Leo Strauss and Natural Law: Locke on Property and its Acquisition: Vice Turned Virtue

LOCKE'S DOCTRINE OF PROPERTY is central to his political teaching, and is something that distinguishes his teaching from his predecessors. It is important to grasp Locke's notions on property, for they are deeply revolutionary in spirit. They are anti-conservative, or at least they are contrary to the best thinking of the pagan philosophers and the highest thought of the Christian moral theologians, which is what real conservatism is all about: the first things. As Strauss concludes his analysis of Locke's doctrine on property:

Locke's teaching on property, and therewith his whole political philosophy, are revolutionary not only with respect to the biblical tradition but with regard to the philosophic tradition as well.

Strauss, 248. Again, Locke's doctrine of property purports to be a "natural law" doctrine, and doing so "it partakes of all the complexities" of Locke's doctrine of natural law which, at best, could be called a doctrine of quasi-natural law or something altogether different disguised as a natural law. But it also suffers from what Strauss calls a "peculiar difficulty." Strauss, 234. This "Locke's teaching on property, and therewith his whole political philosophy, are revolutionary not only with regard to biblical tradition but with regard to the philosophic tradition as well."
--Leo Straussdifficulty arises out of Locke's theory which requires the transformation of a natural right to property (the "original law of nature") to a civil right to property, wherein the former essentially ceases to be valid. For Locke, the natural right to property arises from the natural right to self-preservation and the desire for happiness, i.e., the pursuit of happiness. Immediately, man in a state of nature confronts the problem of others of his kind with the same natural right who are in competition with him in taking the things from the earth. Neither begging nor stealing property is right; the only title to right to property arises from a man's labor as he appropriates the goods of nature. It is the mixture of labor and the goods of the earth which, combined, give rise to the right to property. "Labor is the only title to property which is in accordance with natural right." Strauss, 236.

The only limit to acquisition, that is, to title to property, is that the property acquired must remain useful to man. "Man may not appropriate things which through his appropriating them would cease to be useful." Strauss, 237. If a kind of property is not subject to waste (gold, silver, diamonds), then a man can acquire as much as his heart desires. On the other hand, he ought not acquire more perishable commodities that he can use without waste. Therefore, man is entitled to more nuts (which are less perishable) than, say, plums (which are perishable). Waste is for Locke, the mortal sin of property ownership, not covetousness, greed, or selfishness. As Strauss puts it: "The terrors of the natural law no longer strike the covetous, but the waster." Strauss, 237. In acquiring property, man "does not have to think of other human beings." Strauss, 237. Put proverbially, Strauss labels Locke's thought thus: Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous.* The fancy French may be roughly and vulgarly translated as "Screw everybody else." And this attitude Locke justified whether man, in a state of nature, had plenty or lived in want.

Labor, however, created title to property only under the "original law of nature" pertaining to property. In a state of civil society, "labor no longer creates a sufficient title to property," Strauss, 240, though it retains its role as "the origin of value or of all wealth." Strauss, 243. So the worker who yearns to labor so as to acquire not only what he needs, but what he wants, is "a greater benefactor of mankind than those who give alms to the poor." Strauss, 243. Amor habendi, amor nummi is greater than amor proximi.** Indeed, there appears to be no limitations to the acquisition of goods in civil society, other, perhaps, than the property must be acquired in a manner allowed by positive law. Locke seems, nay, does, turn the classical and Christian teaching on property entirely on its head.

How does Locke justify the right to untrammeled acquisition of property to the neglect of the fundamental law of law of neighbor? Locke was not foolish enough to emancipate acquisitiveness from moral law by arguing that it was a virtue per se. "He justifies the emancipation of acquisitiveness in the only way in which it can be defended: he shows that it is conducive to the common good." Strauss, 242. For Locke, then, "[u]nlimited appropriation without concern for the need of others is true charity." Strauss, 243. So similarly is the study of nature and knowledge treated by Locke. The study of nature and the acquisition of knowledge, too, is emancipated from the moral law through similar argument. "[T]he study of nature . . . may be of greater benefit to mankind than the monuments of exemplary charity that have, at so great charge, been raised by the founders of hospitals and alms-houses." So he who discovered the medicinal properties of quinine did more than those who built hospitals. George Soros and Bill Gates more virtuous and greater philanthropists than Mother Theresa or St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. Virtue has nothing to do with the inside of a man. Money, money, money, money, and the love of it is apparently Ok with Locke.

So this is the great charge of government, to preserve property. "The great and chief end . . . of men's uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property." Strauss, 245 (quoting Locke's Treatise) Madison in the Federalist No. 10, puts the Lockean notion of government succinctly: "The protection of [different and unequal faculties of acquiring property] is the first object of government." To protect the greedy? To sanction pleonexia?*** That's is the "first object," the "great and chief end" of government?

