Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 17

For episode 16, see here

The Theory of the National State

XVII: Royalist and Anti-Royalist Theories
 A. Religious wars brought two sides of philosophy to fore,
     especially in France, people's right of defense vs divine right.
 B. Protestant attack om absolutism
       1. Constitutional argument based on medieval practices
           showing absolute monarchy to be an innovation
       2. Attempt to show philosophically that monarchy was
           contrary to universal rules of right supposed to underlie
           all government
       3. Vindiciae contra tyrannos was chief work of the French
           Protestants
           i. saw ruler as servant of the community, one that could do
             whatever its own life required
           ii. established two contracts, one of the people and king with
             God and another between the people and the king
           iii. king may be disobeyed when he goes against the 
              commands of God because people share the covenant
              with God and if they didn't take action would become
              co-conspirators
           iv. the second covenant justifies resistance to tyranny
              in secular government
           v. form of contract based largely on utilitarian agreement to
              render obedience to king to gain the benefit of protection
              of life and property
           vi. limits on the king based on his subjection to law
           vii. resistance was an expression of religion, a corporate right
               expressed through magistrates rather than by individuals
       4. Anti-royalists assumed law of nature and as defense of ancient
           liberties 
 C. Jesuits and the Pope
       1. Militant force of counter-Reformof the Roman Church
       2. Sought to reinstate spiritual leadership of Pope
       3. Kings power was from the people, only the Pope's authority
           came from God
           i. thus the king could not demand absolute obedience from
            subjects and;
           ii. Pope still could control the secular realm on spiritual
            matters
       4. Juan de Mariana saw the state of nature giving way to 
           civil society and saw the growth of government as a
           natural process and contended that the community
           controlled the rulers whom its needs created
       5. Francisco Suarez defended spiritual authority of the Pope
           but saw power of society to rule itself and its members as
           inherent property of social groups
 D. The Divine Right of Kings
       1. The attack on absolutism led to falling back on longstanding
           belief on the divinity of civil society
       2. Defense of a national establishment
       3. Rested on notion that authority had religious origin and
           sanction based on faith rather than on reason
       4. Saw law as residing 'in the breast of the king"
       5. James I defended monarchy's freedom from interference
       6. Pushed analogy of king as father to his children

Next week:  Jean Bodin

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 13

For episode 12 see here


The Theory of the Universal Community


XIII.  Universitas Hominum

  A. Rebirth of scholarly activity in 13th Century

       1. rediscovery of Aristotle

       2. concentration on theology and metaphysics

  B. John of Salisbury

       1. saw kings bound by law as everyone was

       2. carried on argument of Cicero for res publica

  C. Saint Thomas Aquinas

       1. used Aristotle as new support for Christian philosophy

       2. tried to synthesize faith and reason

       3. saw each as acting to achieve own form of perfection within a

           hierarchy of degrees of perfection

       4. saw Aristotelian society of mutual exchange for achieving the good life

       5. ruler derives power from his part, under God, in the community of

           directing every class towards a happy and virtuous life

       6. offered no clear definition of lawful authority or of its derivation (or the

           kings relation to law)

       7. law was one aspect of the cosmic system by which God rules the world

           i. all different manifestations of the same principles

           ii. Eternal Law -- the eternal plan of all creation, not knowable

           iii. Natural Law -- reflection of Eternal Law in created things

           iv. Divine Law -- revelation from God in the Scriptures

           v. Human Law -- ius gentium and ius civile, applies to humankind the

           divine principle

       8. Human Law is Natural Law made to cover man


"For both men [Aquinas and Locke], the ruler is as definitely bound by reason and justice as his subjects, and his power over the positive law arises from the need of keeping it in agreement with Natural Law. Enactment is less an act of will than an adjustment to times and circumstances. (259)


 D. Dante sought to show the Emperor's authority derived directly from God but

      not dependent on God.

 E. For all three thinkers, human race forms a single community whose existence

     implies a single head.

