Ecstasis and Telos: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Disfigured Man

"A LOVER OF HIS KIND, but a hater of his kindred," is how Edmund Burke aptly described Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Rousseau abandoned as many as perhaps five children he fathered out of wedlock with the seamstress Thérèse Levasseur. But we mustn't forget that this noble act gave the responsible "citizen of Geneva" Jean Jacques Rousseau the time and the peace and quiet to write about so many things with great authority and aplomb, including morality, good citizenship, and (no kidding!) the proper rearing and education of children. Edmund Burke was right: Rousseau was worse than a bear, for a "bear, loves, licks and forms her young, but bears are not philosophers," at least not "philosophers of vanity." (Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791). The remarkable thing is that men (particularly the French) listened to Rousseau, lionized him, and idolized this sensual and diminutive whining egoist to the point that Burke could mock the French as running to foundries with the kettles of their poor and the bells of their churches to have them smelted down into statues of Rousseau. Preposterously, the French even enshrined the ashes of this cad who wrote words sweet, but did things bitter, in the Panthéon in Paris.


In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), the most famous of his political discourses, Rousseau resolves to discover the true nature of mankind by doing what Hobbes did, hypothesizing on man's "state of nature" or "original condition." Coming to the exact opposite of Hobbes's conclusions, however, Rousseau sees man in his "state of nature" not as a state of constant war, but a state of constant peace, a paradise. Rousseau comes to believe that culture and society have stained the warp and woof that is man, and that in his natural state man was far more pure and altruistic. Famously, Rousseau compares his analysis of man to the Greek statute of Glaucus:

Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, sea and storms had disfigured to such an extent that it look less like a god than a wild beast, the human soul altered in the midst of society by a thousand constantly recurring cause, by the acquisition of a multitude of bits of knowledge and of errors, by changes that too place in the constitution of bodies, by the constant impact of the passions, has, as it were, changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable. And instead of a being active always by certain and invariable principles, instead of that heavenly and majestic simplicity whose mark its author had left on it, one no longer finds anything but the grotesque contrasts of passion which thinks it reasons and and understanding in as state of delirium.

Poor Rousseau. It was not mankind that was like Glaucus's statue. It was Rousseau that was like Glaucus's statue. It was Rousseau, whose egotistic and self-regarding sensualism and sexual license led him to his life of hideous selfishness, one which led him to abandon his children, marked him with a chronic inability to get along with any of his colleagues, and fed his palpable paranoia. By his behavior, he had disfigured himself, his soul, to where it had no semblance of its original nobility.

And that the grass, which methought hung so wide
And white, was but his thin discoloured hair,
And that the holes he vainly sought to hide,
Were or had been eyes:—
. . .
'First, who art thou?'—'Before thy memory,
'I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died,
And if the spark with which Heaven lit my spirit
Had been with purer nutriment supplied,
'Corruption would not now thus much inherit
Of what was once Rousseau,—

Shelley, "Triumph of Life" (1822).

As the poet Shelley put it, Rousseau had lost his eyes. Where there had once been eyes, there were but gaping holes, a man who had blinded himself. And why should we follow a blind guide, especially one self-blinded? Rousseau is called Father of the French Revolution, a revolution that during its Reign of Terror led to the death of perhaps as many as 40,000. If you include his five children (who very likely died in the foundling hospitals where they were abandoned) to the tally, that would be 40,005. These were but collateral damage to the theories of Rousseau.


Be all that as it may, Rousseau's efforts at unearthing human nature like some sort of philosophical paleontologist was not for the purpose of discovering an end or teleology in that nature. He rejected any notion of a teleology in nature, and saw that nature as "self-contained rather than ordered beyond itself." Levering, 109. Moreover, there is no notion in Rousseau wherein man finds fulfillment in community (as a political animal) or where he is "guided toward 'ecstatic' fulfilment by an ordering established by God." What Rousseau intended to do was discover this original nature so that it could be the foundation of the natural rights of the individual as against society. Thus, though Rousseau's conclusions about human nature are more optimistic than Hobbes's, they still suffer from the same individualistic strain.

The two fundamental principles of "natural law" that he finds [through his analysis] are self-preservation and compassion for others; the second principle will predominate and guide human society unless the first principle is threatened. What he calls "natural right" flows from these two principles.

Levering, 111-12.


Rousseau's conclusion was that man was radically free and equal in his original state. All goods, even women, were free and could be picked and chosen at will as if they were fruit on a tree. "Savage man is free of entangling social bonds, whether with neighbours, wife, or children, and therefore is free to seek peacefully his self-preservation and to exercise compassion." Levering, 114. It was only the invention of private property (and exclusive marriage, an invention of civilized women to control men) that led to man's fall from his idyllic savage existence.

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch . . . .

Levering, 114-15 (quoting Part II of Discourse on the Origin of Inequality).

The original sin was not disobedience to God, but the institution of private property, and following its institution, the natural law disappeared to be replaced by a regime of violence, or, only marginally better, human law, which was nothing less than violence writ on paper. Laws

gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established forever the law of property of inequality, changed adroit usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subject the entire human race to labor, servitude, and misery.

So, deftly, with his free, easy, and irresponsible pen (what did he care; it helped sell books), Rousseau managed to contradict Hobbes's view of the state of nature and the value of the commonwealth and Locke's veneration of the right to private property and contractual government. All ills were placed at the foot of civil society. As he famously wrote in the opening lines of the Social Contract: "Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains!"