In Locke's notion of property, then, and in the civil government's role in protecting it, we have something very different, something highly revolutionary and anti-conservative and vicious. It is the formalization, the institutionalization, the invirtuation, of libido habendi. The rationalization: "Private vices" yield greater "public benefits." Virtue, after all is "unendowed," but vice is richly endowed. Wrong is thereby made right because it pays better. Since in the age in which Locke was writing most people still believed that the unlimited acquisition of wealth was unjust or morally wrong, however, Locke felt the need to "conceal" his doctrine, to justify unlimited acquisition by tying it to the common good, to appear to be "going with the herd," and further, to "so involve[] his sense, that it [would] not [be] easy to understand him." Strauss, 246. In a word, dissemble.

Locke, then, "is a hedonist," but a hedonist who advances a "peculiar hedonism." Strauss, 249. It is a Midasian hedonism, where the greatest pleasure is not in enjoying the greatest pleasures, but "in the having of those thing which produce the greatest pleasures." In short, "Locke says in effect that the greatest happiness consists in the greatest power." Strauss, 249. "Life" becomes what it seems to be for so many Ugly Americans who have swallowed the poison of Locke wrapped up in the sweet capsule in which he hid it and who frenetically pursue wealth, and not virtue, as the end of all ends: "the joyless quest for joy." Strauss, 251. One becomes as despairing as Midas, swallowed up in his greed, and bereft of any human consolation. He cannot love his wife, or his children, or give a piece of bread and hot soup to the poor, or clothe the naked, or perform any work of mercy, for everything is measured in, and therefore is transformed into, filthy lucre.

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*Translation: "Every man for himself, and God for us all." In other words, let me take care of myself, and let God worry about others.
**Amor habendi = love of having or possessing. Amor nummi = love of money. Amor proximi = love of neighbor.
***Pleonexia (from Greek: πλεονεξια) is the Greek word for greed, covetousness, the inordinate grasping of more than one is entitled to. It is a concept that is both Biblical (cf. Col. 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21) and classical Greek, found and described by both Plato and Aristotle as a disordered, vicious, and undesirable quality.

Leo Strauss and Natural Law: Locke and the Pursuit of Happiness

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS is, for an American, a given, a moral and political shibboleth. The "pursuit of happiness" has made it into one of our organic, institutional documents, to wit, the Declaration of Independence. There is, of course, a perfectly classical way to view the "pursuit of happiness." The "happiness" ethics, the eudaemonistic ethics of Aristotle and St. Thomas, with their objective basis, could easily inform us as to what the "pursuit of happiness" means, and all would be well. But Americans have taken the "pursuit of happiness" to mean something entirely different, something inherently subjective.* How much of this, if any, is Locke's fault?

It is difficult, of course, ever to answer such questions as the imposition of blame for ideas. No one can measure the human cost arising from bad ideas. Some of them are horrible. Ideas such as national socialism, communism, Maoism, antisemitism, radical Islam have horrible costs attached to them. Locke's ideas, we may be sure, had a human cost much, much lower than these vicious counterparts. But at least we can look into Locke's ideas of happiness and make an educated guess and what sort of moral cost, if nothing else, such ideas have.

For Locke, there was precious little in man that was innate. Certainly, no principle of natural law was innate. Locke rejected the notion of universal law: he saw "no rules of the law of nature 'which, as practical principles ought, do continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without ceasing [and which] may be observed in all persons and all ages, steady and universal.'" Strauss, 226 (quoting Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding). The desire for happiness was an exception; for Locke, this desire was innate:

Nature . . . has put into man a desire of happiness, and an aversion to misery; these, indeed, are innate practical principles."

Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I, iii, 3. This desire for happiness, and the pursuit of happiness to which it gives rise, is not the source of duty (as the case would be if it were "law"). It is, however, the source of right, and so, for Locke, "the desire for happiness and the pursuit of happiness have the character of an absolute right, a natural right." Strauss, 226. This coupling of Lockean aversion to an innate natural law with advancement of the notion of the innate desire as the source of right means, in short, that "[t]here is, then an innate natural right, while there is no innate natural duty. . . . Since the right of nature is innate, whereas the law of nature is not, the right of nature is more fundamental than the law of nature and is the foundation of the law of nature." Strauss, 226-27. There really is no law in a "state of nature," since in that state, "any man may do what he thinks fit." Strauss, 228 (citing Locke passim). This state of lawlessness, is of course, highly unpalatable, as it exposes man-in-a-state-of-nature to constant danger. He seeks peace so as to preserve his life so as to satisfy his desire for happiness and therefore contracts with his fellows for a State.