 F. Out of line with Aristotle's presumption that the state is an outgrowth of the

     natural evolution of society, justified by the moral values it sustains without

     religious sanction.


Next week: Three Challenges to Christian Society    


Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 10

For episode 9 see here

 The Theory of the Universal Community

 X. Seneca and the Fathers of the Church
    A. Seneca wrote in the early days of Empire
    B. Reflects despondence of a Rome in social and political decline 
    C. Good man can do nothing through political office and such offices
         have little to offer good men
     D. Duty of the good man is to offer moral or religious virtue, to become
          the teacher of mankind
       1. offered strength and consolation in this world
       2. turned toward contemplation of spiritual life
       3. beginning of split between religious life and politics
     E. Religious institutions begin to form along side state
     G. State no longer seen as highest agency of moral perfection 
     H. Seneca saw innocent Golden Age, a state of nature
      I.  For him, government and law are an ethical second-best and as a cure for
           the sinfulness of civilized man
      J. Rise of Christian Church as distinct institution to govern spiritual
          concerns of men was revolutionary
       1. Religious doctrine of salvation was neither philosophy nor political theory
       2. Philosophy of early Christians not unlike Stoics  
          i. law of nature
          ii. providential government of the world
          iii. obligation of law and government to serve justice 
          iv. equality of all men before God
       3. Added obligation to respect constituted authority, as derived from God,
          not the people
          i. respect due institution, not merely the person of the ruler
          ii. But unlike Roman law, it was necessary to suffer bad ruler as he came
              from God and not the people
          iii. Yet obligation to God higher than obligation to the state
       4. Christianity split what for pagans was a unity -- that the duties of
          morality and religion met in the state
       5. Led to problems of church and state (which made possible liberty)
       6. Church and State were to be mutually interdependent with the Church
          the superior partner
     K. Ambrose, Augustine and Gregory
       1. Dealt not with systemic philosophy of Church and State but with
         immediate pressing problems
       2. Ambrose -- 4th Century AD
          i. strong statement for autonomy of the Church in spiritual matters
          ii. taught and converted Augustine
       3. Augustine -- 5th Century AD
          i. transmitted ancient thought to Middle Ages
          ii. Saw human history as dominated by contest between earthly city
              (lower human nature) and the City of God
          iii. through earthly life, however, the two cities are mingled
          iv. true commonwealth must be Christian as only such a state is just
       4. Gregory -- pope, father of the medieval papacy
          i. obedience to ruler extended to passive obedience to wicked ruler
          ii. ruler had power even to do what was unlawful, providing he was
             willing to risk damnation
       5. The Two Swords
          i. Church held spiritual interests and eternal salvation which was the
           province of teaching by clergy
          ii. State held temporal authority, maintenance of peace, order and
           justice
          iii. between the two a spirit of mutual helpfulness ought to prevail
       6. Universal Christian society was the Empire and the Universal Church,
       7. Split laid the ground for the right of (spiritual) freedom
 

Next week: The Folk and Its Law  

A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: Part One

Sometime ago, I wrote in this space an Introduction to a Still Unwritten Book. For several years before and since, I have been pondering consciousness, cosmology and quantum physics in what I like to think follows in the tradition of natural philosophy. While I am not a scientist, I believe that the ultimate questions are essentially unanswerable but – following Saint Thomas’ finger – the proper subject of a reasoning intellect. It seems to me that the most fundamental question remains one that has haunted all philosophical and religious traditions: why is there anything? Science alone cannot shed light on this. Current science points to a Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. Today’s quantum physics and cosmology can say much about the first few moments after that event and the subsequent evolution of the universe and life. But we cannot say much about where the Big Bang came from and even less about why it might have occurred. Nor can we explain – without positing an infinity of less comfortable parallel universes – why our universe seems so right for us.

