Richard Storey by

When accordingly it is inquired, whence is evil, it must first be inquired, what is evil, which is nothing else than corruption, either of the measure, or the form, or the order, that belong to nature.

— Augustine

T

The Indo-European, cultural origins of natural law;

The Roman, statist confusion of natural law; and

The Church's rightful title as successor in this tradition.

The Origins Of Natural Law

the inquiring mind of the Greeks...failed to find an agreement among the priestly experts of the Middle East on fundamental questions [and so] they, in Ionia, began thinking about these questions themselves... Instead, they used natural law to explain the phenomena.5

[T]he individualism of the Homeric heroes came originally from the Indo-European chieftains who took over the Greek mainland in the second millennium, and founded Mycenaean culture. [Thus] the primordial roots of Western uniqueness must be traced back to the aristocratic warlike culture of the Indo-European speakers who spread throughout Europe during the 4th and 3rd millennium [BC].8

From Homer on, new standards of arête [virtue] began to evolve away from a strictly martial conception. Odysseus, the central character of the Odyssey, is seen to create meaning in his life not by risking his life in battles, but in his roles of spouse, parent, and joyful companion to his friends...The ultimate basis of Greek civic and cultural life was the aristocratic ethos of individualism and competitive conflict which pervaded IE culture. Ionian literature was far from the world of berserkers but it was nonetheless just as intensively competitive. New works of drama, philosophy, and music were expounded in the first-person form as an adversarial or athletic contest in the pursuit of truth... The search for the truth was a free-for-all with each philosopher competing for intellectual prestige in a polemical tone that sought to discredit the theories of others while promoting one's own.12

This virtue of moderation, it is argued, was suitable to the life of democratic discussion in the polis, which required self-control and "sound mind." This new virtue challenged the elitist view of the heroic age as a time when the social order was under the spell of mighty and turbulent aristocrats thirsting for glory and plunder without consideration for the pain and hardship they brought onto the world.13

The Roman Confusion Of Natural Law

The Roman formalistic and fatalistic view could not originate from...Indo-European religion...because Diaus-Pitar (Zeus-Iuppiter) represented an active force. However we know Etruscans respected highly the power of the Fate, and their oracles prophesied among others the decline of Etruscans themselves by strictly determined processes.15

The patrician law involved and preserved a fatalistic-formalistic morale, but the ideas about justice remained in non-formal condition in the plebeian cultural area. For example, Roman law only developed the concept of equity through the influence of the Indo-European Latins and the Greeks.16

A large part of the Roman rules of law was not due to any legislative process whatever. Private Roman law...was kept practically beyond the reach of legislators during most of the long history of the Roman Republic and the Empire... Statutory law for the Romans was mainly constitutional law or administrative law (and also criminal law), only indirectly relating to the private life and private business of the citizens.17

the definition of property and protection will be altered continually and the range of jurisdiction expanded to the government's advantage...[and] eternal and immutable law that must be discoveredwill disappear and be replaced by the idea of law as legislation — as flexible state-made law.18

Rome had basically a laissez-faire concept of state/economy relations. Except in emergencies, which were usually related to war... But now under the pressure of this need to pay the troops and under the pressure of inflation, the liberty of the people began to be seriously eroded — and very rapidly... The early 5th century Christian priest Salvian of Marseille wrote an account of why the Roman state was collapsing in the West... [B]ecause it had denied the first premise of good government, which is justice to the people. By justice he meant a just system of taxation. Salvian tells us, and I don't think he's exaggerating, that one of the reasons why the Roman state collapsed in the 5th century was that the Roman people, the mass of the population, had but one wish after being captured by the barbarians: to never again fall under the rule of the Roman bureaucracy. In other words, the Roman state was the enemy; the barbarians were the liberators... Rome continued to use an oppressive system of taxation in order to fill the coffers of the ruling bureaucrats and soldiers.19

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.20

All of this goes under the academic label of "positive law," which covers any one of the many particular imposed ("posited") systems of regulation by legal rules that we find in various politically organized societies... Justice, then, is only an accidental and often marginal concern of the state. On the other hand, legality or conformity to the rules it imposes or wants to be obeyed is its central concern. (The word "legality" derives from the Latin lex, which denotes a general command issued by a public authority, which originally was a military authority.)

