Nomology: The study of the Law of God and its application in theology and civics.

Part 1. An Augustinian (Theocentric), as opposed to Aristotelian (anthropocentric) framework for thinking and doing (faith and practice) Nomology.

Introduction.

In the life and thought of the Christian churches there has been no more important thinker than Augustine. It is not simply because he brought so many of the questions to the surface but because he did so with a depth, a clarity, and a poetry that floods the already inclined with joy and even the skeptic with a careful admiration.

How God makes such men and with what strange ingredients I don’t dare to guess but they are few, and a blessing, and incredibly important to the continued health and welfare of the Christ’s Holy Church.

When Augustine draws from the wells of scripture the doctrines of Law as it relates to the Church and the World his meticulous care is evident upon every line. Does he write more like a philosopher? Or more like a Pastor? Both traits are exceeding in his exposition and in that is found his peculiar genius. He was no less concerned with the truth of revelation than the truths of the world. One could not be true without the other bearing witness and both have no source but the very mind of God.

“All truth is God’s”, and so revelation in the Augustinian context is much more broad and meaningful than contemporary authors give justice. The blade of grass is as much a revelation of glory as the words of Holy writ, but in fallen man, the words become essential as a corrective for the sinful heart and for the clarity that only a propositional revelation can adjure.

In the scriptures he finds that there are always two peoples. Two families, two Kingdoms, two hopes. One who’s blessedness and hope is found merely in the rudimentary goods of this created world, and one who’s hope of blessedness is beyond all things seen, looking to that which is unseen as their great reward.

He draws the analogy of “two cites” to better explain the bifurcation of two peoples, in externals seemingly alike, though in reality as different as the day from the night. These two cites, if you will, inhabit the same space, the same time, and yet one is more ghostly than the other. It is limited to time and space alone and sees its only good there. As to things immortal, eternal, transcendent, and absolute, they neither see them nor care for them. To these they are blind, deaf, empty, insensitive, confused, unloving, impatient, and unimproved when confronted with the eternal as opposed to the temporal. Their only concern, their only light, is in that which is fading away and will soon be gone.

The Heavenly city is transposed in its intent. A Heavenly light has shown within them with such purity and such vigor, that these Earthly things and the pleasures of this pale flesh seem trivial by comparison. They know themselves to be the citizens of a far off country. To find their solace and comfort in the shadows of this world, in the Earthly city of flesh and blood is to love the shade above the Sun, the seed above the Flower, the means above the End. The Beatific vision is their one true goal and ultimate end and everything in this life is loved only as a means to that final end of knowing Christ and Him crucified, that they too might be found members of His heavenly body, and see the face of God in Him.

The city of man is belligerent in the face of such spiritual things. He is a natural man. He is nature fore and aft. What is it to him if there are things beyond the tip of his nose? Such neither concerns nor interests him since it has little to do with his daily bread. He eats and sleeps and considers his appetites.

His appetites for knowledge are not to be underestimated though. Like all men, he has an inborn drive to understand and he pursues this end as if it were life itself. Thus he has an inevitable hunger for the sciences, because in the sciences he sees an avenue for the increase of his estate. He finds in politics, especially in law, the cruces of his worldly activity.

There is power in law, the ability to coerce and maintain. Thus his passion for his community, his society, his family, his nation, and his race are at the foremost of his affections since he sees them as an extension of his own personal well being. Of course be very careful if he should see you as not being part of one of these, since he may see you as simply labor or provisions.

When he dies and becomes dust he dies at peace knowing that they will continue after him in the city of man.

The Heavenly city does not devalue the world of flesh and blood. Far from being Gnostic in their approach to the means of spiritual progress provided in this life, they use them with temperance and patience and care, but always more careful to remember that these are the created means to an end, and never to be taken as an end in themselves. The things of this life are like the proverbial grass of the field. It rises in the morning, is laid low by the noon-day sun and swept away by the wind. We were made for a purpose above ourselves, more beautiful than our selves, and the definition and meaning of ourselves and this life can be found only by looking above ourselves to something better.

Thus even if we gather all knowledge and understanding that might be drawn from the Worldly city and study all sciences both empirical and occult we will not find that most needful thing that urges the hunger of our souls to follow Him. It is in God and God alone that our purpose is found, our rest arrives, that our need is filled, and sorrows sated.

We too walked as the World in all of its subtle unknowing proving ourselves by being a Law unto ourselves. But when Christ came to us and gave to us that light of life we find the dark no longer has any place for us. We have lost one home for the sake of another. Our citizenship lost to us, we no longer have our accustomed safety and find ourselves acclimated to the citizenship of Heaven more than Earth.

1.1 Augustine.

And so what is the interplay between the two cities in the arena of community? Because when we say community we really mean politics, sociology, and law, and these are all subjects prone to the greatest confusion and subtlety, we need to be mindful to catch his thought. Many today are prone to define all things in terms of Community (Thomists, neo-Thomists, postmodernists, communitarians, communists, socialicrats). All speech, psychology, philosophy, and even truth itself is up for sacrifice at the altar of Community and should be given for its good accordingly.

Since it is said that communities create goods, or at least the good cannot be known apart from a given community, or possibly even what the good is, is an effect of the psychology of a given community, there can be nothing so important. So they say. The difference between this and the City of God being, that in the City of God the basis of Community is first the Truth and second the Good and that until the True and the Good are known there is no possibility of the existence of fulfilling and edifying Community.

