural right. The reason why the discovery of nature is not enough to inform us of natural right is that it may be that all right is conventional, and there is no such thing as natural right. Nature may be bereft of right. It may be beyond good and evil, a sort of premoral given, like the nominalists or voluntarists would liken God. It is still possible--even after having discovered nature--that God, for example, simply does not care about justice. He is far above us, an Olympian. He is far away from us, a Deistic self-regarding not communicating, not a Providential God.

God [it may be] is not concerned with justice in any sense that is relevant to human life as such: God does not reward justice and punish injustice. Justice has no superhuman support. The justice is good and injustice is bad is due exclusively to human agencies and ultimately to human decisions.

Strauss, 94. Indeed, it is precisely the rejection of "particular providence" that is father of such a thought. That thought comes into the mind of man when he stumbles upon the scandal of particular providence, a scandalous providence that states that God regards the number of hairs on our head, or that he concerns itself with the fall of the sparrow. (Cf. Luke 12:6-7) If so, we doubt, where is the proof of it? The vast cosmos seems indifferent to our plight. It appears, for example, not to have answered the prayer of the Jew caught within killing camps, the Vernichtungslagers and the Todeslagers of the Nazi. It appears sublimely unconcerned in the main. It is possible to get stuck in the apparent disconnect between Providence posited and Providence realized. So, for example, Simone Weil could not jump the gap, and separated the world of nature from the world of God. But Strauss thinks that there is an Aristotelian--etiamsi daremus non esse Deum--way around the problem, that "the example of Aristotle alone would suffice to show that it is possible to admit natural right without believing in particular providence or in divine justice proper." Strauss, 94. So technically, the light of the Gospel, or even belief in a providential God, is not required to believe in natural law or natural right. This, at least, is Strauss's view. He would expand the tent of the natural law and natural right to bring in those who harbor doubt, perhaps even disbelieve, in the God of revelation, and even in the God of natural theology.* For Strauss, natural right and natural law exist, etiamsi daremus non esse Deum.

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*Strauss cites Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1178b7-22, Socinus, Praelectiones theologicae, cap. 2, Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, Prolegomena § 11, Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, Book I, chap. ii, § 2, and III, chap. 16 and II chap. 6 of Rousseau's Social Contract. I am not sure of it. It seems to me that there is a greater connection between the providence of God and the rule of the cosmos (including man)--the eternal law--and natural law or right, which is nothing less than man's participation in the eternal law. While the difficulty of believing in particular providence may be conceded, its existence need not. We must ever realize that our sights are limited. We have no ability to see sub specie aeternitatis, under the light of eternity. And we certainly have no ability to encompass the entirety of the cosmos so as to become privy to the particular plan of God for each of his creatures in particular and the cosmos as a whole. There has to be room for faith, even if intellectual and not supernatural, in a philosophy of natural law or natural right. We have addressed this issue before: see Natural Law: Ecstasis and Telos and Potpourri of Natural Law, though a lot more could be said about it. Moreover, we have to remember that particular Providence may be hidden because of our sin, because of others' sins, because of convention, or a combination of all three. In the maw of Auschwitz, where God's providence was hid, as it were, with the black drapes of institutionalized and personal sin and wicked convention--like our statues draped in purple cloth during Lent--St. Maximilian Kolbe was able to look past all these veils and never disbelieved God's particular providence even in extremis. Indeed, he was a vehicle of particular providence for Franciszek Gajowniczek, the Jewish father and husband whose place he volunteered to take in a starvation cell.