The positive law is not the natural order of the human world. It is the artificial order that some powerful people (individuals and groups) in a particular society currently try to impose on others. It is an order, not of relations among human persons as such, but of relations among social positions, roles and functions. Thus the positive law of a particular country tells us what powers, immunities, rights, duties, claims and liabilities legally attach to the social positions, roles and functions of a general, a minister, a representative of the people, a citizen, a registered alien, a pensioner, a police man, and so on. In the same way, the rules of chess tell us what a king, queen, knight, pawn or other piece is or can or cannot do.21

Christianity Takes Up The Torch Of Hellenistic Natural Law

The king is supposed to only apply law, not make it. And to assure this, the king will never be granted a monopoly on his position as judge... [E]veryone remains free to select another judge, another noble, if he is dissatisfied with the king... If he is found to make law, instead of just applying it, or if he is found to commit errors in the application of law, i.e., if he misconstrues, misrepresents, or falsifies the facts of a given case, his judgment stands open to be challenged in another noble court of justice, and he himself can there be held liable for his misjudgment. In short, the king may look like the head of a State, but he definitely is not a State but instead part of a natural, vertically and hierarchically structured and stratified social order: an aristocracy.24

It is too easily forgotten that in the time of Jesus Greek had already been established as a language for more than three hundred years and already had a long and varied history behind it... The victorious Maccabaean revolt and the national and religious renewal associated with it had hardly changed anything in this respect.29

This point of the discovery of the individual before God is probably the greatest gain of that encounter between the Jewish and Greek spirits which was so influential and at the same time so passionate. The certainty of the overcoming of death and the stress on the value of the individual unite in the glorification of the martyr. The Old Testament could not yet know the praise of the hero who dies for his ancestral city and its gods, but we find this praise of heroes all the more, say, in Greek poetry during the period of the Persian war. Although there are many reports in ancient Israel of the death of prophets and their faithfulness to YHWH, the prophets are never transformed into martyrs: in contrast to Greece, in Israel before the Hellenistic period (apart from the enigmatic text Isa.53) there is never any mention of a heroic "dying for"... That changes at a stroke in the Maccabean period....31