In the City of God the Truth must be held in order to know the good or evil of any given community and to find meaning in the existence of community itself. Thus God Himself, or more specifically the Law of God, is the previously existing source of the existence of Community and precedes it both in time and in causation. In short, all communities are not created equal.

Knowing this creates for us the Aristotelian dilemma. When so many of today’s infra-theological heroes have focused their civics on Aristotelian and Thomistic foundations (Haurwaus, R. George, Macintyre, Weigel, Hittinger), and so culturally autonomous methods of framing the questions of the good and Community around the supposed good of Community in and of itself apart from the knowledge of God, do we have any need, any duty, to return the question to the framework that we seem to find in the scriptures themselves and in the teaching of the historical Church visa vie Augustine? Should we even give such a hearing in the halls of power? Certainly not if the City of man holds sway, because it does not have in mind the things of God, nor can it.

The premise that Community is a good, and a natural good, and an end in itself as a source of human flourishing, does nothing to advance itself beyond the fact that all communities are not good, many arm themselves against the true purpose of nature and fellowship, and many are aggressively organized against human flourishing. This being so, Community however it might be defined or explained can neither be the source nor the definition of the true or the good, but is the very thing that the true and the good define and create. The ultimate source and end of all things is found in God alone.

“City of God, Chapter 17 — WHAT PRODUCES PEACE, AND WHAT DISCORD, BETWEEN THE HEAVENLY AND EARTHLY CITIES.”

Augustine first describes the particular status of the parties, this being a distinction necessary to framing their relationship to any law. This is also necessary because though contrary to most modern thought on this, the motivation of the individual actor is crucial to the moral quality of the act in traditional Christian thought. In other words, who is acting and what their highest intent is in the act are necessary facts for any legal analysis.

“But the families which do not live by faith seek their peace in the earthly advantages of this life; while the families which live by faith look for those eternal blessings which are promised, and use as pilgrims such advantages of time and of earth as do not fascinate and divert them from God, but rather aid them to endure with greater ease, and to keep down the number of those burdens of the corruptible body which weigh upon the soul.”

Augustine.

That is to say in Augustinian verbiage, that the faithless desire things as an end in themselves while the faithful desire them only instrumentally, or as a means to a higher end, that being the Love of God and the Glory of Christ.

“Thus the things necessary for this mortal life are used by both kinds of men and families alike, but each has its own peculiar and widely different aim in using them. The earthly city, which does not live by faith, seeks an earthly peace, and the end it proposes, in the well-ordered concord of civic obedience and rule, is the combination of men’s wills to attain the things which are helpful to this life. The heavenly city, or rather the part of it which sojourns on earth and lives by faith, makes use of this peace only because it must, until this mortal condition which necessitates it shall pass away.”

Augustine.

The purpose or motivation of those outside of Christ is always less than the highest good, and thus the reason for Law and the order it brings is merely personal peace in this life. Egoistically speaking, Augustine is agreeing that the non-Christian has as an intent only selfishness, and thus though they may receive the Laws of God and may have points of identity with Christian thought on how a Civil state should be governed, having a different status, being outside of the grace of God, and having a different intent, their own selfish pleasure and well being, in every good law they ordain, in truth they break the Law; but this is ordained by God so that there will be some semblance of peace on the Earth during this time when evil has not yet been extinguished. They use the same Law, but to a different end.

This next line is very important to understanding Augustine especially as a precursor to all who come after him.

“Consequently, so long as it lives like a captive and a stranger in the earthly city, though it has already received the promise of redemption, and the gift of the Spirit as the earnest of it, it makes no scruple to obey the laws of the earthly city, whereby the things necessary for the maintenance of this mortal life are administered; and thus, as this life is common to both cities, so there is a harmony between them in regard to what belongs to it….”

Augustine.

In other words, they live by the same laws.

“This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace.”

Augustine.

“It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced. Even the heavenly city, therefore, while in its state of pilgrimage, avails itself of the peace of earth, and, so far as it can without injuring faith and godliness, desires and maintains a common agreement among men regarding the acquisition of the necessaries of life, and makes this earthly peace bear upon the peace of heaven; for this alone can be truly called and esteemed the peace of the reasonable creatures, consisting as it does in the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God.”

“When we shall have reached that peace, this mortal life shall give place to one that is eternal, and our body shall be no more this animal body which by its corruption weighs down the soul, but a spiritual body feeling no want, and in all its members subjected to the will. In its pilgrim state the heavenly city possesses this peace by faith; and by this faith it lives righteously when it refers to the attainment of that peace every good action towards God and man; for the life of the city is a social life.”

Augustine.

The life of the city is a social life, both in the City of God and the City of man. And thus both live under one law, one code, one rule, and one Ruler, that being God Himself, but whereas the city of God obeys all things, submits to all things, endures all things, sufferers all things for the ultimate end of reaching their heavenly home, and they do all of these things as a means to a final good, the World uses the same as a means to the end of their own pleasure.

But it being social does not at all imply the social power to create the good, nor the true. The community, the social life is an effect, not the cause of the of the truth of God’s presence and power, both in the act of creation and even now as the ultimate good end of all things.

Neiswonger