Particularism and the Sanctification of History

An essay on political theology and the dynamics between Law and Politics

“The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of nature, her voice is but his instrument.”
—Richard Hooker—

Several weeks ago I wrote an essay on Thomas Hobbes that could be summarized in this way: though I am not a “Hobbesian,”—and indeed am a committed political Augustinian in so many ways, as eventually will be elaborated some day—I cannot ignore his particular observations with regard to the function of the Sovereign within a society on the brink of chaos. After writing this essay, it dawned on me that the specific lesson that could be drawn from a Schmittian reading (see that previous post) of Hobbes can be generalized to actually be a lesson drawn from a sort of Political Realism of the post-enlightenment age.

In other words, the things we Augustinians are most repelled by in Hobbes—his nominalism and materialism— are not necessary to the particular observations he makes about sovereignty. How do I know this? Because Schmitt himself, the great expositor of the post-enlightenment realist tradition, points past Hobbes to the counter-revolutionary Catholics Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Donoso Cortes to find the fruition of Hobbes’ contributions on the theory of the political sovereign. And these three are magnificent proponents of traditional Christendom and vicious dissenters from the revolutionary trends of eighteenth century Europe.

It was they, more perhaps than any other dissenters from post-Enlightenment politics (such as Edmund Burke), who absorbed the lessons of sovereignty in ways that those before Modernity were unable to. The great political theorists of Christendom—from Augustine to Aquinas to Marsilius to Hooker— were not situated in a position that would require them to grapple with the collapse of Christendom as the hegemonic metaphysic. But the post-Enlightenment counter-revolutionaries were. Thus, it is these counter-revolutionaries, in particular Cortes, who will help us to sanctify the lessons of Bodin and Hobbes in our next essay.

For this essay though, I want to give an overall summary of my political theology. The reason for this is because I think it helps set the tone for understanding my association with what we can call the New Christian Right; it also helps contextualize the increasingly reactionary flavor of right wing tendencies in our time; it roots them in something that transcends the moment. Questions as to where our political strategies must take us, given the present state of affairs, can come in the next essay, but the theoretical problems we seek to answer are sourced somewhere. This essay sets up that paradigm.

The Two Kingdoms

My political theory is essentially—that is, in essence—religiously grounded. Though I often insist that I want to focus on more general political things, it is impossible for me to avoid the roots of political theory in our Christian-religious past. As such, I am somewhat forced to interact with certain theological debates that pertain to questions of political society.

The doctrine of the Two Kingdoms¹ is an extremely important framework in delineating the way I conceive of the function of political society within the Great Ordering of the cosmos. This doctrine has been a predominant feature—in various flavors and variants—of Christian political theory since at least Augustine. After the Reformation, it was a doctrine heavily emphasized so as to properly understand the dynamics between the Christian’s citizenship both in heaven and on earth in light of the political transformation happening throughout Europe.

The recovery of Classical Two Kingdoms theology, in our time, consists of a self-conscious and emphatic rejection of more One Kingdom models such as transformationalism, Kuyperianism, Theonomy, Covenantalism, and so on. This view has the tendency to confuse (blur together) the Kingdom of Heaven that Christ talked about with the civil kingdoms tasked with ordering political society.

Adherence to C2K also consists of a self-conscious and emphatic rejection of the Modern Two Kingdoms model, wherein there is a strict and impenetrable separation between “church and state” such that the latter cannot, among other things, be particularly concerned with the unique well-being of Christianity beyond what it might afford to any other religious (or anti-religious) community within the political society.

The reason I bring this up is that the New Christian Right is constantly being blamed for trying to “politicize the gospel” or advocate for divisions between men that Christ allegedly came to tear down. But with the Two Kingdoms model, it is clear that the problems of political society are restrained to the one— temporary, civil kingdom—and do not undermine the integrity or essence of the other eternal, invisible kingdom.

Or, as John Calvin wrote:

We may call the one the spiritual, the other the civil kingdom. Now these two, as we have divided them, are always to be viewed apart from each other. When the one is considered, we should call off our minds, and not allow them to think of the other. For there exists in man a kind of two worlds, over which different kings and different laws can preside.

By attending to this distinction, we will not erroneously transfer the doctrine of the gospel concerning spiritual liberty to civil order, as if in regard to eternal government Christians were less subject to human laws, because their consciouses are unbound before God, as if they were exempted from all carnal service, because in regard to the Spirit they are free.