The contract of the individuals actually concerned with their self-preservation [and their pursuit of happiness built thereon]--not the contract of the fathers qua fathers or divine appoint or an end of man that is independent of the actual wills of all individuals--creates the whole power of society: "the supreme power in every commonwealth [is] but the joint power of every member of society."

Strauss, 228-29 (quoting Locke's Treatise).

One of the most notable features of Locke's doctrines is its emphasis on property rights. It is part of the Lockean trilogy: life, liberty, and estate or property. To that we shall turn to next in our last blog entry on the Straussian analysis of Locke. Again, Locke departs from any classical or Christian concept of natural law.

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*On this issue, I heartily recommend Deal W. Hudson's Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).

Leo Strauss and Natural Law: Locke's Great Dissemblance

OH IF LOCKE HAD LIVED TODAY, where there are no penalties but rather praise attached to being a secular liberal, how untrammeled would he have been, and how much clearer it would have been for his readers to see what he had intended to say! But then many our founding fathers, at least those who were practicing Christians, would not have chewed on his fat. Yet nevertheless we would not have to read between the lines and read so carefully. Instead, the social strictures of the time in conjunction with his temporal prudence caused him to write Hobbesthought using Hookerspeak. Carefully read, however, "a summary comparison of [Locke's Second Treatise] with the teaching of Hooker and of Hobbes would show that Locke deviated considerably from the traditional natural law teaching and followed the lead given by Hobbes." Strauss, 221. Strauss engages in such a comparison in his book Natural Right and History, which will not be addressed here.

But in one area, Locke disrobes, and we see his deviant Hobbesian skivvies that cover up his swelling atheistic pudendum. Strauss identifies for us Locke's "radical deviation" from Hooker. What and where is it? It is to be found in Chapter II of his Second Treatise, entitled "Of the State of Nature." It is the notion that in the state of nature, "every one has the executive power of the law of nature." Locke, Sec. Tr., § 13; see also § 8 ("every man hath a right to . . . be executioner of the law of nature.") Locke admits that this doctrine is "strange," that is, novel, Sec. Tr., §§ 9, 13, but he asks for the reader's indulgence and begs no hasty judgment. That man has "executive powers" in a state of nature to enforce the law of nature (in other words, in a state of nature, I can act as judge and jury and executioner against a fellow man who has infringed the natural law) is not to be found in Hooker. Nor is it to be found in any classical or Christian treatment of natural law. Why, then, does Locke insist upon this executive power in man in a state of nature? Why does he risk an express breach with the words of Hooker and the distrust of his fellows?

It is because in Locke's view, for natural law to be law at all, there must be sanction, and for there to be effective sanction, there must be enforcement. The traditional view taught that natural law's sanction was "supplied by the judgment of conscience, which is the judgment of God." Strauss, 222. Locke, however, who rejected a natural law that contains within it the notion of "nature's God," had to find the sanction/enforcement mechanism elsewhere than in conscience or God. So he wrests it from conscience, the spark of God in man, and puts it in the soiled hands of brutish men with clubs. Look at Locke's deprecatory notion of conscience: for Locke, the conscience "is nothing else but our own opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude or pravity of our own actions." (Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I.iii, § 8) Our own opinion? This is fully and entirely Hobbesian: "private consciences . . . are but private opinions." Hobbes, Leviathan, Chap. 29. Conscience, for Locke, not only is no guide, it supplies no sanctions, and it hardly need be said that it is in no wise linked to God. For God is not the God of opinions, but of truth. Thus, in Locke's view, only men can enforce this partial natural law in the state of nature, which means, at the end of the day, that the law is not a natural law at all, but a man-made law. In a state of nature, man is its executive. Under social contract, that executive power is conveyed to the Leviathan State. God is altogether out of the picture, in theory and in practice.

The law of nature is indeed given by God [a concession of Locke to the times], but its being a law does not require that it be known to be given by God, because it is immediately enforced, not by God or by the conscience, but by human beings.

Strauss, 223. Is Locke's view any different from Hobbes's? Once the veils are removed, manifestly no. Has he departed from Hooker? Once the smokescreen clears, manifestly yes.

But the problem is even worse than merely a lack of enforcement mechanism tied to God. God is entirely out of the picture in the matter of promulgation of this "partial natural law."

Man would know the law of nature in the state of nature if the "the dictates of the law of nature" were "implanted in him" or "writ in the hearts of mankind." But no moral rules are "imprinted in our minds" or "written on [our] hearts" or "stamped upon [our] minds or "implanted." Since there his no habitus of moral principles, no synderesis or conscience, all knowledge of the law of nature is acquired by study: to know the law of nature, one must be "a studier of that law." . . . . [Therefore] the law of nature is not promulgated in the state of nature. Since the law of nature must be promulgated in the state of nature if it is to be a law in the proper sense of the term, we are again forced to conclude that the law of nature is not a law in the proper sense of the term.