So the ultimate questions – why should there be anything, why should there be us – remain unanswered. It would seem that nothing is the more natural state because it would need no explanation. That there was nothing and always would be nothing would require nothing to be done or said about it. That nothing somehow gave way to something, anything, would have required a departure from the most simple state of nothing to greater complexity. The universe, in which we find ourselves a part, exists, it is something. Furthermore, it seems to have been fine-tuned insofar as it expresses a particular set of physical laws that seem designed to make life and intelligence inevitable. We live in a Goldilocks’ reality, not too cold, not too hot, but just right for us. The apparent design that gave rise to our existence must inevitably imply a designer.

But granting all this, this still leaves two fundamental questions. Where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. The possible answers to the first question appear to converge on two possibilities, that the designer always was – i.e., that something always existed and there never was nothing – or that there was an original act of creation (or self-creation) that led to the existence of the designer. Both of these “explanations” essentially define what we might call God. One of them must be true.

The second question, why did the designer enact the particular act of creation that led to us, could have a myriad of answers. It might have been from boredom – as an eternity of nothing but self might eventually wear thin – perhaps in the form of a cosmic-scale version of a computer SimUniverse. It could be the night’s sleep of a very rationally-minded dreamer. It could be an experiment of some kind, or a simulation set to explore possible design parameters. It could be an act of love. Whatever the possible reason, the act of creation implied a kind of consciousness (even of the sleeper) and some version of a conscious choice. The designer must have been a conscious entity, perhaps even consciousness in its rare form. Whether the designer always was or was somehow created, the form it had or took was consciousness. In either case, consciousness was primordial, coming before the creation of our universe, before matter, before the Big Bang. The primordial consciousness – what might be called God – was the designer.

A fascinating aside about following this chain of thought is the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the designer was or felt constrained to create a universe capable of being apprehended by scientific reason. The universe is not just some stage set on which we players play our parts but an intricate mechanism that obeys its own complex, intrinsic laws. This suggests that the designer was using – for whatever reason – a given toolbox that provided the means to form the particular set of physical parameters manifested in the Big Bang.

Still, why us? What are we and what were we made for? I lean toward the notion that the cosmic consciousness designed a reality that it could then enter, whether out of loneliness, curiosity, love or some combination of these. 

TBC... 

If There Was A Cosmological Design, What about the Designer?

I have been speculating about the origins of the universe and consciousness for some time now. Following St. Thomas’ finger, modern science points to an act of creation tightly constrained to produce the universe of matter and energy that we see around us (and in which conscious beings arose). If the fundamental constants of physics were not exactly what they are, if the Higgs boson did not manifest itself in a way to create the menagerie of particles that physics has discovered, the Big Bang would have produced some other kind of universe or perhaps none at all. We discover the laws of nature because they – the laws – appear to be there. They were there from the very first moment something “exploded” into spacetime. We exist in a universe that seems to have been designed according to these laws, or better, was created through using a particular set of fundamental constants and rules.

Of course, if there was a design, it suggests there was a designer. (I’m now reading Mind & Cosmos by Thomas Nagel. He suggests something like a design without a designer but more on that another time.) My question this time is why anything capable of designing a law governed creation on the order of the cosmos would have to use or obey law? The traditional notion of a Transcendental God is a being all-powerful and without constraints. As noted here before, I tend not to believe in such a god. And in fact, it seems that whatever set in motion the particular universe we find ourselves in was constrained to act through rules of the game we now discover as fundamental physics. Could an omnipotent god be constrained? Could not such a god simply call a universe that would look like ours into being by commanding or dreaming it? What kind of “god” would work with a rule book and where would that rule book have come from? Either that rule book precedes its use or for some unknowable reason the god created it in order to use it? What kind of god would do the later? And if the rules predate the god then we have not yet reached the First Cause.

I have no answers to these questions so let me have some fun. Let’s imagine a toolkit of cosmic software that allows the creation of universes. It contains menus of all sorts of starting conditions, rules and variables. A “player” – amateur or professional – plugs in, picks through the many choices available and runs the program. The “machine” cranks and out spews the result. Some might crash immediately, others just sit there shining or in the dark, others maybe moving forward in whatever way the rules encourage. A “successful” run might eventually contain things like stars, planets and people. If this program came on the market here, it would quickly outsell any of Sid Meier’s creations.