Lex Aeterna: τὸ γνωστὸν του νόμου

IN OUR EARLIER POSTINGS, we had discussed how the Eternal Law, like God, is empirically hidden from us. It is not detectable by any our five senses, and so knowledge of its existence must be obtained in a way other than relying purely on the senses. Knowledge of the existence of the Eternal Law and what it encompasses be gained in two ways. First, these may be accepted by Faith as a result of having been revealed by God. Secondly, they may be gleaned, as the Pagans managed, by extrapolating what is learned from the visible creation. "No theistic and teleological system of philosophy that acknowledges an intelligent supreme Being can omit the concept of a supreme and eternal law." (Hans Meyer, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas quoted in Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 158 n. 7. ) The Greek and Roman philosophers with theistic and teleological systems of philosophies therefore managed to grasp the truth of the Eternal Law. It follows that, to the extent our political philosophies and philosophies of law or jurisprudences omit mention of the existence of a supreme and eternal law, they are neither theistic nor teleogical, i.e., they are practically atheistic and have no meaning or end. The political philosophy or jurisprudence that does not recognize a notion of an Eternal Law is therefore untrue, or at least seriously limited and defective, if for no other reason than because it does not recognize that man and his nature has any meaningful end or purpose (what is called entelechy).

(photo from of Violet Oakley's Divine Law, see http://cpc.state.pa.us/)

Whether accepted by Revelation or gained through Reason, our notions of the Eternal Law are dark and limited, and, when based on Reason alone without Revelation's aid, prone to error as a result of vice, poor education, cultural inheritances, or simple weakness of mind. Even the most naturally virtuous, dispassionate, honest, and sincere seeker, the Aristotelian σπουδαῖος (spoudaios = a very diligent, earnest, zealous and naturally good person), is wooing and is wooed by an unfathomable Mystery, an Other. And if the Eternal Law is in fact God, as St. Thomas teaches, it follows that, with our finite minds, even the best and brightest of us can never comprehend it on this earth. Si comprehenderis non est Lex Aeterna. If you understand it, it is not the Eternal Law. You simply will never get the arms of your mind about it.

Though the Eternal Law is one respect hidden, and therefore cannot be wholly known, it does not follow that it is entirely hidden. The existence of the Eternal Law and what it comprehends can be known in part. Likewise, it does it follow that we cannot know what it is not. By reasoning from created things, we are able to grasp heavenly realities. The law we know is part of God's creation. Nathanael Culverwell (whom we mentioned in our prior posting) explains:

Now as God himself shews somewhat of his face in the glasse [i.e, mirror] of creatures, so the beauty of this [Eternal] Law gives some representations of it self in those pure derivations of inferiour Lawes that stream from it. And as we ascend to the first and supreme being, by steps of second causes; so we may climb up to a sight of this eternal Law, by those fruitful branches of secondary Lawes, which seem to have their root in earth, when as indeed it is in heaven; and that I may vary a little that of the Apostle to the Romanes, The invisible Law of God long before the creation of the world, is now clearly seen being understood by those Lawes which do appear, so that τὸ γνωστὸν του νόμου [the knowledge of the law] is manifested in them, God having shown it to them.

Culverwell, 36 (citing Rom. 1:20).

In Culverwell's words, God is mirrored in his creatures, including the human law we are familiar with, so we may "climb up" from our knowledge of human legislators and human laws to gain a "sight" of the Eternal Law. We must not think that the human lawgiver and human laws are rooted in the earth only, as the human lawgiver and and the institution of human law in fact owe their existence to the Eternal Law or God. Knowledge of the existence of the Eternal Law and its content--what Culverwell rather ungainfully calls τὸγ νωστὸν του νόμου (to gnoston tou nomou)--may thus be gained by extrapolating from the lawgiver and the law that we do know through a process called the analogy of being (analogia entis).

This principle is well described by St. Bonaventure:

All created things of this sensible world lead the soul of the contemplative and wise man toward the eternal God, and this because He is the first, most powerful, wise, and best principle, the eternal origin, light, and fullness, the efficient, exemplary, and ordering art of which they are the shadows, resonances, and pictures. They are vestiges, likenesses, and images divinely given to us as first premises to lead the mind to God. They are exemplars to be used by minds still rude and sensory, so that through such sensible signs, which they see, they may be transferred to the intelligible which they do not see, as through signs to the thing signified.

