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The
Importance of Transcendent Law
C. Culture
War
Q.
Most American universities seem to teach that the founders of
America were deists in religion and therefore pragmatists in
politics. In other words, traditionalism as a comprehensive
framework of thought as you describe it, particularly in the sense
of transcendent law, did not motivate them. Are American students
being misled about their own history?
A.
Several schools of thought have arisen to explain the motivations of
the American republic's founders. Their interaction has amounted to
what may seem to some as a culture war. For some decades in the
early twentieth century, the economic interpretation, pioneered by
Charles A. Beard, reigned, but subsequent historians have thoroughly
discredited this one-track obsession.
In
mid-century, a school arose to claim that practically everybody of
intellectual or political repute during the past two hundred years
has been a disciple of John Locke and his "social contract
theory." This school, led by Louis Hartz of Harvard and later
including John Rawls, author of A Theory of Justice, has been
discredited by later students of history. Far more popular than
Locke among the early American intelligentsia was David Hume, whose
publication in 1748 of Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
devastated the whole concept of pure rationality as the only guide
to morals and politics. In a "what if" scenario, Kirk
postulates that the Constitution and history of the United States
would have been no different "had Lock in 1689 lost the
manuscripts of his Two Treatises of Civil Government while crossing
the narrow seas with the Princess Mary [to help complete the
Glorious Revolution of 1688]."(19)
By
1787, Deism had nearly trickled away in North America.(20)
This is shown by M. E. Bradford's finding in his book, A Worthy
Company, published by The Plymouth Rock Foundation in 1982, that
with perhaps only three exceptions, a lapsed Quaker, a sometime
Anglican, and one open Deist, namely, Benjamin Franklin, all of the
delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were orthodox
members of one of the established Christian communions.
Thomas
Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and our
third president, was attacked polemically as an atheist because he
did not support the doctrinal mysteries of orthodox Christianity. He
has been described as a deist, who, by definition, believed that God
created the universe like a clock-maker and then retired from the
scene. In fact, he was a theist, who believes that God created the
world and constantly sustains it out of love for every human person.
Jefferson
was a deeply spiritual man, which is why he provided in his will
that his private letters should never be published. Twenty volumes
of these letters, however, are now scheduled to be published,
beginning in 1996, one volume every year. These should confirm his
role as one of the truest representatives of traditionalist peoples
of all faiths, whom he defined as those who are "enlightened by
a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various
forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance,
gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an
overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it
delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness
hereafter."
Secular
fundamentalists are now trying to control America's future by
rewriting American history. They are trying to eliminate the role of
religion in the third millennium by eliminating or perverting its
role in the past. How many children in the public schools know that
George Washington read the Bible religiously every day, and that he
arose every morning almost all his life for an hour of meditation,
and that he set aside half an hour every afternoon to open his heart
and mind to God, even if this required him to interrupt a cabinet
meeting. He was profoundly convinced that his life and the life of
the American republic had only one meaning, which was to fulfill its
divinely determined destiny. Nowadays the secular humanists would
brand him as a fanatic or as mentally disturbed.
It
is inconceivable that the founders of America, who grew up within
the paradigm of the Old and New Covenants with God, could ever
accept the Lockean view that the ultimate standards of human life,
political or otherwise, could originate in a contract among human
beings. At bottom, according to contemporary students of American
history, including Russell Kirk, the thinking Americans of the last
quarter of the eighteenth century found their principles of order in
no single political philosopher, but rather in their religion. They
objected especially, according to Kirk, "that Locke does not
take into account those operations of the mind that lie below the
level of consciousness; nor those that lift man, by mystical means
or by poetic and mathematical insights, to a condition transcending
the limits of pure reason."(21)
The
reality of natural law as one element of transcendent law was taken
for granted by Americans of the early Republic. And this law was
essentially the concept of the Medieval schoolmen combined with that
of classical antiquity. The great scholastics of European
civilization during the height of the Islamic classical period
borrowed heavily from Islamic scholars. They were familiar with what
Muslims call variously the Sunnah of Allah and `ain al yaqin, which
is the Will of Allah as expressed indirectly through the created
world, in contrast to haqq al yaqin, which is the will of Allah
revealed directly through angels and prophets.
When
I was intending as a teenager to join the Jesuits, who were known as
the shock-troops of the Pope, I studied natural law and have been
studying it ever since. Originating with the Greeks, especially
Plato and Aristotle, if not much earlier in the history of
humankind, the concept of natural law as an assertion that law is a
part of ethics was passed through Cicero and other Roman
jurisconsults to the Fathers of the Church. The great learning and
insights of Thomas Aquinas passed into Anglican learning through
Richard Hooker and other Anglican divines, and through them to
pulpits throughout the American colonies.
This
classical jus naturalis was not challenged until a secularized
version of it was introduced by such as Pufendorf at the beginning
of the 18th century and then vulgarized later in the century by
Thomas Paine and the theoreticians of the French Revolution, who
distinguished God, whom they either ignored as deists or denied as
atheists, from "nature's laws," which they worshipped.