I said fun, but this is really a thought experiment for it raises the question of why any designer would create a universe and let it run without further ado. For it seems that the putative designer plays no further part in influencing outcomes. There is good and evil in our world and one must assume that it exists anywhere conscious beings exist. Lots of bad things have happened here on earth – to civilizations, societies, individuals – despite whatever prayers or entities were sent the gods’ way. One might argue that God showed its care for us by allowing us free will, by allowing us reason, by giving us the ability to tell right from wrong. There is scant evidence that that has worked out very well when one looks at the present state of the world, or as my historian friend would say, at any period of history. What possibly could be the intention of the possible designer who set our world in motion? Play, experiment or maybe child-rearing?

What if there was no designer but simply a design and the universe is an example of the eternal return?

Saint Thomas’ God

Somewhere in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas is the suggestion that when one follows reason as far as it can go, that is a finger pointing to God. Over the past several years, I have been considering what the existence of consciousness, modern cosmology, quantum physics and relativity can say about the origin of consciousness, life and the universe. This has led me to some conclusions, including that consciousness may be primordial, that there may indeed be a “ghost in the machine,” and that the creation of the universe seems to have happened according to laws written into the act. My way of summing all this up has been to accept the notion that the universe is a product of conscious intent and that we all share in that same consciousness. I have come to think of the “creator” as a kind of Shakespeare who wrote a cosmic script setting the stage full of interesting processes, happenings and beings and dumped itself into it in order to experience its creation first hand. (Each “I” is part of that consciousness.) Another way to think about this might be to imagine an all-powerful being who designed the most amazing multi-level, multi-player computer game to play – to alleviate a really cosmic case of boredom? – by downloading itself into it to play every role.

As a former Catholic, however, I had trouble with the concept and notion of “God.” Cleary the God of all three religions of the Book – the Hebrew, Christian and Muslem – was too anthropomorphized. The concept of God comes with baggage I could not accept. A transcendent being like some sort of super human that loves us as a parent and deserves worship is simply a reflection of our own collective lack of psychic maturity. There is also no evidence for such a being that judges us and will hold us accountable for our actions, right and wrong. Given the fantastic and unlikely beauty of a universe that seems just right for us, there is no reason to suppose that there must be a heaven beyond it. Given our experience of the various forms of evil, historical and current, there is also no reason to suppose the need for some other hell. It seems clear to me that the universe as it exists is ungoverned by any morality beyond what we humans bring into it.

But recently, sitting in the Bishops Garden at Washington’s National Cathedral on a sunny, early spring morn, I made my peace with the word God. Listening to the gentle sound of a burbling spring and basking in the warmth of the sun, I considered the process by which the millions of photons showering down reached me. The sun’s energy comes from a myriad of fusions of two hydrogen atoms into one helium in the sun’s core. It takes thousands of years for the energy produced by each single fusion event to reach the surface of the sun. Then it takes just eight minutes to travel the 93 million miles to earth. The physical laws governing our universe are just right to allow this font of endless free energy sitting in the middle of an expanse of nothingness to bring to life our planet and all the creatures on it.

Some might say that that conditions may seem just right because else wise we wouldn’t be here. Just a happy accident out of an infinity of possible combinations that don’t work for conscious life forms. But that seems to violate Occam's Razor. Why suppose an infinite number of random fluctuations just to come up with one that has us? Much more direct to suppose that the one that contains us was meant to do so. And besides, the fundamental questions remain why is there anything at all rather than nothing and how could something arise out of nothing. Much more logical to recognize the likelihood of a First Cause. And one might as well call that God. Not one to worship, follow or depend upon for any kind of salvation but one to wonder about. Accepting the existence of St. Thomas’ God opens, at the most basic level, the door of wonder.