Conclusion

, Master of Laws contributing tohe study of Western Civilization has been all but eradicated. This was no accident but, rather, an aggressive policy of leftist academe which has used exclusionary tactics to dominate and pervert the culture and purpose of our universities since the 1960s and 70s.But, for us students, driven underground, Western history is the greatest treasure trove of almost every faculty. Not least of these is natural law. This unique philosophy of law so encapsulated the spirit of the West that the late Prof. Surya P. Sinha described law as "the most central principle of [the] social organization" of Western civilization alone. "This fact explains that most...theories about law have issued from the Western culture."Prof. Sinha even declared law itself to be a non-universal phenomenon of the West, other civilizations developing little more than "principles of moral life which are not law."The story of natural law is a fascinating one; Prof. Ricardo Duchesne draws from decades of definitive scholarship on the uniqueness of the West to crystallize the "essential message" from across the social sciences: "the rise of the West is the story of the realization of humans who think of themselves as self-determining and therefore accept as authoritative only those norms and institutions that can be seen to be congenial with their awareness of themselves as free and rational agents."Being at the heart of Western civilization, yet lost to history and shrouded in confusion, I would like to clarify the environment in which natural law developed and the consequences of its loss.I will discuss:I propose that natural law concepts germinated in the aristocratic culture of the Indo-European environment of ancient Greece and were nurtured by Christianity (a thoroughly Hellenistic religion); thus, why the Church found many similar concepts of kingship in the medieval Indo-European tribes of Northern Europe, particularly the rule of law and the right of resistance against tyrants. This allowed for the transition to and development of natural law and the Church's creation of the first proper system of law in the world.The classical natural law school of jurisprudence was concerned with the use of reason to discover the natural order of the world, particularly the world of men. This involved discovering universal rights which, by definition, cannot be alienated from anyone by anyone, rendering all subject to this natural justice. Thus, the natural law rules as king of kings, rather than governing coercively as the legislated whim of a despot. But, natural law was no accidental discovery; Prof. Sinha noted,The universe then was considered ordered, perhaps even controllable — not the incomprehensible and whimsical actions of untouchable gods. Natural phenomena had natural causes, according to pre-Socratic Thales of Miletus, and the same philosophy which saw the cosmos as a natural order applied to human societies too. This created environments less hospitable to those who would set themselves up as the sole source of social order; indeed, some of the Greek poleis were governed by the rule of law.Sinha concludes that the ancient Greek's desire to live "for his own sake...marks the emergence of individualism." However, he asserts this individualistic rejection of oriental despots and unquestionable sage wisdom originates merely in the environmental factors of the Greek archipelago, in the shadow of the collapsed Mycenaean Kingdom.Whilst such thinking is typical in today's academe, Prof. Duchesne's theory is more thorough:The uniqueness of the Indo-European egalitarian aristocracy was the freedom (and even encouragement) of individuals to strive for personal recognition — a Nietzschean "restless ethos" in which berserkers flaunted their fearlessness in combat to earn respect and nobility.The aristocracy (from the Greek for excellent or virtuous being —) were thus the nobles of a society whose virtues were martial and masculine, evidenced by the brotherhoods/war-bands of free men. The individualistic nature of these "free aristocrats" was not that of "an autocrat who treats the upper classes as unequal servants but as 'peers' who exist in a spirit of equality as warriors of noble birth."Naturally, the mainspring of Western Civilization's concern for liberty was the Indo-European culture of self-asserting, audacious individuals who continually competed against those who would create a territorial monopoly of judicial power, keeping not just despotic rule but any state creating activity at bay. It was the inheritance of this ethos which caused the ancient Greeks to see the Oriental practice of prostration before the "Great King" as "symbolic confirmation of the great divergence between Eastern and Hellenic notions of individualism and political authority."Most significantly, however, was the recounting of the individual heroic deeds of the aristos by the priestly class.In depicting heroic deeds, the Indo-European spirit was internalized by the intellectual class of priests. This produced a highly competitive philosophical environment — "the miracle of Greece" — which drove the aristos to greater feats of rational self-mastery, as Prof. Duchesne expounds:So, the western concept of virtue (from virtus, the Roman, aristocratic concept of manliness) evolved from attributes associated with martial valour to those of the rational and civil man. In contrast to the violent hubris of Achilles, a new virtue emerged — ", referring to moderation or self-restraint."Basically, the Greeks internalized the restless, conquering Indo-European spirit; philosophy and poetry began to depict their inner battles as well as outer. High competition in understanding the complexity of human reason, the psyche and society had begun. Rather than simply overpowering the world around them, even the gods, man turned inward to conquer himself, producing the self-civilizing, trustworthy proto-gentleman who pursued Plato's four cardinal virtues — prudence, justice, temperance and courage.Natural law was famously developed further by the Roman lawyer, Cicero, but, whilst Roman civil law was mostly privately developed, the various Roman systems of government were not consistent examples of natural law in practice. Roman law developed primarily between the 1st century B.C. and the 3rd century A.D. and comprised of private and public law. Rothbard describes the difference between the two: "Private law developed the theory of the absolute right of private property and of freedom of trade and contract. While Roman public law theoretically allowed state interference in the life of the citizen, there was little such interference in the late republic and early empire." Since, as Prof. Jenõ Szmodis notes, this "duality of legal positivism versus natural law...is not known so sharply in other legal cultures," the question arises: How did these two conflicting systems of governance develop together, as one legal system, in Rome but not elsewhere in Europe?The founding of Roman law was influenced by the ethnically