Hi cornelis! Well, I do know the difference between divine and natural law. Problem is, I suspect my correspondent, like most people these days, thinks that human consciousness and being are purely world-immanent phenomena. So to speak of what I really wanted to speak of – divine law – would be quite impossible. So I thought I’d try something else. It didn’t work out. My question was ditched. But then, perhaps it was simply unintelligible.
The physei dikaion -- what is right by nature – depends, as Voegelin points out, on a proper understanding of that physis -- nature – is. For Aristotle, the word “has the three meanings of physical, divine, and human…. Aristotle talks of thephysikon dikaion now as that which is valid everywhere (meaning in its divine essence), now as that which is changeable (meaning its realization by men in a concrete situation). When he…begins to talk of ta me physika all’ anthropina dikaia (“what is just not by nature but by human enactment”), one can indeed not make up one’s mind whether by physika he means nature in the physical sense or in the divine essence.” But Voegelin is certain that such human enactments are not nomika (changeable law) as opposed to physika (immutable law based on divine essence), “but rather the physika in the third sense of the human realization of what is by nature.” [boldface added]. That is, the understanding of what is right by nature emerges in the “tension between divine immutable essence and human existentially-conditioned mutability.”
Plato, and Aristotle after him, rejected the idea that man’s consciousness is world-immanent and nothing more than that. Indeed, the psyche of every man is rooted in divine essence, a transcendent principle. Thus man can apprehend “the point of intersection of the timeless with time.” Indeed, man is the demonstration of this intersection. Man lives in the tension between the God beyond this world, and the “god within,” the divine principle that constitutes his own essential being. I take this to mean that man is capable of recognizing the “immutable law based on divine essence” because it is literally in his nature to do so.
Thus, what is right by nature (physikon dikaion) – we might say what is right according to the laws of nature and of nature’s God – and human legislative acts (nomikon) are the “poles” of an existential tension between the timeless and time, of the unchanging and the changeable. Justice – which is eternally right by nature – is universal in the sense that men everywhere and at all times recognize its truth, although the laws men enact to achieve it in concrete societies may differ and be subject to change. The point is, human enactments of law ought to reify as much as possible “the invisible, divine measure.” For if this is not done, then the eternal measure’s “place will be taken by a legislator’s arbitrariness pursuing his special interest,” and truthful existence – personal and social – will be impossible.
This is an extraordinarily difficult complex to convey to people who don’t spend a whole lot of time hashing out philosophical problems; maybe a more prosaic illustration may help. I’m convinced the Framers of the U.S. Constitution had precisely this problem of the just basis of nomikon in mind. I believe they consciously modeled their design after an idea of the divine measure to which human legislative acts must refer and conform in order to have the status of law. They well understood that changing circumstances over time would drive changes in law. At the same time, the “eternal” principles the Constitution was designed to secure and protect – liberty and justice under law – needed to be protected from arbitrary legislation that would undermine or threaten these principles. So, they simply said, in effect, that any legislative act that did not conform to the measure of constitutional principle was a nullity, “no law” at all, and not binding on anyone. (Of course, it doesn’t work out quite this way in actual practice; after all, you can be punished for not complying with a “nullity” these days…but then the Constitution has been traduced by successive generations of “arbitrary legislators” for quite some time by now….)
cornelis, I simply loved this: “…ethics is not a matter of moral principles, nor a retreat from the complexities of the world, nor a contraction of existence into eschatological expectation or readiness, but a matter of the truth of existence in the reality of action in concrete situations… The truth of existence [and presumably its untruth, as the case may be] is attained where it becomes concrete, i.e., in action…. The kineton of action is the locus where man attains his truth….
“From the unmoved mover, as the first cause, the movement of being goes on through the cosmos down to the last thing that is moved, in the realm of humanity to human action. If what is right by nature is characterized as kineton, the translation of this term as ‘changeable’ is correct but must be supplemented by the meaning of ‘being moved cosmically by the cause of all movement.’… The wise man…deliberates on the basis of his knowledge; and this knowledge may be ordered and expressed in the lasting form of propositions of various degrees of generality, which are called ethics. Insofar as this constant knowledge is the instrument used by the divine to attain truth in the reality of action, ethics itself is a phase in the movement of being that ends in the kineton, and its creation is a labor of serving the unmoved mover. The philosophical achievement of ethics has its dignity as a part of the divine movement that leads to the truth of action…. The criterion of rightly-ordered human existence…is [its] permeability for the movement of being, i.e., the openness of man [to] the divine; the openness in its turn is not a proposition about something given by an event, and ethics is, therefore, not a body of propositions, but an event of being that provides the word for a statement about itself.” (boldface added)
Thank you so much, cornelis, for posting this magnificent essay – and for providing an opportunity to discuss divine law. All my best, bb.
-- So to speak of what I really wanted to speak of – divine law – would be quite impossible. So I thought I'd try something else. It didn't work out. My question was ditched. But then, perhaps it was simply unintelligible.
I hope that you don't think your question on that thread was 'ditched' by me, betty. --- It was sidetracked by a pirate, that I can agree. - But so was my answer.