Strauss, 225-26.

So the natural law of Locke, it turns out, is not natural law at all. It requires no knowledge of God, of its promulgation by God, of its enforcement by God. It requires no belief in judgment after death, or in life after death. There is no room in it for God. It requires no conscience to inform man of it, or to account to man that he has violated it. It is no law at all. It is in fact only desire, a desire to pursue happiness. Locke's natural law, or perhaps replacement for natural law, is desire. The pursuit of happiness, then, becomes the one-and-only law of man, and it follows from the desire for self-preservation. It requires property to be fulfilled. Hence, Locke's trilogy of rights: life, liberty, property. Naturally, for Locke, the pursuit of happiness, being entirely natural, is happiness without God. Some people, by the way, would call this Hell.

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Leo Strauss and Natural Law: Locke's "Partial Natural Law" Not Natural Law At All

LE SAGE LOCKE, "the sagacious Locke," is what Voltaire called John Locke. Thomas Jefferson called Locke one of the three greatest men who ever lived, rivaled in greatness only by Bacon and Newton. For Locke to have gained the respect of two such virulent haters of the Catholic Church and revealed religion should give one pause before accepting him hook, line, and sinker, or, perhaps more paronomasiacally, lock, stock, and barrel. If Locke, who quoted the Aristotelian/Thomistic Richard Hooker, "one of the least revolutionary men who ever lived," Strauss, 207, who appeared to advance a traditional notion of natural law, who feigned intimate knowledge with "those justly descried names" of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, was up front, then why are these two princes of the Enlightenment, these two chiefs of the Revolution, so bullish on Locke?

What's up with that? Were his traditional-sounding words part of a great dissembling? Was Locke the "Great Dissembler"? This seems to be the judgment of Leo Strauss:

We see, then, that, according to Locke, cautious speech is legitimate if unqualified frankness would hinder a noble work one is trying to achieve or expose on to persecution or endanger the public peace; and legitimate caution is perfectly compatible with going with the herd in one's outward professions or with using ambiguous language or with so involving one's sense that one cannot easily be understood.

Strauss, 208-09. Locke writes as if the New Testament revelation provides the perfect law, but he responds or acts in such a manner so as to belie that belief. As Strauss notes, actions speak louder than words, and Locke wrote "Two Treatises on Government, and not a 'Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture sainte.'"* Granted, it is difficult if not impossible to know whether the dissembling was the result of Locke's own doubt on revelation, or rather his concern that his audience had doubts with respect to it. Therefore, though his words sound pious, he seems to have been judicious though calculating nevertheless to advance a form of political teaching, of natural law, as independent of Scripture and Christianity, indeed as independent of God, as he could possibly make it. Strauss, 209. Locke appeared to believe that it was impossible, through the light of reason alone, to arrive at any conclusion on life after death for mankind. Accordingly, any law that referred to life after death, or a notion that "after death comes judgment," Heb. 9:27, was not, strictly speaking, a natural law based upon reason alone at all.

Therefore, if there is to be a law "knowable by the light of nature, that is without the help of positive revelation," that law must consist of a set of rules whose validity does not presuppose life after death or belief in a life after death.

Strauss, 212. Not only was the belief in life after death not materia propria for natural law philosophy, neither was the connection between virtue and happiness, since from the vantage point of any particular man's mortal life alone there seems to be little correlation between virtue "Locke cannot have recognized any law of nature in the proper sense of the term."
--Leo Straussand happiness or prosperity (That's why Billy Joel has the seducer sing to the Catholic Virginia who insists on the virtue of chastity: "Only the good die young!") But what was apparent on a micro scale to Locke was not necessarily so on a macro scale. And Locke seized on what he perceived was something arguable by reason alone: a necessary link between "several moral rules" and "public happiness," and on this linkage crafted a doctrine of a "partial law of nature," different from the "complete law of nature." Strauss, 213.

There exists, indeed, [in Locke's view], a visible connection between "public happiness" or "the prosperity and temporal happiness of any people" and the general compliance with "several moral rules." These rules, which apparently are a part of the complete law of nature, "may receive from mankind a very general approbation, without either knowing or admitting the true ground of morality; which can only be the will and law of a God, who sees men in the dark, has in his hands rewards and punishments, and power enough to call to account the proudest offender."