eastern Etruscans,whose religion possessed typical Levantine attributes:A submissive, fatalist acceptance of the positivistic legislation of a state power was of course not the habit of Indo-European peoples. Equilibrium formed between public and private law, between the patrician rulers, influenced heavily by the Etruscans, and the mostly Latin and Greek population:The greatest evidence of this is the development of the Twelve Tables (Leges Duodecim Tabularum), the legislation which founded Roman law in the Republic (450-449 B.C.). After the expulsion of the last king of Rome, the Republic governed by magistrates was established by patrician rulers who denied the plebeian class access to the magistracy. According to Roman tradition, after a long social struggle between the two, with threats of secession by the plebeians, the Twelve Tables were produced. These visibly contained these two influences: the Etruscan, ritualistic influence continued by the patrician class, i.e. various rituals required for certain formal transactions; and the desire to ensure that private property rights remained essentially unmolested, which was the main thrust of the diverse and disorganized content, revealing the influence of the natural law-style of thinking of the predominantly Indo-European plebeian class. So, public and private law developed as one mixed legal system; as in Greece, private rights only had force under the auspices of the public law, yet there was no direct-governance undertaken by all free men.Of course, it may be countered that, in Roman history, the State interfered to a minimal degree in private disputes and, thus, private courts provided the required judicial services for resolution despite the State's legislative powers, as exemplified by philosopher and lawyer, Bruno Leoni:Nevertheless, as Prof. Hans-Hermann Hoppe predicts, in such circumstances,This is precisely what happened in the later development of Roman law and through the later history of Western law, as influenced by it. During what is called, "The Crisis of the 3rd Century," the over-militarized Roman economy was weakened through donatives to a conditionally loyal and expansive army. Prof. Joseph R. Peden explains the deterioration of individual liberties during this period, as the public law expanded to extort greater taxes from the people, encroaching more heavily on citizens' rights until they preferred life under the barbarians than the oppression of the imperial rule:Thus, St. Augustine could make this observation in the shadow of a moribund Western Rome:To explain why, as Lord Acton put it, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," would take an entire book. What's more, I'm not qualified to write it. But we can conclude, as Prof. Frank van Dun does, that either natural law rules or some ideologue — either there is natural order or unnatural disorder/chaos."Law" has Germanic roots and essentially means order. When we speak of a natural law we are thus talking about the natural order of rational agents with free will, in the same sense as Aristotle. Likewise, justice simply meant respect for this natural order and agreement between similarly natural persons. Today, however, law and justice are understood as synonymous with state legislation and consequent legality.Whilst not necessarily answering why power corrupts, we might at least conclude that positive law is an excuse to use natural persons as a means to achieve ends which may have nothing to do with the natural order of the human world. If, as Prof. Duchesne concluded, "the West is the story of the realization of humans who think of themselves as self-determining and therefore accept as authoritative only those norms and institutions that can be seen to be congenial with their awareness of themselves as free and rational agents," it is clear then why such a civilization developed natural law.The notion that the same rules apply to all men later found a home with the kings of Northern Europe. These tribes still possessed that Indo-European culture of the rule of an, albeit, customary law and the right to resist tyrants, with kings being answerable to the rulings of another lord's court. Therefore, the European Christendom of the Middle Ages presented a rather unique situation in which there was no state per se. This continued throughout the period primarily because natural law teachings of the Church largely comported with and developed the customary laws of the Germanic tribes, which, as Prof. Gerard Casey eloquently notes, always tend to the natural law anyway, being a "local concretization" of it.In Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, Fritz Kern explored the two major, similar concepts of law which the Church found among the Germanic tribes (the rule of law and the right to resist tyrants). The Church was able to exert a certain amount of influence in limiting the kings dominium but expanding his imperium, that is, obliging him to "rule and defend this the realm which is vouchsafed to thee by God," as the German coronation order of the tenth century provides. Therefore, he was not to exercise any supposed superior rights, as a tyrant. Otherwise, the king was not consecrated or was excommunicated by the Church; likewise, he would not be considered a valid king by the people, but rather a criminal who could rightly face justice. Therefore, Kern concluded that a legally absolute king was impossible in the earlier Middle Ages.It is certainly the case that the aristocratic heritage of the Indo-European civilizations provided a plurality of judges, with the king being merely a first among equals, each lord's court exercising authority. Such an environment ensured (albeit imperfectly) competition in rationalizing about resolutions to conflicts between parties and that no individual or group was beyond adjudication. Prof. Hoppe describes this non-exclusive territorial rule as an "aristocratic natural order," as he expresses the attitude which allowed private systems of government and defied the creation of a state:As for the influence of the Church, whilst she had freedom to choose her own leaders, aristocrats would secure bishoprics etc. for family and friends, including the accompanying privileges and lands. Certainly, competition prevented the later rise of constitutional monarchs and subsequent states who sought greater revenue from the gradual monopolisation of judicial services.But, as the emperor effectively hand-picked the pope, this allowed kings to corner the market on authority.Pope Gregory VII understood this to be the source of corruption in the 11th century and so, whilst still a cardinal-subdeacon, established the College of Cardinals to elect the Pope; of course, they promptly elected him. The Gregorian Reform would furthermore establish judicial independence for the Church, producing the first proper system of law in the world — Canon law, built largely on natural law and various private law decisions from Roman and customary, Germanic laws which accorded with it. This event would then