Both the classical and the more secularized approaches to natural
law were made familiar to virtually all of America's early political
leaders through Blackstone's Commentaries, which provide the basis
at least theoretically for the reign of Common Law in America even
today. Blackstone distinguished natural law as a source of guidance
for lawmakers from the positive law that they create. Their task was
to shape positive law in conformity with natural law, which
originated, in Cicero's words, "before any written law existed
or any state had been established."(22)
The
other source of transcendent law, other than classical natural law,
is religion. Since ethics throughout human history have derived from
religion, religion in the sense of an apprehension of the Divine
Presence and Will is a powerful source both of natural law in
particular and of transcendent law in general. The
Congregationalists at the time of the Constitutional Convention, in
fact, preferred that the specifically religious source of natural
law be acknowledged by using the term "divine law." In the
more ecumenical environment of today, we can accomplish the same
goal by using the all-encompassing term "transcendent
law." Russell Kirk remarks that the profound Catholic writer,
C. S. Lewis, in his book, The Abolition of Man, identifies a
recognition of natural law in many religions and philosophies,
including the Tao.(23)
Islamic
scholars make clear distinctions among: 1) the positive law, known
generally as the fiqh or binding rules and regulations of Islamic
law derivative directly or indirectly from Revelation in the Qur'an
and from the practice of the Prophet Muhammad; 2) the 'usul al fiqh,
which produce and consist of the universal principles (kulliyat),
purposes (maqasid), or essentials (daruriyat) of justice, derivative
indirectly from human interpretation of the divine command and
functioning basically as ethical guidance for everyone, including
rulers and judges; and 3) the Shari`ah, which is the system of
justice that God has revealed through all the prophets to all
communities of peoples since the time of Adam and Eve. In this
latter inclusive sense, used twice in the Qur'an, the Jewish,
Christian, and Islamic teachings on justice are considered to be
one. Since the use of reason to reflect on the purpose and meanings
inherent in Creation, and the direct revelation of this purpose by
God, are common to all three of the Abrahamic religions, this use of
the word shar` could be seen as identical to the term
"transcendent law." And the six universal principles of
Islamic law, the maqasid al Shari`ah, can provide a universal
framework for public policy analysis of the issues of conscience in
any civilization. I have developed them in some detail in many of my
writings, but perhaps the best exposition is in Part III, entitled
"The Search for Justice and the Quest for Virtue," in the
book put together by Muzaffar Haleem and Betty Batul Bowman, The Sun
Is Rising in the West, published in 1999 by Amana Publications,
Beltsville, Maryland.(24)
The
increased interaction of individuals and communities throughout the
world is perhaps at the core of the much heralded and simultaneously
feared era of globalization. The technological, economic, and
political ramifications are the subject of hundreds of articles and
books in all the world's major languages. But the most significant
elements of this new era for the long-range future may be moral and
spiritual. Ecumenism started as a global movement more than a
century ago at the first Parliament of the World Religions, held in
conjunction with the Chicago World's Fair in 1894. Since then, but
especially during the last decade of the "second
millennium," the ecumenical movement has transformed relations
not only within each of the world religions but among them. The
reason may be simply that there is nothing really new under the sun,
and that the problems that concern people are basically the same in
every country and in every religion. And therefore so are the
approaches to their treatment.
Following
the Second Parliament of the World Religions in 1994, scholars and
spiritual leaders spent years developing a "Global Ethic,"
building on a first draft by the Catholic theologian, Hans Kung.
Some enlightened Muslims are doing the same thing, building on the
maqasid al Shari`ah as the basis for a world council of Islamic
legal scholars. I discussed this enterprise in my article last year,
"The Grand Strategy of the Great Jihad," published in the
Summer/Fall, 1998, issue of the Middle East Affairs Journal, by the
United Association for Studies and Research in Springfield,
Virginia. The motivations, rationales, and conclusions of these two
groups seem to be identical. What they lack is an explicitly common
language of traditionalism based on transcendent law.
The
concept of transcendent law teaches that there is a common law not
only of America but of all humankind, and probably of all sentient
beings everywhere in the universe. There is also a common cult, in
the sense of an awareness of the transcendent and of the
responsibilities that this awareness entails. Therefore there is a
common culture. This has been taught by all the great Western
traditionalists, including Christopher Dawson, Eric Vogelin, and
Arnold Toynbee. The leader of these Western traditionalists, Russell
Kirk, explains their rationale: "At the dawn of civilization,
people unite in search of communion with a transcendent power, and
from that religious community, all the other aspects of a culture
flow - including, and indeed especially, a civilization's
laws." (25)
For
most of the world's peoples the twentieth century was a "dark
ages," when literally hundreds of millions of persons perished
from the extremes of secular utopianism. The source of this chaos,
in secular-humanist fundamentalism, especially among the superficial
adherents of religion with political agendas of violence, continues
into the third millennium. The great issue of the new century is
whether transcendent law will inform the peoples of the world so
that they will be led by leaders who are led by God.
Bob
D. Crane, Shaping the Future: Challenge and Response, 169 pages
hardback, now out of print from the publisher but still available
from Cranes' think-tank, The Islamic Institute for Strategic
Studies, P. O. Box 10199, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504.
a. Positivism: The Root of Chaos
b. Traditionalism: The Root of Cosmos
c. Culture War
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