This “right reason which comes to us from the gods” (recta et a numine deorum tracta ratio) is what is usually termed the natural law; and the beautiful language of Cicero recalls this magnificent verse of the IVth Psalm: “Quis ostendit nobis bona? Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine.”
V.—INFLUENCE OF PANTHEISM ON MODERN LAW.
Pagan teaching, how elevated soever it may be, is always incomplete; and this is evident even from the words of Cicero.
Since law comes from God, it is very clear that it will be known more or less correctly according as our idea of God is more or less correct. This it is that gives so great a superiority, first, to the law of Moses, before the coming of Jesus Christ, and to all Christian legislation since.
The Jews had not merely a vague knowledge of the precepts of the divine law. This law, in its principal provisions, had been directly revealed to them. Christians have something better still, since the Eternal Word was made man, and the Word is precisely “the true light which enlighteneth every man coming into this world.”[56] The philosophers of antiquity saw this light from afar off; we have beheld that of which they merely affirmed the existence; the Jews contemplated it as through a veil, and awaited its coming. It was made flesh; it brought us life; “it shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.”[57]
It is not the fault of the Word or of his manifestation, says S. Thomas on this subject, if there are minds who see not this light. There is here, not darkness, but closed eyes.[58]
It is God himself, therefore, whom man refuses to acknowledge when he rejects the fundamental law, which alone deserves the name of law. Human pride and insolence go beyond forgetfulness or simple negation when they have the audacity to put a human law in the place of and above the divine law; which last crime is nothing less than the deification of man. This philosophic consequence of the secularization of the law was inevitable, and is openly displayed in modern doctrines. Atheists, properly so called, are rare; but the present generation is infected with Pantheism. Now, Pantheism proclaims, without disguise and without shame, the divinity of man.
Let us add that this error is the only foundation upon which man may logically rest to defend modern rights. It produces, with regard to constitutions and laws, two principal effects, which it suffices but to indicate, that every honest mind may at once recognize their existence and their lamentable consequences.
Pantheism, firstly, destroys individualities, or, as the Germans call them, subjectivities; it sweeps them away, and causes them to disappear in the Great Whole. Do we not likewise see personality, simple or associated—that is to say, individual liberty, associations, and corporations—little by little reduced to annihilation by the modern idea of the state? Does not modern theory make also of the state another grand whole, beside which nothing private can exist?
To reach this result, they represent the state as expressing the aggregate of all the particular wills, and they seek, in a pretended “general will,” the supreme and infallible source of law. But even were this will as general as theory desires, it would not be the less human, or, by consequence, the less subject to error. Whence comes it, then, that they make it the sovereign arbiter of good and evil, of truth and falsehood, of justice and injustice? The Pantheists reply that “God is in man and in the world; that he is one and the same thing with the world; that he is identical with the nature of things, and consequently subject to change.” The general will, the expression of the universal conscience, is then a manifestation of the divine will; and this would allow it to change without ever erring.