Strauss, 213. The "several moral rules" in this "partial" natural law seem rather limited, as even the laws of marriage Locke finds outside of them, apparently having difficulty justifying monogamous marriage from polygamy or even concubinage or incest (the latter two the dissembler simply remains silent about) under principles of natural law, and does not see marriage as a union for the life of the spouses, but only one that ought to be "more firm" and more "lasting" (whatever that may mean) in men, than say satyrs or rabbits, but only because of the length of time needed in the raising of children. It seems that for Locke, the civil society can legislate on marriage virtually in any way it wants, since the natural law has so little to say about it. Marriage is therefore in practice outside of Locke's "partial" natural law. There are other discrepancies between Locke's "partial" natural law and the teachings of Scripture, the details of which need not be gone into here. "It can safely be said," in any event, "that Locke's 'partial law of nature' is not identical with clear and plain teachings of the New Testament or of Scripture in general." Strauss, 219. A fortiori when we add the moral teachings of the infallible Church, which, of course, Locke, the good Protestant become Deist and incipient Atheist he was, had long ago jettisoned as having any relevance.

In Locke's take of the natural law, this "partial natural law," the law of nature is totally and thoroughly secularized, nay, more, temporalized. The "one thing necessary," the unum necessarium,--contemplation of God--has disappeared. Maries are ostracized from the natural law. The natural law is only for Marthas. (Cf. Luke 10:38-42) Indeed, "the 'partial law of nature' does not require belief in God." Strauss, 219.

There is yet another log in Locke's intellectual eye which prevents his teachings on "partial" natural law from being on a sound foundation. "Locke's political teaching stands or falls by his natural law teaching concerning the beginnings of political societies." Strauss, 215. "Locke's entire political teaching is based on the assumption of a state of nature," a notion that refers neither the pre-lapsarian or post-lapsarian state of man. Strauss, 215. Locke's notion of the "state of nature" is Hobbesian, and it is a notion, it may be observed, entirely at odds with Scriptural concepts. The Fall of Man has no meaning to Locke in his political theories. It is a notion, as Strauss notes, "wholly alien to the Bible." Strauss, 215.

So when Locke's suggestion that the natural law is contained in the Scriptures is compared to his "partial law of nature" and its contradiction to the Scriptures, "it follows that the 'partial law of nature' does not belong at all to the law of nature." Strauss, 219. Indeed, since the "partial law of nature" does not require belief in God, it follows that there is no enforcer or judge of it, which means, naturally, that the "'partial law of nature' is, then, not a law in the proper sense of the term." Strauss, 220. It is thus that Strauss concludes in a manner that he admits is "in shocking contrast to what is generally thought to be his doctrine." "Locke cannot have recognized any law of nature in the proper sense of the term." Strauss, 220.

Egads! Isn't Locke one of the principal inspirations for the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution? And, if Strauss is to be believed, he did not recognize the natural law in any proper sense of the term? What does all this mean?

(continued)

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*The reference is to Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet's (1627-1704) work by that name. Translated, the title is: "Politics Drawn from the Very Words of the Holy Scriptures."

Leo Strauss and Natural Law: The Hobbesian Path to Avernus

AVOIDANCE OF VIOLENT DEATH or self-preservation becomes the source of Hobbesian morality and the the root of Hobbesian justice. It also is the passion that compels man, who would rather be a solitary atom, to combine himself with others in society through compact. Man has no duties but those which come from the "fundamental and inalienable right of self preservation." Strauss, 181. Duty, for Hobbes, follows right. More precisely, duty is limited by the right to self-preservation, and so self-preservation trumps all duties. All duties become relative to this right:

There are, then, no absolute or unconditional duties; duties are binding only to the extent to which their performance does not endanger our self-preservation. Only the right of self-preservation is unconditional and absolute.

Strauss, 181. What this means is unsettling. Strauss puts the hammer on the nail's head: "By nature, there exists only a perfect right and no perfect duty. The law of nature, which formulates man's natural duties, is not a law, properly speaking." Strauss, 181. Hobbes has redefined natural law out of existence, and all of a sudden, it seems, people start talking of rights and become forgetful of duties. Liberalism raises its ugly head in a world where all there are only rights, where there is no natural law. Hobbes may therefore be called the father of liberalism:

If we may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection or the safeguarding of those rights, we must say that the founder of liberalism was Hobbes.

Strauss, 181-82. Similarly, we find in Hobbes the germ for the modern penchant for rights-talk, and its for duties-talk mutism:

The fundamental change from an orientation by natural duties to an orientation by natural rights finds its clearest and most telling expression in the teaching of Hobbes, who squarely made an unconditional natural right [self-preservation] the basis for all natural duties, the duties being therefore conditional. He is the classic and the founder of the specifically modern law doctrine.

Strauss, 182. Ah, with what facility did the Hobbesian passion-derived, natural right theory supplant the Thomistic reason-derived, natural duty theory in a massive social apostasy? Facilis descensus Averno. The descent to Averno is easy. The Gates of Hell are open wide. It is holding the line, nay, even more, it is the ascent to truth that is the labor, that is burdensome and hard.

Facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

(Virgil, Aeneid, VI.124 ff.) Less classically, perhaps, Strauss quotes the conservative Burke (Thoughts on French Affairs) and not Virgil as I have done:

"The little catechism of the rights of men is soon learned; and the inferences are in the passions." With regard to Hobbes's classic formulation, we add that the premises already are in the passions.

Strauss, 183. So Hobbes initiated a paradigm shift which clearly take mankind downhill: individual rights were now prior to social duty, and thus preceded the common good, whereas in the past individual rights followed social duty, and so came out of or derived from the common good. All of a sudden, people started talking about the "state of nature," and pitting it against the Aristotelian man who, by nature was political, social. More ominously was the shift in the use of the term "state of nature," which had referred to the fallen condition of man prior to grace, to the use of the term "state of nature" to refer to the condition of man prior to the State. Indeed, there may have been more method than madness to the use of the term, for we have through Hobbes the introduction of the secular salvation of man:

Prior to him [Hobbes], the term "state of nature" was at home in Christian theology rather than in political philosophy. The state of nature was distinguished especially from the state of grace, and its was subdivided into the state of pure nature and the state of fallen nature. Hobbes dropped the subdivision and replaced the state of grace by the state of civil society. He thus denied, if not the fact, at any rate the importance of the Fall and accordingly asserted that what was needed for remedying the deficiencies or the "inconveniences" of the state of nature is, not divine grace, but the right kind of human government.

Strauss, 184. Since for Hobbes self-preservation is the ultimate rule and ultimate source of rules, we find an interesting corollary comes with it. Whereas the natural law assumed the judgment of the wise, Hobbesian natural right assumed the judgment of everyman, including, so it seems the fool. Every man, even the most base, has an instinct for self-preservation, and so every man, regardless of wisdom, has the right to judge the right. "We may speak of a natural right of folly." Strauss, 186. Along with the democratization of judgment comes the emphasis on consent and will, rather than reason, as the basis of law.

As we shall see, the building of the natural moral law upon the right of self-preservation was to have important repercussions on the natural moral law.

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The Disfigured Face: The Unholy Trinity: John Locke

THE LOSS OF ONTOLOGICALLY-BASED MORALITY began when Western man walked the intellectual trail from the woods of Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition to the moral desert of increasing autonomy, and thence to relativism and skepticism and moral anarchy. In his walk from the perennial ethic to modern autonomy and relativism, man the pilgrim, homo viator, traveling through history shed himself, as it were, of his traditional moral accoutrements. On the way to wherever apparent self-mastery and self-definition would lead him, a goal as pointless and as elusive as the search for the legendary Prester John, Western man cast off his scrip, his hat, his cloak, his staff, and ultimately even his faith, and in so doing, lost likewise his nature. This was the path from ontological ethics to deontological ethics: from ὄν to δέον, from being to duty,* at first duty to reason, and then duty, even enslavement, to the overweening State.

Sant'Iago (St. James) Dressed as a Pilgrim

Luis Cortest explores this process of the increasing rejection of the ontological and eudaemonistic ethics of Aristotle and St. Thomas in his fourth chapter of his book The Disfigured Face. Though there are many who are answerable to humanity and, even more importantly to God,** for their ideas of increasing infidelity and rejection of the natural law, Cortest focuses on three: John Locke (1632-1704), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). (He could have chosen many others, including Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, etc.) By focusing on these three, Cortest spans the 17th through the early 19th century. These are the chosen unholy trinity of "the Modern way," whose quality is supposedly autonomy, but is actually thralldom to human convention, to sin, and to the State.

Locke, Kant, and Hegel: Luis Cortest's Unholy Trinity of "The Modern Way"

The 17th century is where one must look for the genesis of the modern notion of positive human rights. The unity of Christendom had been rent by the Protestant rebellion, and the powers of tyrant kings and tyrant princes went unchecked by the submissive state-sponsored churches, and increasing secularism grew as it were cancer. The Wars of Religion had exhausted men, pitting German against German, and Frenchman against Frenchman, European against European. And all of Europe, its hands in stained vermilion in fraternal blood, struggled with finding some sort of modus vivendi which was nothing other than practical compromise to a situation spawned by rebellion against God and His Church. Those practical compromises and accommodations were eventually apotheosized to the preeminent moral value of toleration. The preeminence given to toleration as a means to deal with religious dissent, and the temporizing accommodation to idiosyncrasies of belief that came with religious and moral anarchy, naturally led to despair that objective truth in religion or philosophy was impossible to attain. "Holiness before Peace," was the young John Henry Newman's motto adopted from Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford when liberalism was already infecting the schismatic Protestant ecclesial communions and established churches, a liberalism Newman, when created Cardinal, described thus in his so-called "Biglietto Speech" of 1879:***

Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. . . . . Hitherto the civil Power has been Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as in my own, the dictum was in force, when I was young [E.N. Newman was born in 1801], that: "Christianity was the law of the land." Now, everywhere that goodly framework of society, which is the creation of Christianity, is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to which I have referred, with a hundred others which followed upon it, is gone, or is going everywhere; and, by the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten.