secure similar self-determination for universities, guilds, merchants, entire cities etc.Of course, the battle was not over; this was the start of the Investiture Controversy which commenced the battle for superior authority between the Church and kings, later resulting in the Reformation, the rise of the nation-state, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the modern liberal-democracies, ubiquitous today.We can conclude that the 'libertarian' aristocracy of the Indo-European civilizations produced and was, in turn, preserved by the philosophy of natural law into the feudal period, "where no authority, not even the pope or the king, had complete political, religious, or intellectual jurisdiction."Although imperfect in many ways, natural law could be said to rule during this period in a way we cannot say of ancient Rome or the West today. So, the role of the Church in the widespread teaching of natural law (particularly as developed by the Scholastics) and the preservation of this traditional European system of rulership should not be underestimated; rather, it should be celebrated.Nevertheless, it has been argued by various modernists, especially New-Right thinkers, that pre-Christian Rome and the revival of its more anti-Christian features during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, is more in-keeping with the ancient culture and principles of European civilization; what's more, that Christianity was essentially an alien, even subversive, Jewish ideological influence on European civilization and one which has been, at least in some ways incompatible with the culture of Europeans.On the contrary, as shown above, the Roman state was a divergence from Indo-European ideas of rulership in significant ways, such as the Greek experiments in freedom and the kings of the Germano-Celtic tribes. Now, I shall argue that Christianity is Hellenistic and a rightful successor of the natural law tradition and, therefore, at the heart of Western civilization.In his article of the same name, Prof. Duchesne argues that "Christianity is a Hellenistic Religion, and Western Civilization is Christian," following the scholarship of Prof. Martin Hengel — still the best source for the study of the Hellenistic period of Second Temple Judaism, from which Christianity emerged. He concluded that because of the interchange between Judaism and Hellenism, it is impossible to define Judaism as separate from it:But, it was not simply popular language which was affected during this period. Remarking that Jerusalem had effectively become a Greek polis by 175 B.C., Prof. Hengel noted, "It is evident here that the Hasmoneans did not really slow down the 'process of Hellenization' in Palestinian Judaism, but in fact continued it as soon as they themselves came into power."The evidence for Greek being used as the lingua franca for trade, commerce and administration throughout Palestine has obviously increased since Prof. Hengel wrote those words, but he was still able to list an impressive amount: Greek schools in Jerusalem as early as 3rd century B.C., bilingual coins (Herod produced purely Greek inscriptions on Jewish coins), borrowing Greek words to fill out the Jewish vocabulary (especially in Rabbinic literature), Greek architecture and public entertainment and Greek public inscriptions (some of the earliest evidence being in Jerusalem). Most significant, perhaps, is the development of individualism in the Second Temple Period literature as a result of this influence:Prof. Hengel wasn't surprised, as Jerusalem "was...a metropolis of international, world-wide significance, a great 'attraction' in the literal sense, the centre of the inhabited world."Indeed, the number of dispersed Jewish pilgrims from all over the Roman Empire outnumbered the inhabitants of Jerusalem and brought with them that foreign cultural influence. Jews of the Diaspora had been slaves in Greek homes, soldiers in Greek armies and even held worship services in Greek. "The influence of Greek education and literature extends very much wider. We already find it in late Hebrew and Aramaic literature, for example in Koheleth, Ben Sira, Daniel or the Enoch writings."Notably, of course, St. Paul of Tarsus had received a Greek education which coloured his thought throughout his New Testament letters.Many of the early Church, composed largely of Gentiles, intuited this strong connection with the natural law tradition of the Greeks. For example, St. Justin (early 2nd Century A.D.), in his proselytising Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, developed the identification of Christ as the Greek notion of the logos in the opening of John's Gospel. The logos is the ordering principle of the universe or "Divine Reason," according to the Stoics. Therefore, St. Justin asserted that those Greeks who sought the natural order through reason had been led by God as much as the Old Testament figures, especially those who awaited the Messiah. "[Christ] is the Word [logos] of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably, are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias."According to the data, St. Justin was right — there isn't simply a bridge between the natural law of Indo-European thought and Christianity, but, as Prof. Hengel observed, these movements are historically impossible to separate for definition. What's more, Christendom produced the personalistic form of individualism we know and take for granted as so typical of Western culture.It is hardly surprising that so many today complain that justice is blind. Our system of law is no longer based on the principles of Western natural law; that is, legislators can make up the rules as they go, only recognising artificially determined persons for the achievement of an artificial order. Without any significant consensus to recognise principles of a natural order of human societies, there is nothing to mitigate the above process and so the criteria of posited 'social justice' seem to be increasing exponentially in our time.This is painfully and poetically clear when we consider the blind goddess of Justitia. Lady Justice is known today as a solitary figure. Long forgotten is her sister, Prudentia, with whom she was portrayed in times past. Alone and blind, the law is indeed an ass for she doesn't have her sister to guide her toward any rationally observable order. Traditionally, however, the Church presented a universal moral framework for the West — one which reinforced the classical virtues, spurring Christians to strive for a more perfect world, with none other than prudence as the 'charioteer' of the classical or cardinal virtues.The modern and especially post-modern mindset which has gripped the West has certainly blinded most of us from the objective principles which were the heart and soul of our civilization, and without the heart of natural law establishing our families, communities and beyond, we can hardly be surprised our civilization is dead. At least we know the philosophy which gave it life and which could yet revitalise it.