Omnes creaturae istius sensibilis mundi animum contemplantis et sapientis ducunt in Deum aeternum, pro eo quod illius primi principii potentissimi, sapientissimi et optimi, illius aeternae originis, lucis et plenitudinis, illius, inquam, artis efficientis, exemplantis et ordinantis sunt umbrae, resonantiae et picturae, vestigia, simulacra et spectacula nobis ad contuendum Deum proposita et signa divinitus data; quae, inquam, sunt exemplaria vel potius exemplata, proposita mentibus adhuc rudibus et sensibilibus, ut per sensibilia, quae vident, transferantur ad intelligibilia, quae non vident, tanquam per signa ad signata.

St. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum (The Mind's Road to God), 2.11.

Applied to the Eternal Law, the principle works as follows. God is the Creator of the cosmos, a world which He brought forth from nothing (ex nihilo) as if a divine artisan, and so God must share some quality with the artisan that we do see. God also is the Ruler of that world, though He rules it in a manner that we do not physically see. But, in ruling the universe, He must share in the qualities of the earthly ruler that we do see, though He does so eminently. Lastly, the Eternal Law we do not see, though we see its effects; but it must share some analogy with the natural moral law we do have some knowledge of, or the human law which we clearly see.

The principle is well-handled by Timothy McDermott in his Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1989), who is his paraphrase/translation of St. Thomas has the following:

No one but God and those blessed with the vision of God can know the eternal law in itself. But all knowledge of truth is a light radiating from the eternal law, and everyone knows some truth, if only the general principles of the law that we have in us by nature. Those who know more than others know the eternal law better. We can know the hidden things of God by looking at the things that he has made, but no one fully comprehends the eternal law because its effects do not fully reveal it.

(p. 284)

It is from this basis that St. Thomas begins his philosophical analysis of the Eternal Law. St. Thomas handles his discussion of the Eternal Law in Question 93 of the second part of the first part (Prima Secundae) of his Summa Theologica by analogizing what he knows about an earthly artisan and an earthly ruler. St. Thomas observes that an artisan must have an archetype or plan (in Latin, a ratio) of the things he intends to make prior to making them. Similarly, a ruler must have an archetype or ordering idea, a blueprint (ratio ordinis) that guides him in governing those subject to him. That ordering idea (ratio ordinis), which is based upon reason, has the nature of law if it is aimed at the common good, and promulgated by the one who has care of the community. ST IaIIae, Q. 93, art.1, resp. Since God is both Creator and Governor of the world--which includes non-rational and rational creatures--it follows that the idea or archetype of the created world that is found in the Divine Wisdom (ratio divinae sapientiae) has the character of law (obtinet rationem legis). The Eternal Law is nothing else but the plan or archetype of the Divine Wisdom--the ratio or the logos--that is made manifest in His creation. Id.

In his work The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson summarizes Aquinas's teaching regarding the Eternal Law thus:

The first and vastest of all [communities] is the Universe. The entirety of beings created by God and maintained in existence by His will, can be considered as an immense society of which we are citizens; and not only we, but also all animals and things. There is not a single creature, animate or inanimate, which does not act in conformity with certain rules and in view of certain ends. Animals and things follow these rules and tend towards these ends without knowing them; man, on the contrary, is conscious of them and his moral justice consists in accepting them voluntarily. All laws of nature, all the laws of morality and of society must therefore be considered as so many particular instances of one and the same law, viz., the divine law. But the law by which God wills the universe to be governed is necessarily eternal as God is Himself; eternal law is, therefore, the name given to this first law, which is the source of all other laws.

(Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Dorset Press) (Edward Bullough, trans.), 327.)

Our next post will address the issue of whether God is bound by or subject to the Eternal Law, and the relationship between the divine Will and the divine Reason.

"The Hidden Law"

"The Hidden Law" by W. H. Auden

The Hidden Law does not deny
Our laws of probability,
But takes the atom and the star
And human beings as they are,
And answers nothing when we lie.