It's true. Rousseau could write a line. But he could not live a life. And he could and would ruin many, and most certainly five. And whatever it was that he advanced, and for whatever it is that he is famous for, it is not because he advanced the cause of the natural moral law and the cause of virtue.

Natural Law: Ecstasis and Telos

ETIAMSI DAREMUS . . . NON ESSE DEUM. These temerarious but still tenuously introduced words in the introduction (Prolegomena) of Hugo Grotius's treatise De iure belli ac pacis (1625) symbolize a historical phenomenon of which anyone who studies the Natural Law must be aware. In this treatise on international relations, Grotius (1583-1645), commonly called the "Father of International Law" (although the title could equally be claimed by the Spaniard and Catholic Vittoria), relied on the doctrine of the Natural Law. Though the Dutch Grotius was himself a Christian [of Protestant bent, he wrote an apologetic of Christianity in Dutch, Vewisjs van den waren Godsdienst (1622) which was translated into Latin as De veritate religionis Christianae (1627)], he argued that the Natural Law would bind us etiamsi daremus . . . non esse Deum, even if "we dare to say there is no God." It is true that the Natural Law binds all men, including the Atheist, and if understood in this manner, there is no controversy to what was said. But Grotius's etiamsi is indicative of something in the air a little more subtle, and a little more ominous. It is perhaps the first shoot, the first flowering of a Natural Law theory wholly unmoored from the notion of God, if such a theory is even tenable. It was the maturation of trend of turning away from God being the measure of all things to a Protagorean man is the measure of all things. In his classic The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), the historian of Natural Law, Henrich Rommen, identifies Grotius as the "turning point." The "turn," however, started much earlier than Grotius.


In his excellent book Biblical Natural Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Matthew Levering, an Associate Professor of Theology at Ave Maria University, discusses this "turn" from a theocentric notion of Natural Law to an anthropocentric notion of Natural Law. According to Matthew Levering, two things are required for a wholesome (and also Biblical, i.e., consistent with Revelation) theory of Natural Law. The first he calls ecstasis. The second he calls teleology.

What do these words mean? Ecstasis is the transliteration of a Greek word ekstasis or ἔκστασις. It means to "extend outwards" to "stretch out." It is the word from which we derive the English word ecstasy. It is used here for the desire of union with the Divine. This ecstasis need not be religious in origin, though it most often is. For example, the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus, no Christian himself, in his Enneads speaks of his ecstasis, his virtual experience of union, with his philosophic notion of God which was based upon a natural theology. The term ecstasis was readily adopted by Christians to describe the union with the Trinity. Levering's point is that the Natural Law must recognize ecstasis, a desire for union with God, which means that our lives on earth are ordered to God.


The second requirement that Levering argues is required for an adequate theory of Natural Law is a teleology of nature. The word teleology is a technical word derived from a combination of two Greek words: telos (τέλος), which means "end", "purpose", or "goal," and logos (λόγος), a word which means "reason" or "word." For example, in the Gospel of Christ Christ is referred to as the Logos of God, the Word or Reason (logos) of God. John 1:1. In St. Paul's letter to the Romans, Christ is also referred to the end (telos) of the Law. Rom. 10:4. As applied to Nature, a teleological view would include the concept that God created nature, including the nature of man, and that He did so with a plan, a purpose, an end, a reason in view.

In short, requiring a theory of Natural Law to possess a notion of ecstasis and a notion of teleological nature means that God is both the origin and the end of things, including man. God is the alpha (A), He is the omega (Ω), the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and the first and last letters of the Natural Law. Put another way, the requirement that a theory of Natural Law include notions of ecstasis and notions of teleology in nature mean that a theory of Natural Law must presuppose Eternal Law.

The traditional or classical notion of Natural Law includes both notions of ecstasis and teleology in nature. This notion of Natural Law found its most mature expression among the Stoics, e.g., Cicero, and was advocated in modified form by the Church, e.g., in St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, as consonant with, and in fact revealed in, Scripture and Tradition. Many modern theories of the Natural Law shun notions of ecstasis. They turn not outward to God (ecstasis), but wholly inward (in what may be called an entasis) to man. Though a turning inward to man is not fatal to a theory of the Natural Law (in fact it would be part of our discovery of our nature), it is when this turning inward is exclusive or in opposition to the turning outward to God that it becomes a problematic to a theory of Natural Law.

The story of how the Natural Law came to be progressively emancipated from its theological roots is a long one, and there are many controversial points about it, for example who initiated the process, and whether the arguments made to justify such emancipation are valid or not. Regardless, Levering calls this disassociation from of the Natural Law from its original theological roots the "Anthropocentric Turn" or "Anthropocentric Shift." He wrests out eight individuals from history to make his point. And for the next series of reflection we will rely on his choices: Renè Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, George W. F. Hegel, and Friederich Nietzsche. There are many others Levering could have chosen (e.g., Ockham, Scotus, Machiavelli, or Luther). Though these may (or may not) have been believers in various shades, the "natural law" of Messrs. Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel is not the Natural Law. These gentlemen's ideas are already on the way out of the Porch (Stoa) or the Church (Ekklesia) , and in some instances completely out of the Porch or the Church into the Wilderness.

To a greater or lesser degree, each of these men rejected the notion of ecstasis and teleology in nature. In some cases, there was no apparent rejection, but some of their presuppositions would lead to or implied such rejection. Each played a part in the Western world's turning from God as the measure of all things, including Law, to Man as the measure of all things, in particular Law. Some of their notions have prevailed and are assumed in modern culture, and we have to be aware of them in order to understand better the Natural Law, to reject these ideas, or to respond to them.