The end of the century came and went, and the Almighty does not appear to have interfered, probably because the West has refused to repent, and so must confront the punishment, some natural, some surely supernatural, for its disobedience. What the newly-created Cardinal Newman described as Liberalism was the doctrine of John Locke, the first of the unholy Trinity selected by Cortest. A man with opposing sentiments to Blessed John Henry Newman in every way, John Locke's motto may be said to have been, in opposition to Newman's, "Peace (or Tolerance) before Holiness."

When religion is understood as a purely personal matter, it becomes extremely difficult to tolerate religious groups that defend a doctrine of absolute truth in matters of faith and morals. Locke's goal for society was the peaceful coexistence of citizens. For Locke, it was more important that each person in society follow his or her own conscience than for anyone to defend a doctrine of absolute truth.

Cortest, 53. John Locke's weakness of Faith was physically mimicked in the weakness in his lungs (he was chronically asthmatic). Locke worked with limited lung capacity as well as limited Faith capacity. Locke's doctrine on tolerance was born from the brain of a man who rejected the Trinitarian faith, lapsing into an unorthodox Socinianism that denied the pre-existence of Christ and his atoning death on the Cross. Locke was a proto-Unitarian, only nominally Christian. He certainly had no traditional notion of the Church, as he seems to have had an ecclesial theory predicated upon social contract: "A church," Locke said, "seems to me to be a free society of men, joining together of their own accord for the public worship of God in such a manner as they believe will be acceptable to the Deity for the salvation of their souls." Cortest, 50 (quoting from Locke's Letter on Tolerance). What? Faith a contract among men? This betrays no notion of a Faith or a Church founded by an Incarnate God. Cortest's conclusion is a massive understatement:

Obviously, Locke was not a defender of traditional church teaching; he was, rather, one who had embraced a new way of understanding religious matters.

Cortest, 50. Locke seems to have been skeptical of the human mind to grasp ultimate truth, and of God to reveal himself to man. And to make way for his increasing rejection of the Faith, he demanded increasing tolerance from secular and religious authority for this false religious freedom. He wanted his rebellion to become right. The spirit that motivated him may be gleaned from his hatred of the Roman Catholic Church. Locke was intolerant with the notion of an objectively true Faith. Though these things are hard to tell with moral certainty (the last shall be first, the first shall be last), one thinks maybe the Devil had John Locke in his employ and it may have landed him in Hell. He, along with Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and (less frequently) Friedrich Schleiermacher), is honored with the title the "Father of Liberalism," which is already a condemnation. Locke made the honor roll of error when his name was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. In fine, he is a Doctor of Beelzebub's Church, the Doctor Liberalismus. (This is not to say that all of Locke's ideas are ipso facto suspect, but he must be handled with caution, sort of like a Petri dish infected with dangerous bacteria.)

John Locke

Locke not only advocated a religious freedom, he also advocated the radical separation of Church and State.

The church itself is absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth and civil affairs. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He mixes heaven and earth together, things most remote and opposite, who confuses these two societies, which in their origin, their end, and their whole substance are utterly and completely different.

Cortest, 50-51 (quoting Locke's Letter on Toleration). The church "absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth?" The boundaries on both side are fixed and immovable? Where are these boundaries? And by whom are they set? By man or by God? By the State or the Church? The State and Church "remote and opposite?" The Church's role is to bring men to God. Is Locke suggesting the commonwealth's role is the opposite, that is, to bring men to the Devil? Clearly not. But perhaps unclearly yes.

Cortest compares Locke's novel doctrine with the Quanta cura, the Encyclical of Pope Pius IX of 1864, and comes to the conclusion:

Obviously, Pius IX did not believe for an instant that the Church should remain separate from and have no voice in civil society. One the contrary, he believed that the Church has the responsibility to make civil society more humane and just. Locke's doctrine of the complete separation of church and sate is absolutely incompatible with Roman Catholicism.

Cortest, 52.

Locke thus opened the way to modern secularism. "Locke may well not have been a secularist, but his principle of the total separation of the spiritual from the temporal prepared the way for modern secularism." Cortest, 53.