The difference between the two kingdoms is that the one—the Civil Kingdom— is ordered around Natural Relations. It pertains to the relationships, concerns, dynamics, needs, and ordering of mankind as created beings. There are no men outside this category. God’s sovereign rule is here mediated via other men:² Kings/magistrates/governors, etc (depending on the political structure of a given society). The rule of God is indirect here in this kingdom, because it is mediated. This kingdom of “created relations” is natural to man. This is the Natural Order.

On the other hand, the Spiritual Kingdom (Invisible might be better here, for reasons unnecessary to bring up now) is ordered around supernatural relations. It pertains to the relationships, concerns, dynamics, needs, and order of those united together in Christ; in other words, the Invisible Kingdom of Christ pertains to Gospel categories. Only those united to Christ exist within this kingdom. Here, God’s rule is mediated by Christ, who is God, and therefore it is not mediated by other men. The rule of God is direct. This kingdom of grace-relations is supernatural to man, given the Fall. This the Spiritual Order.

Ergo, the objectives of a Christian political theory are not directed to binding or making demands of the conscience; for in seeking solutions to political problems, we have “called off our minds” to such internal affairs, leaving them to God. The objectives of political theory have to do with the realm of Natural Relations. One absolutely cannot draw from this that the religious character of a society is unimportant or irrelevant, and indeed, political society must grapple with and uphold the religious nature of mankind—for to operate otherwise would be an anthropological error that presumes man can exist outside of the realm of mind and spirit; a materialism that ends in moral and cultural degradation.

Political Society and its Origins

Thus, we must now deal with political society as such. There is a significant debate about the origins of political society—from where does political society come? There are several currents of thinking, but among them two are most prominent and general enough to contain many other theories.

The first is the Naturalist view, and the second is the Conventionalist view.

The naturalist view can be seen in the Aristotelian tradition and posits that man is by nature a social being and government is an organic mechanism that man instinctively longs for; it sees government as natural and beneficial for the well-being of the community to direct men to the good life, and to order society toward higher things. Governments are downstream from society, in a sense; government embodies, reinforces, and directs the social order to actualize its tendencies. This Naturalist view is taken up by Stephen Wolfe in his Christian Nationalism book, it is the view of many of the continental Reformers, the scholastics, and others in the Thomist and Neo-Aristotelian tradition. On this view, political society and the magistrates who oversee it function in a role that originates prior to the Fall of Man.

The second view is the Conventionalist view. This, unlike the naturalist view, sees political society strictly as the result of man’s sinful nature; it is specifically unnatural, forced, and oppressive against man’s nature—which is good, because man is a wicked creature, liable to chaos absent enforced order, and always prone to anti-social behavior. Society, in this view, is downstream from the establishment political order. This is the view taken up by Thomas Hobbes, Martin Luther, and many other modern Reformers (including Modern 2Kers). It was also taken up by Carl Schmitt when he wrote that “All genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.” On this view, the state was added after the Fall; it was added because of man’s sins.

One should not draw the conclusion that those in the first category have a positive view of man—though some in the Aristotelian tradition might tend in that direction. Many here too—especially Augustinians— think that political organization has taken on additional characteristics as a result of man’s Fall. Additionally, we should not assume that the latter category implies a nominalistic view of man or Hobbesian definitions of man’s total wickedness such that no social or cultural good can flow from men in the context of society. There are key passages from Augustine himself that demonstrate his adherence to postlapsarian views of Civil Government’s origins.

Interacting with the Natural vs. Constructionist views would take an entire series of essays—and they are important debates; many of the neo-Integralists and proponents of Richard Hooker over at the Davenant Institute for instance, will be immensely critical of the Friend-Enemy distinction as a key animating feature of politics—but as Schmitt shows, this is one of the fundamental conclusions about politics that one must draw on the Conventionalist view.

Despite my truncated treatment here, it is obvious and central to me that the best political theory with the widest grasp of political problems must be a synthesis of both of these views. Man does have a nature that precedes his Fall; and this nature was intended to permit and assist man in pursuing an ordered and heaven-oriented society. One of the vital features in this Aristotelian vision of society is the unity of purpose and underlying metaphysic. In a world where Man’s heart is ordered toward Heaven and the Good, all men are in harmony on ultimate principles.

For this reason, we can say that in Natural Politics, there are no friends and enemies. Natural Law reigns above the political society and all know it and live in harmony with it. There are rulers in the Natural Political Society and they function to coordinate the complexities of their realm, not in a way that deals with evil man, but in a way that amalgamates and gives unity to the order, organizing it in a way that mirrors the Heavenly Ideal.³

We can also say that in “Artificial Politics”—the political character of society under corrupted man—there are Friends and Enemies. Politics is transformed into an arena where there are competing combatants who seek the domination necessary to impose their vision of society. The “Political” is that area of the human experience where the contest is waged between various would-be holders of power, each striving for the position required to eliminate their enemy and institute the social conditions sought after by their friends. Such a political characteristic is not prescription, but description of the world as it is, as we find it, fallen and immersed in sustained antagonism.

