R. J. Rushdoony
Education and the Autonomy of Thought
Indeed it was the Enlightenment and Natural Law that gave us muck and mire we are currently stuck in by championing as a main principle, “Egalitarianism.” Henry James Sumner Maine, a 19th century legal scholar wrote, on this score;
“There cannot, I conceive, be any question that to the assumption of the Law Natural we owe the doctrine of the fundamental equality of human beings.”
It is this Natural Law … the Natural Law that was championed by the French Philosophes and Revolutionaries, which included egalitarianism that is making a comeback among a new generation of pseudo-intellectuals.
Natural Law suffers from the condition of only being as good as the presuppositions with which one begins. The man whose reason begins by valuing sodomy and pedophilia will easily conclude that, lo and behold, Natural Law teaches sodomy and pedophilia. Similarly, the man whose reason begins by valuing Scripture will find Scripture validated everywhere by Natural Law. His problem however, will be that he is positing the strength of God’s revelation on the foundation of his autonomous reasoning as opposed to founding his reason (which is never autonomous) on God’s revelation.
The Natural Law chaps seem to believe that folks can look out upon reality and quite apart from any fallen biases can begin to read the proper nature of things just by the use of this presumed unbiased reasoning. However, this stands in contradiction to God’s special revelation. If these Natural Law types would refers to God’s special revelation first as opposed to referring to Natural Law first there they would read that “the heart is deceitfully wicked above all things.” As such man never looks out upon creation and reasons in an unbiased manner. As the saying goes, “Man has a ox to gore” and that ox is to read all things in terms of himself as the highest and best interpreter.
Natural law aficionados have failed to take seriously the noetic effects of the fall on the mind of fallen man, and as such they are denying the doctrine of “total depravity” with their precious (gollum gollum) doctrine of Natural Law. Indeed, it is not to much to say that the Church’s embracing over the centuries of Natural Law has been one of the greatest boondoggles of the Church in her entire history.
John Dewey in his book Experience in Education, says that man must learn to set his own standards, his own ideals, in terms of himself, as the ultimate criterion. This is exactly what the Natural Law attaboys are promulgating when they advocate for homo mensura (man the measure). The idea that fallen man will create a just and Christ honoring social order by relying on his autonomous ability to read Natural Law is right up there with the idea that Ph.D. clergy from Reformed denominations are trustworthy men from which to garner advice.
Fan boys of Natural Law think that they are avoiding presuppositions but they have instead merely embraced the presupposition that fallen man has no bias and can indeed act in a neutral fashion as a autonomous free agent. They have returned us to De Cartes by positing that the thinking self is the highest point of reference. This gives us, just as it gave De Cartes, subjectivism. What Natural Law does is it takes the subjective (fallen man) fills him and his thinking with helium so that his thinking becomes a transcendent something and then labels that helium filled subjective as his “objective” naming it with the name of “Natural Law.” The “objective” that the Natural Law man has is a subjective that has been given the status of objectivity. It is a subjective objective.
We would be better served by remembering Van Til on this score;
“If God exists, there are no brute facts. If God exists our study of facts must be the effort to know them as God wants them to be known by us. We must then seek to think God’s thoughts after him. To assume that there are brute facts is therefore to assume that God does not exist.”
There are no facts that can be known truly as independent of God. Fallen man is by definition someone who seeks to be a knower independent of God. He uses Natural Law to proclaim that all facts are brute facts until he, as fallen man, gives them meaning and coherence. He can know apart from and without God just by the use of right reason and natural law. But, without God, pray tell what is the standard for this thing called “right reason,” and apart from God how does Natural Law have any objective meaning whatsoever?
Natural law, when it “works” is a classic example of robbing capital from a Christian worldview and importing into a pagan concept in order to get it off the ground. Natural Law can only work as a reasoning mechanism if one presupposes the God of Christianity to begin with but if one is going to presuppose the God of Christianity then why not go all the way and presuppose that God’s law as found in special revelation? Why presuppose instead man’s epistemological ability to start from his fallen self and by the use of his right (right by what standard?) reason properly cogitate about the nature of reality?
Save yourself of presupposing yourself as your own God and flee Natural Law theory.
Speaking of Sir Henry Maine, I have read that book (“Ancient Law,” 1861) where your citation is from. Maine was apparently a typical conservative-minded, learned Victorian Englishman who did not much appreciate the advancing mass democracy of his times – even though he was too much of a sophisticated gentleman to say it out loud in a completely explicit manner.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Maine,_Sir_Henry_James_Sumner
“Meanwhile Maine had published in 1885 his one work of speculative politics, a volume of essays on Popular Government, designed to show that democracy is not in itself more stable than any other form of government, and that there is no necessary connexion between democracy and progress. The book was deliberately unpopular in tone; it excited much controversial comment and some serious and useful discussion.”
So Maine was opposed to the egalitarian dogma that was rapidly spreading in the 19th century (and then completely metastasized in the 20th century). In this regard he resembled his contemporary Nietzsche, but unlike Nietzsche, he did NOT blame Christianity for the invention of egalitarian doctrine. Because as a legal expert, he knew its TRUE source – the pagan Roman civil law, which had been influenced by the cosmopolitan speculations of the Stoic philosophers.