What the empiricist Locke wanted was the Church shoved in a corner where it should become irrelevant. His toleration is suspect; indeed it is a guise, a feigning, a cover for his skepticism and relativism. Why do we know this? Because Locke was intolerant of any Church that claimed special status. He was intolerant of anyone who believed in objective truth. With respect to the Catholic Church:

These, therefore, and the like, who attribute to the faithful, religious, and orthodox, that is, in plain terms, to themselves, any peculiar privilege or power above other mortals, in civil concernments; or who, upon pretence of religion, do challenge any matter of authority over such as are not associated with them in the ecclesiastical communion; I say these have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate; as neither those that will not own, and teach, the duty of tolerating all men in matters of mere religion.

So much for the tolerant Locke. No Catholic was wanted in tolerant Locke's tolerant England. No more Merrie Old England. No, to be part of the way things were going to be, you had to drop the notion that God came down from heaven in the form of a man, and founded a Church upon the Rock of Peter. You had to give up the notion that Peter had been given the authority, the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and could bind things both in heaven and on earth. You had to give up the notion that there was a natural law that was ontologically-based and that the Church claimed the right, by divine bestowing, to declare infallibly truths of Faith and truths on Morals. Being Catholic was the new crime. So it was that in Locke's "tolerant" Dour New England, the Catholics were legally and socially discriminated against until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. No, Locke was not tolerant. He was simply an old-fashioned, unreasonable, closed-minded, and intolerant anti-Catholic.

What is perhaps the most characteristically modern aspect of Locke's thinking, is his "emphasis on the personal." Cortest, 53. This hyper-individualism simply does not fit with traditional moral thinking.

From the time of Plato, ethics as the science of the good was never a doctrine of individual choice. Traditionally, ethics formed part of an ontological whole; it is only in modern thought that morality and being become autonomous.

Cortest, 53. In support of his view, Cortest quotes Louis Dupré, whose work on the passage of traditional society to modernity has been mentioned in an earlier posting on this blog: (See Louis Dupré on Metanoia.) "As a science of the good, ethics had always been more than a concern about human perfection," Dupré observes.

Almost from the beginning it had occupied the center of an all-inclusive ontology. But when modern thought reduced the good to personal or social perfection, independently of and occasionally in position to the whole, it deprive it of ontological depth and marginalized morality with respect to the totality of Being. Few modern thinkers avoided the pitfall of severing the person as creative principle from the rest of nature.

Cortest, 53 (quoting Dupré's Passage to Modernity, p. 143). So Locke, though perhaps not the first to put a dent in the armor of ontological ethics, certainly did his part to weaken the temper of that armor's steel. Cortest argues that the separation of the individual from the community is the upshot of Locke's thought. Locke rejected any sort of ontological foundation for moral activity. While he talks of nature and natural law, he did not understand "nature" in the manner of his forefathers.

Locke's doctrine of human rights is non-ontological; by the time he was writing his most important works (in the late seventeenth century) the older understanding of the relationship between nature and morality had started to disappear. When Locke speaks of "nature," that term no longer has the same meaning as it had for thinkers one hundred hears before, who were still operating within an Aristotelian-teleological context.

Cortest, 54.

Noah's Covenant: Stained Glass, 13th Century, Chartres Cathedral

Locke's emphasis of individual freedom at the expense of an objective notion of justice and at the expense of an ontologically-based morality was problematic. If personal caprice is more important than some sort of universal order that is based upon being or that which exists, then where is the objectivity to be found if at all? Is there such a thing as an objective order? What is it that is supposed to guide the State, to guide positive law? Where is any effective restraint on the State?

Like some sort of clumsy white knight, Kant comes in to the rescue, but instead of repairing the breach in the dike of ontological morality, he made the hole wider, and changed to focus of ethics from being to duty, a duty based upon a pure reason completely distilled from anything else that may be characterized as being part of man. And now the whole world's flooded with Kantian deontological ethics, and the ontologically-based natural law finds itself largely in the confines of the Ark, that is to say, the Roman Catholic Church, waiting the end of the rains and the recession of the world's waters. God promised he would not destroy the earth with waters he sent from the heavens (Gen. 9:11), but he did not promise that he would save us from the floods that we made for ourselves. At least not without repentance. Where the new Mount Ararat is to be found, where the Christian may once again stand on terra firma and rely on government that is not against him, is anybody's guess.

We will save Kant for our next posting.


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*ὄν [on]= being in Greek, δέον [deon]= duty in Greek.
**We are bound by the natural moral law to assure that our thoughts conform to objective truth, and that our conscience and actions conform to the good. This obligation we owe to our neighbor and to God. The moral freedom we enjoy is ordered to truth and the good. There is moral fault in spreading falsehood among our brothers, a worse fault that knowingly spreading some sort of infectious disease.
***A biglietto is the name given to the formal correspondence that one has been created Cardinal by the Roman pontiff.