Rule Through Law, Not Of Law

Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.  Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

In the foregoing video, Professor Hamburger — Columbia University Law School — makes a point which titles this post.  At Power Line, Scott Johnson works on that point in a post titled The Administrative Threat.  Also at Power Line, Steven Hayward works on the point in a post titled Bureaucracy In America.  Hayward finishes with this sentence:

I think Postell’s book will take its place alongside Phil Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (answer: yes) as one of the important treatments to come along at the historic moment when second thoughts about bureaucratic rule seem to be reaching a critical mass.

The phenomenology which makes this point necessary is our old nemesis idolatry.  Law is a work of human hands and as such it is capable of being treated idolatrously.  To be ruled by law is to be ruled by a work of human hands.  And that, of course, is the very definition of idolatry.

Man is to be ruled by God, not by anything man makes.  Only God is for man.  Man is never and cannot ever be for man.  An ironic paradox but true.  Everything about man — except his essential nature — is limited and deformed by his finitude … of which he is self-aware.

What man makes helps God rule man and in that way helps man.  Man, as thrown into existence, is co-creator with God, by God’s wish for man.  But God only knows what is good for man and how to dispose the works of man’s hands.  Man, if he is intelligent, endeavors to discern God’s wishes regarding the works of his hands.  He looks inwards and outwards and asks God to shed light — illumination, interior and exterior — on the things He wishes him to do with what he has and what he makes.

The great Polish historian of civilization per seProfessor Feliks Koneczny, brilliantly explored and exposited upon this phenomenology — at the point of law — in the following excerpt from his On The Plurality Of Civilizations:

The difference in the sources of law is in fact the deepest root of differentiation of civilizations.  Here again, it was old Rome who for the first time and quite unequivocally considered law as a consequence of morality and as its application to concrete cases.  With this recognition of natural law also the first complete release of law from sacrality took place in Rome.  Organs of society, not of State, issued laws in Rome; during centuries the State as such did not issue in Rome even a single law, but accepted laws born in the citizen’s assemblies of the curiae at comitiae.

Unfortunately, the picture of ancient Rome does not stand sufficiently clearly and unequivocally before our eyes, the eyes of posterity; in late antique times the East already influenced the West.  Even antiquity knew already the temptation of the East.  There was a time when even in Rome one started to declare that quod principi placuit, legis habit vigorem (what pleases the ruler has the force of law). The sources of Roman law which we, posterity, have inherited — the Pandecta and the Codex — reflect the struggle of two different ethics, the Western and the Eastern, a struggle which we can observe very clearly although the Eastern ethic sometimes wears a borrowed Western and Roman cloak.

Thus, a cultural split ran in later times right through the innermost structure of the Roman Empire. Two fundamentally different, two diametrically opposed views struggled with each other, two principles between which there could be no synthesis.

The fundamental achievement of Rome could survive the period of the ruin of the Roman Empire and of the accompanying chaos, thanks to the Catholic Church which introduced this achievement into Western civilization.  The middle ages, in spite of occasional relapses, show the history of a constant penetration into European secular laws of the principles of Catholic morality.  At the same time, in the conflicts between sacerdotium and imperium which took such a dramatic aspect from the penetration of certain Byzantine legal views into the West, an increasingly sharp distinction between secular and religious authority took place, with an increasingly clear separation of their spheres of influence.  It was quite the other way in the East, where the State attributed to itself the position of the only interpreter of law.  The consequence of it was the amorality — which meant in practice the immorality — of public life.

A nation must as a cultural entity belong only to one civilization; it cannot belong to two different civilizations.

sanabiles Deus fecit nationes
He, God, made the nations.

nil humani a me alienum puto
Nothing human is foreign to me.

I consider that grasping this point regarding the nature and use of law, and the phenomenology informing the point, is of the utmost importance to the task facing Christian civilizations, Latin and Greek, namely, expelling the foreign body of Socialism (rule of law) by restoring the native immune system of morality (rule through law).

Update 1: Trump and Bolton Take On the International Criminal Court

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA

Deborah Kerr
Deborah Kerr

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