Maine probably was not a very devout Christian, but he did make one comment that would have sounded good in a mouth of devout Christian; I think it was the best part of his book, where he noted a case of downright Providential irony – that in this decisive historical junction, where the superstition of equality first truly burst into the Western civilization, the fatal road to foolishness was opened by the rabidly anti-clerical prejudices of the philosophes:
https://archive.org/details/ancientlaw030840mbp/page/n95/mode/2up?view=theater
“Perhaps the question most frequently asked nowadays is not what is the value of these opinions, but what were the causes which gave them such overshadowing prominence a hundred years ago. The answer is, I conceive, a simple one. The study which in the last century would best have corrected the misapprehensions into which an exclusive attention to legal antiquities is apt to betray was the study of religion. But Greek religion, as then understood, was dissipated in imaginative myths. The Oriental religions, if noticed at all, appeared to be lost in vain cosmogonies. There was but one body of primitive records which was worth studying—the early history of the Jews. But resort to this was prevented by the prejudices of the time. One of the few characteristics which the school of Rousseau had in common with the school of Voltaire was an utter disdain of all religious antiquities; and, more than all, of those of the Hebrew race. It is well known that it was a point of honour with the reasoners of that day to assume not merely that the institutions called after Moses were not divinely dictated, nor even that they were codified at a later date than that attributed to them, but that they and the entire Pentateuch were a gratuitous forgery, executed after the return from the Captivity.
Debarred, therefore, from one chief security against speculative delusion, the philosophers of France, in their eagerness to escape from what they deemed a superstition of the priests, flung themselves headlong into a superstition of the lawyers.”
And already in the 17th century, one of the most notable reactionary thinkers of that era, the Royalist ideologue Sir Robert Filmer (against whom John Locke polemicized), who had also had legal training, and thus knew the “secret” of equality-dogma’s true origin, had stated out loud what Maine had merely implied, in much more direct and simple words:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=ErkQDnw7Ob4C&lpg=PP1&hl=fi&pg=PA208#v=onepage&q&f=false
“Civilians,* canonists, politicians and divines are not a little perplexed in distinguishing between the law of nature and the law of nations. About jus naturae and jus gentium there is much dispute by such as handle the original of government, and of property and community.
…
A principal ground of these diversities and contrarieties of divisions was an error which the heathens taught, that ‘all things at first were common’, and that ‘all men were equal.’ This mistake was not so heinous in those ethnic* authors of the civil laws, who wanting the guide of the history of Moses were fain to follow poets and fables for their leaders. But for Christians, who have read the Scriptures, to dream either of a community of all things, or an equality of all persons, is a fault scarce pardonable.”
But WHY had the heathen Roman Law contained such “egalitarian” elements? I believe it was because the Stoic philosophers, who heavily influenced it, had channeled in their speculative theories a rationalized view (the Stoics specialized in giving rationalizing, philosophical re-interpretations of old myths) of the pagan myth of original “Golden Age.” As the Jewish historian Norman Cohn put it:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=tDVaYvh4qj0C&lpg=PA2&hl=fi&pg=PA187#v=onepage&q&f=false
“It was from the Greeks and Romans that medieval Europe inherited the notion of the ‘State of Nature’ as a state of affairs in which all men were equal in status and wealth and in which nobody was oppressed or exploited by anyone else; a state of affairs characterized by universal good faith and brotherly love and also, sometimes, by total community of property and even of spouses.
In both Greek and Latin literature the State of Nature is represented as having existed on earth in some long-lost Golden Age or ‘Reign of Saturn.’ The version of the myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses was to be repeatedly echoed in later literature and to exercise considerable influence upon communistic speculation during the Middle Ages.”
Whereas the Biblical narrative emphasizes the FALL and sinfulness of mankind, in pagan imagination there had simply been the original Golden Age – with its primitive freedom and equality – and then just SOMEHOW, things had changed for the worse. It might have actually been the fault of unjust, capricious gods, and not the man’s fault at all!
The Royalist Filmer essentially accused the Libertarian-Egalitarian political speculators of his own day of setting the fanciful “state of nature,” which ultimately originated from the pagan myth of Golden Age (and which pagan philosophers and jurists had then moulded to a more rationalistic form), against the Genesis narrative, which was PATRIARCHAL, not egalitarian:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=ErkQDnw7Ob4C&lpg=PP1&hl=fi&pg=PA236#v=onepage&q&f=false
“There never was any such thing as an independent multitude, who at first had a natural right to a community. [In other words, who lived in the state of primitive anarcho-communism] This is but a fiction or fancy of too many in these days, who please themselves in running after the opinions of philosophers and poets to find out such an original of government as might promise them some title of liberty, to the great scandal of Christianity and bringing in of atheism – since a natural freedom of mankind cannot be supposed without the denial of the creation of Adam. And yet this conceit of original freedom is the only ground upon which not only the heathen philosophers but also the authors of the principles of the civil law, and Grotius, Selden, Hobbes, Ascham and others, raise and build their doctrines of government and of the several sorts or kinds, as they call them, of commonwealths.”