Reiteration on the Concept of the Political

It is absolutely necessary to stress that I am not here talking merely about the use of political means to restrain the passions of the citizenry—this is where debates and discussions on political theory usually default back to ("what laws should we create or enforce to better society?”). I am not simply focusing on the need of the state to enforce laws against murder or rape or theft and so on.

Obviously these are included; but when I talk about the Political, I am referring back to everything I’ve said about the proponents of Sovereignty doctrine, and anticipating everything I will say; namely, that the function of the Political in the post-Fall world is to absorb the conflict of competing visions for the social order and provide an arena on which these Friend-Enemy groupings can work themselves out.

This would not be necessary in a pre-fall world, because all would-be leaders are operating on the Heavenward metaphysic. The primary problems of Hobbesian politics are not what laws should we have? but rather, who will defeat who in the inevitable conflict of proponents of competing mutually exclusive political visions? Or, Who? Whom?

The Implications of the Augustinian Synthesis

It is not that the political apparatus of a society is a result of man’s wickedness (in agreement with Aristotelianism), but that the particular Hobbesian character of the state came about as a result of man’s wickedness. That’s the Augustinian synthesis.⁴

I’m not the first to stress such a synthesis of these views.⁵ Torrance Kirby, who is among those who attributes an Augustinianism to Richard Hooker (as somewhat distinct from the traditional Thomism of Roman Catholic political theology) has noted the following on the question of whether Hooker’s view of political origins is more Aristotelian or Hobbesian:

Richard Hooker is more of an Aristotelian in his judgement concerning the origins of "politique societie"--his translation of "koinonia politike", a formula from Aristotle's Politics. It is interesting that both Church and Commonwealth are forms of "politique societie"--and thus the Royal Supremacy follows logically.

Hobbes's notion of the condition of nature as a state of war is echoed in Hooker's account of human nature:

"Laws politic, ordained for external order and regiment amongst men, are never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to be inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his nature; in a word, unless presuming man to be in regard of his depraved mind little better than a wild beast, they do accordingly provide notwithstanding so to frame his outward actions, that they be no hindrance unto the common good for which societies are instituted: unless they do this, they are not perfect." (Lawes Book I, chap. x.)

So I guess rather than a "via media" I would say that he is both/and.⁶

The synthesis between these two views shows up in additional important ways in the thinking of Richard Hooker, and others in the Augustinian political tradition. One key example that is relevant here is the dual source of political authority: the divinely ordained function (corresponding to Natural Politics), coupled with the humanly ordained figure or method of selecting such figure (corresponding to Hobbesian Politics). On the question of whether sovereign magistrates (regardless of the political structure) are given their authority directly from God (such as under Divine Right of Kings or Israelite Theocracy) or from the original consent of the people (Hobbes), Hooker (similar to Samuel Rutherford and even Edmund Burke) take the position that authority is given indirectly from God, via the conduit of the original consent of a people.

In Hooker’s expression:

'The law appointeth no man to be an husband, but if a man have betaken himself unto that condition, it giveth him the authority over his own wife. That the christian world should be ordered by kingly regiment, the law of God doth not anywhere command; and yet the law of God doth give them right, which once are exalted to that estate, to exact at the hands of their subjects general obediences in whatsoever affairs their power may serve to command. So God doth ratify the work of that Sovereign authority which kings have received by men.

And Samuel Rutherford too argues that, in contrast to the situation in Old Testament Israel, there is now “no prophetical and immediate calling to kingdoms.” Yet, despite this denial of direct Divine Right of Kings, God functions through the people to fill an office that he authorized:

for of six willing and gifted to reign, what makes one a king and not the other five? Certainly by God’s disposing the people to choose this man, and not another man. it cannot be said but God gives the kingly power immediately; and by him kings reign, that is true. This office is immediately from God, but the question now is, What is that which formally applies the office and royal power to this person rather than to the other five as meet? Nothing can here be dreamed of but God’s inclining the hearts of the states to choose this man and not that man.