It is the only reason why
No government can codify,
And verbal definitions mar
The Hidden Law.

Its utter patience will not try
To stop us if we want to die;
If we escape it in a car,
If we forget It in a bar,
These are the ways we're punished by
The Hidden Law.

The “Hidden Law” was published in The Double Man, a book of poems written by W. H. Auden and published in 1941. See W. H. Auden, The Double Man (New York: Random House 1941). The Double Man is also known under its English title New Year Letter. The poems included in The Double Man or New Year Letter document Auden’s return to the Anglican faith of his childhood after his lengthy flirtation with Communist and other leftist thought.

The Double Man includes the poem “New Year Letter,” which is accompanied by a series of idiosyncratic and often cryptic “Notes,” and it is these that contain this poem. Though published (untitled) as a note to the lengthy poem “The New Year Letter” in The Double Man, “The Hidden Law,” also appeared under the title "Aera sub Lege" in 1945. See Collected Poems (New York: Vintage International, 1991) (Edward Mendelson, ed.), 905.

The title "Aera sub Lege" (trans. = “The Era under Law”) would suggest that Auden intended to contrast the Aera sub Lege (the time before the Christian dispensation) with the Aera sub Gratia (the Christian dispensation). In choosing to publish the poem under this title, perhaps Auden intended to show how Grace may be found in Law, like Law may be found in Grace, sort of following the Augustinian concept relating to the Scriptures: Novum in vetere latet, vetus in novo patet. (The New [Testament] is hidden in the Old [Testament], the Old [Testament] is made manifest in the New [Testament]). So, then Grace is hidden in the Law, and the Law is made manifest in Grace.

Prior to writing “The Hidden Law,” Auden had written his poems “Law Like Love” and the “New Year Letter,” where he also struggles with the notion of Law and Freedom and their relationship to God. In this poem, however, Auden adopts the Isaiahan or Pascalian image of the mysterious, hidden God—the Deus absconditus of Isaiah and Pascal—and applies it to the mystery he perceived in his encounter with Law. For Auden, Law participates in the very life of the divine mystery and so shares in this mystery. Law is a Lex abscondita, a hidden Law.

Auden’s message is Augustinian and apophatic: Si comprehenderis non est Lex. In a sense, perhaps, Law, like God, may be known only through a negative jurisprudence, an apophatic jurisprudence. Auden, however, does not reject the notion of a positive or cataphatic jurisprudence based on analogy. This analogia Legis or analogia Iuris , as one may call it, is handled in his earlier poem “Law Like Love,” where Auden concludes that the best analogy for understanding Law is Love. In “The Hidden Law,” however, Auden stresses that for whatever we may think it is, Law remains, in a very real sense, hidden from us.

The notes in The Double Man that precede this poem when originally published may be found in The Double Man, 112-13.

762. The Lex Abscondita
Natural law is not to be confused with human political law. The latter is a generalized will imposed by force upon particular wills. If it is broken it does not cease to be the law. Human law rests upon Force and Belief, i.e., belief in this rightness.
In Natural law, on the other hand, there can be no opposition between the will of the whole and the separate wills of the parts. It is simply what happens in the field under consideration if there is no interference from outside. Our knowledge of Natural Law is derived from an observation of particulars. If we find a single exception, it means that our formulation of Natural Law has been incorrect.
There is therefore no Natural Philosophy, only a Natural Way. The way rests upon Faith and Doubt: Faith that Natural Law exists and that we can have knowledge of it; Doubt that our knowledge can ever be perfect or unmixed with error.
Our grounds for Faith: the unhappiness of Man
Our grounds for doubt: the same.
(Definition. I believe X=I believe the proposition X to be true.
I have faith in X=The existence of X is, for me, an absolute presupposition.
I doubt X=I admit the possibility that, at some future unspecified date, and for reasons also unspecified, I may come
either to believe the proposition X to be false
or to find that, for me, the presupposition that
X exists in longer absolute but relative.)
[Here the poem “The Hidden Law” followed]