And even earlier, in the late 16th century, the Huguenot polemicist Innocent Gentillet (who also was a jurist by training) had noted how whimsical proto-communist political speculators had a habit of following Golden Age mythology:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=nCB0DwAAQBAJ&lpg=PR2&hl=fi&pg=PA211#v=onepage&q&f=false
“And if the distinction of property is not maintained in the world, all commerce is destroyed, and all society decayed and resolved. For although some poets and philosophers praise the community of goods, remembering us of that golden world of Saturn, yet it is plainly evident to all people of judgment that communism induces and brings a carelessness, idleness, discord, and confusion into the commonwealth, as learnedly Aristotle demonstrates in his Politics.”
And even after the introduction of Darwinism, even such rabidly anti-Christian evolutionists as the “Monist” followers of Ernst Haeckel (who were also anti-Communists and direct predecessors of pagan Nazis) could say that the Marxist notion of “Primitive Communism” was actually justified – in other words, they still believed in the most modern version of the Golden Age myth:
https://archive.org/details/scientificorigin0000gasm/page/116/mode/2up?view=theater
“Therefore, [Dr. Johannes Unold] wrote, with the outlandish exaggeration typical of the Monists, ‘considered from an evolutionary point of view Social Democracy was the most reactionary of all the political parties. For it was not content, as were some of the conservatives, or [members] of the Center Party, to return to medieval political conditions, but wished rather to impose primitive forms of state and social organization on our richly evolved civilized communities with their densely and highly individualized populations, their many activities, and their diverse needs.’34 In fact, the only time in history when the Marxist program had ever been fulfilled in any way was at the dawn of civilization when common tribal ownership of land existed. ‘At that time there was no classes but only equality of rights and equality of duties for all.’ But with social evolution all that has changed and society can never return to the condition of its origin.”
Am I ever glad you are around here.
It would seem that this question, on the true origins of equality-doctrine, is the biggest example of all of the phenomenon “stuff people think is in the Bible, but isn’t.”
Like many people think that “God helps those who help themselves” is in the Bible. But it isn’t, and it actually contradicts the Gospel of free grace.
But an even bigger example of this phenomenon is that so many people seem to think, either consciously or semi-consciously (or thoughtlessly), that the most famous Egalitarian declaration ever made – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” – is either from the Bible, or closely paraphrases it.
As a matter of fact, that teaching cannot be found in the Bible, and actually there are many Biblical passages that downright contradict it, like “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” I recall Gary North saying that the only equality to be found in the Bible is the equality of judgment – like all men being equally condemned to die as sinners.
But where DID Jefferson then draw inspiration from for that famous phrase? The Roman Civil Law is probably the closest candidate, and it seems that Jefferson here provided the ultimate example of presenting “a pagan teaching in Biblical language,” or such language that people would easily assume to be Biblical. (The Mormons would later show how easy it is to present heathen garbage in the rhetorical style of KJV Bible translation.) A soundbite that seems outwardly devout, but contains un- or anti-Biblical teaching inside.
In all likelihood, Jefferson was paraphrasing this declaration of Ulpian, perhaps the greatest of pagan Roman jurists, and simply changed the word “nature” to “God” (it was typical for Deists like him to see God and nature more or less interchangeable):
https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/Corpus/d-50.htm#17
50.17.32
Ulpianus libro 43 ad Sabinum
Quod attinet ad ius civile, servi pro nullis habentur: non tamen et iure naturali, quia, quod ad ius naturale attinet, omnes homines aequales sunt.
Translation:
“So far as the Civil Law is concerned, slaves are not considered persons, but this is not the case according to natural law, because natural law regards all men as equal.”
This passage was commonly known to all the Western men who had received juristic education. Formerly it had been like the “guild secret” of all those who were lawyers by profession, but with Jefferson’s declaration, it became “public property” of common people. Sir Henry Maine observed:
https://archive.org/details/ancientlaw030840mbp/page/n99/mode/2up?view=theater
“A very few glances at the writings of Jefferson will show how strongly his mind was affected by the semi-juridical, semi-popular opinions which were fashionable in France, and we cannot doubt that it was sympathy with the peculiar ideas of the French jurists which led him and the other colonial lawyers who guided the course of events in America to join the specially French assumption that “all men are born equal” with the assumption, more familiar to Englishmen, that “all men are born free,” in the very first lines of their Declaration of Independence.”
I mean, you can find these kind of lists that doubtless mean well…
https://research.lifeway.com/2014/08/22/11-things-you-think-are-in-the-bible-but-really-arent/
…but the biggest fish is like hiding in plain sight, as it does not occur to the writer that “All men are created equal” might deserve same kind of reprobation he gives to the soundbite “God helps those who help themselves”:
“If I could pick one phrase to erase from the memories of every Christian, it would be this one. This falsely remembered Bible verse is a blatant contradiction to everything Scripture actually teaches us.”