There are aspects of Rutherford that I think make him slightly weaker than Hooker with regard to the natural prerogative of peoples to withdraw their consent (Rutherford anticipates the pathway against of my own tendencies to emphasize the “perpetual contract” of political society), among other things; but nevertheless, both have a similar model in this area.⁷

The Sanctification of History

This emphasis on the employment of a people (corporately conceived) to be the mechanism or conduit of providence strikes at the heart of my Augustinian historicism. This is why I emphasize so often the concept of Heritage (as in my reference to Heritage America). Heritage is the inheritance, by a people, of a particular way of life, including and especially the original consent. The key phrase we ought to use here is inhereted consent. If the consent is inherited, then the power conferred is inherited, and the political society has that rooted dynamic of continuity over time. John Locke was so wrong to inject into Western political philosophy the notion of the constant re-creation and reaffirmation of consent.

Heritage, therefore, contains things implied by the inherited complex of consent and conferred power. It also includes customs, norms, mores, cultural memories, stories, myths, rights, and obligations; that is, heritage is a particular experience that one people have in working out, over the struggles of time, the meaning and application of Natural Law. Heritage is everything. Natural Law without heritage is nonsensical, even revolutionary. One of the ways modern adaptions of Natural Rights have abused natural law thinking is by severing the process of discovering “natural laws” from the historical process. Heritage embodies Natural Law as it has been applied to a people in the face of peculiar circumstance.

Brad Littlejohn hit the nail on the head here when he made the case that:

“It is important to recognize that for Hooker at least, it is misleading to speak in terms of the Anglican “three-legged stool” of Scripture, reason, and tradition. This terminology fails to realize the extent to which for Hooker, the last of these is simply the second, considered diachronically, and to which the second is almost always to some extent understood corporately.”⁸

That is to say, in Hooker’s words:

“The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of nature, her voice is but his instrument.”

We have thus a vision of history as the actualization of God’s providence, which generates in political society. A Christian historicism embodies the theme of the Sanctification of History. Natural Law is continually discovered by applying reason and custom to real work problems. History is the lab in which a people uncover the meaning and content of Natural Law. The Mind of God is revealed in the process of history. A people can work out, for themselves, and within the range of possibilities particular to that people, the structures and institutions necessary for that people to live well.

This is precisely the understanding of history taken up by Edmund Burke. In an important study on Burke and others, Alfred Cobban writes the following of Burke:

Society, he assumes, has been divinely ordained and its working is subject to the rule of Providence. […] To God, working through the community, embodying His will in its customs, laws, and institutions, we can safely trust.

Burke is [here] reproducing in a slightly different form the medieval philosophy of history.

[Lord Acton]…fastened on to the historic idea as, from his point of view, the dangerous aspect of Burke’s theory. His criticism is based on the conviction that truth and the eternal order… are not deduced from history.

Accepting in theory the idea of a universal court of appeal, the eternal order, he goes on to draw an analogy between the general order of the world and the life of each particular society; for the contract of each single State is ‘but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society.’

It must not be overlooked that the legendary classical liberal Lord Acton once declared that “I would have hanged Mr. Burke on the same gallows as Robespierre.”

This view of history—as the screen on which the projector of natural law displays its content—implies two important things: first, it implies that political rights and duties are socially-situated. This means that one should have a cynical attitude about the sudden contrivance of newly-discovered “rights” (such as “gay rights” or the right to consume pornography). Second, it implies that the limits on power can be found within the context, the heritage, of the social order itself.

Lex Rex?

We thus come to a final implication of the sketch offered above, which will set us up for interpreting the political possibilities of our present crisis. I noted elsewhere that I had an uneasy relationship with the concept of Lex Rex, Samuel Rutherford’s expression for the idea that the Law was above the King. We can now understand better the way in which I approach the problem.

On the one hand, we have to clarify that, in order to have any significance, Lex Rex has a historicist element to it. It’s not talking about some mere conjectural Law, an un-actuated Law that theoretically should restrain the King, but rather the Natural Law as it was realized within the context of the British political dynamics over the historical process. Lex Rex is most meaningful when it is the product of historical development, not a blueprint intended to revolt against history and create a better world on new grounds.

Realism, not idealism, is the essence of Samuel Rutherford’s thesis. In this, Lex Rex is a healthy approach in its mobilization of heritage against perceived innovation. I should stress here that the present discussion is not meant to take a side on the Royalist-Scottish conflict; in fact, we self-consciously avoid taking a side. For our point is the type of argument being made. Lex Rex is part of our tradition; the particular application of that tradition in defense of the interests of Rutherford and his “Friends” is not the point here.⁹

On the other hand, and just as fundamentally, we remember that the nature of the Sovereign is that he sustains the order, having one foot in the state of nature, and another foot inside political society. He determines when the political society is in a state of normalcy, and therefore when the Law as a complex of historically-revealed and constitutionally absorbed obligations even has relevance at all. From the position of Schmittian realism, the Law is not sovereign; only real men in real positions of power are choosing to continually legitimize—for political reasons— and enforce the law. Schmitt noted that "for a legal system to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists."

As I wrote in the Hobbes piece,

What Schmitt and Gottfried take from Hobbes is that [the supremacy of law] is a political myth. There is always a human actor, or human institutions, even if we don’t admit it, behind the veil sanctioning the legal order, interpreting it, applying it, determining its meaning, and its exceptions. This what Schmitt meant when he elaborates on the “challenge of the exception.” No matter how brilliantly exposited or constructed, the legal order cannot account for all situations and there is always a human element upholding the order based on judgement, interests, calculations, and a complex network of myriad factors. The legal order is not a machine that works itself out.

Every political society has a sovereign, even if A) one isn’t written into the structuring documents of the political society or B) no one knows who that sovereign is. As George Schwab (a key expositor of Schmitt) once noted:¹⁰

For Schmitt the sovereign authority not only was bound to the normally valid legal order but also transcended it. As I put it elsewhere,¹¹ his sovereign slumbers in normal times but suddenly awakens when a normal situation threatens to become an exception. The core of this authority is its exclusive possession of the right of, or its monopoly of, political decision making.

Thus, the Sovereign makes possible any dynamic between Lex and Rex at all. “Lex Rex” is downstream from the employment of Power. If you want to uphold the Anglo tradition of the magistrate being subsumed under the legal order, and who therefore cannot act in arbitrary ways (one the better meanings of “tyranny”), you first must ensure the integrity of the Political Order. Schwab elsewhere noted that “the restoration of order and stability was the precondition for the reinstatement of norms.” Rex Lex—or Lex Rex, either way—the Order must precede the Constitutional system. The American Constitution—and the Magna Carta for that matter—were enforceable because the state of nature had been abrogated by those who held power and legitimacy before the Constitutional system had been defined and consented to.

Law is downstream from the Political, and the best political societies are those that are able to politically protect the integrity of the order so that a legal system is possible—even if that legal system incorporates boundaries on power.

Conclusion

We conclude here by noting that we ought to distinguish between A) when political life exists in conditions of normalcy, when we have our cherished heritage in a durable environment, and the threat of mutually exclusive enemies is being adequately suppressed; and B) the situation when we may be in conditions of abnormality, or when there is no order by which we can determine a state of normalcy at all.

This abnormality can be found when there is significant weakness in the Regime such that it may fall to invading forces. However, as we will talk about in the next essay, there are also times when the Regime itself has been subverted such that it is repudiating, rather than upholding, the heritage of a given people. If the heritage contains both the inherited consent of the people and the inherited conferred power of the ruler, then war declared on the heritage breaks apart the entire relationship.

The abnormal state must be declared, and we’ve entered into extraordinary times.

1. For the best treatment of the historical understanding of Two Kingdoms doctrine, I heartily recommend the Davenant Institute guide, written by Brad Littlejohn.

2. It is important to note here that I stress the mediation by men, not law. The Old Testament theocracy, for instance, was the mediation by law.

3. It should not be assumed here that the lack of evil in society indicates a united world order. National diversity is a pre-fall aspect of man’s nature. See National Diversity in an Unfallen World.

4. I believe the Augustinian synthesis is something worth developing at greater length so as to understand it in relation and distinction to the more general Thomist tradition. While I would love to do so here, if space was not an issue, extrapolating the idea further in the study of Richard Hooker (read through Torrance Kirby) and Marsilius of Padua is absolutely necessary and intriguing.

5. Though perhaps I am the first to Schmittify it all—what if I wrote an essay called “The Schmittification of Richard Hooker”?

6. This is from email correspondence with him, in February 2024

7. Rutherford is not to be confused with the English proto-theonomist Puritans, even if they share a Divine Right Presbyterianism, which I also reject.

8. The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty, page 185. (Don’y buy the Kindle version, the file associated with book on Amazon is actually a different book on some other topic.)

9. My own view of historical conflicts does not burden me with always picking sides; it is the drama of history that unfolds our heritage. The dialectic (James Lindsay hardest hit) is what produced my world. I’m on the side of my own heritage, synthesized through the struggle of history. All of it is my own!

10. In the translator’s forward to Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of the Political

11. He’s referring to his book The Challenge of the Exception.