As we were driving today, not far across the Illinois border in Racine County, Wisconsin, we saw a barn with the following sign painted on the roof (I kid you not): STUDY NATURAL LAW. We couldn’t get the camera out quickly enough to photograph it, but thankfully someone else has.

Looks like there’s a farmer in WI who’s on the right track, though perhaps it’s just a bit of wordplay: as it turns out, there’s an interesting backstory to the barn and farm.

In the 1920s, he [Alfred Lawson, once a professional baseball player] promoted health practices including vegetarianism and claimed to have found the secret of living to 200. He also developed his own highly unusual theories of physics, according to which such concepts as “penetrability”, “suction and pressure” and “zig-zag-and-swirl” were discoveries on par with Einstein‘s Theory of Relativity.^[6] He published numerous books on these concepts, all set in a distinctive typography. Lawson repeatedly predicted the worldwide adoption of Lawsonian principles by the year 2000.

He later propounded his own philosophy—Lawsonomy—and the Lawsonian religion. He also developed, during the Great Depression, the populist economic theory of “Direct Credits“, according to which banks are the cause of all economic woe, the oppressors of both capital and labour. Lawson believed that the government should replace banks as the provider of loans to business and workers. His rallies and lectures attracted thousands of listeners in the early 30s, mainly in the upper Midwest, but by the late 30s the crowds had dwindled.

In 1943, he founded the University of Lawsonomy in Des Moines to spread his teachings and offer the degree of “Knowledgian,” but after various IRS and other investigations it was closed and finally sold in 1954, the year of Lawson’s death. Lawson’s financial arrangements remain mysterious to this day, and in later years he seems to have owned little property, moving from city to city as a guest of his farflung acolytes. In 1952, he was brought before a United States Senate investigative committee on allegations that his organization had bought war surplus machines and then sold them for a profit, despite claiming non-profit status. His attempt to explain Lawsonomy to the Senators ended in mutual frustration and bafflement,.^[7][8]

Martin Gardner devoted an entire chapter of Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science to Lawsonomy.

A farm near Racine, Wisconsin, is the only remaining university facility, although a tiny handful of churches may yet survive in places such as Wichita, Kansas. The large sign, formerly reading “University of Lawsonomy”, was a familiar landmark for motorists in the region for many years and was visible from I-94 about 13 miles north of the Illinois state line, on the east side of the highway. Although the sign still exists, the “of” has now been replaced by the URL of their website. As of a storm in spring 2009, the sign is no longer there although the supporting posts are still visible. Driving north on I-94 a sign on the roof of the building nearest the freeway says “Study Natural Law.”

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What he calls the “dualist solution” is useful in securing a certain amount of liberty for the church and her members, for it requires the recognition that there are certain things that are outside of the purview of central government:

Is the dualist solution of the problem of Church and State the correct one? Let  it be said at once that it possesses the outstanding merit of giving the lie to the omnicompetent, totalitarian State. There are realms of life over which the State as such has no absolute rights. Render unto God the things that are God’s! In some degree the Church of the fourth century, with all its concessions and failures, was successful in inducing the State to respect this principle; and how vital it is that the Church should stand firm by this demand is manifest to all of us children of an age in which the powers and requirements of the State increase daily. (60)

But the way in which the dualism is articulated requires great care; it cannot be made an excuse for retreatism or escapism, for instance:

Nevertheless, the dualist principle is never easy of application…..We cannot as a Church withdraw from the world, abandoning society to paganism or materialism. Fourth century monasticism was already tending to do this, in reaction from the secularization of Christianity which accompanied the removal of persecution and the favour of the State. But the Church in general intended not a complete severance, but  a cooperation between two bodies, each autonomous in certain respects yet having much to do with each other. Now if the dualism is not to be absolute, the difficulty of deciding what belongs to each sphere will be all the greater. One can quickly enumerate some particulars. The State will keep the peace, collect taxes, the Church will preach the  Gospel, administer the Sacraments… (60-1)

The type of dualism of which he speaks works well, he thinks, provided that we operate with a minimalist view of what the state is supposed to do. Things become more complicated, however, when we move beyond that:

So long as the functions of the State are taken to lie in the maintenance of order (and it was chiefly as a coercive power restraining evil that early Christianity recognized the State’s God-given authority), or within the field of material benefits and economic organization, the distinction between its activities and those of the Church may seem clear. The more good the State tries to do, the more difficult it is to find a distinction of principle, something that goes beyond naming a few individual points of autonomy….But it is not to the discredit of the modern State, dangerous though it may be, that it concerns itself with the knowledge and cultivation of good. Conversely, the Church is somehow concerned with every action of the State which raises a moral issue, and  this is, in the last resort, with almost everything. The question is, how may the Church show its concern? What may it do? (61-2)

Independence, too, can bring its own perils in Greenslade’s view:

There remains also a problem to which reference was made in the first chapter. The more independent the Church becomes, the more necessary it  is to avoid clericalism, and the resulting anticlericalism. As the Western churchmen  of the fourth century saw the problem of Church and State, it was largely a question of the relations between emperor and bishops. But what are the proper limits of episcopal, or any ministerial activity?… (62)

And given historical circumstances, the interplay between liberty and involvement sometimes yields results that are surprising to modern eyes, as it did in the fourth century:

There is no easy answer to these and similar questions, even when the Church  possesses its own representative organs. Disestablishment, though it might become necessary through circumstances, is not in itself an answer. In the fourth century, at any rate, the demand for ecclesiastical liberty somehow culminated in an established Church, with the approval of all catholic Christians. (62)

What is to be learned from such occurrences, then? If nothing else, Greenslade observes, we can mark that the transition from principles to practice is not easy, and that due attention must always be paid to the circumstances in which one finds oneself:

The inference to be drawn from such puzzles is not that the dualist principle is wrong or  wholly impracticable, but that it must not be too doctrinaire. Sometimes, in given historical circumstance, what the Church must demand or resist will be quite clear; sometimes the issues will be confused. The detailed working-out  of the principle will always turn upon the contemporary situation  of both Church and State. That is, we must always be ready for a change in the existing relations, and not cling to past forms  which may not be principles. (62-3)

Still, there are constants in human nature–namely, abiding sin–that make the relative independence and counterbalancing of what we might call magistracy and ministerium, even if the corpus Christianum underlies both in a given region, attractive if not imperative:

But the principle itself, the notion that Church and State ought to work out their respective spheres of autonomy, while possibly unnecessary if all men were paragons, must presumably be accepted as a necessary conclusion from the only too obvious fact that in human history neither State nor Church is ever perfect. (63)

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In a word St. John’s Gospel and his first epistle, St. Paul’s epistles, especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, and St. Peter’s first epistle are the books that show you Christ and teach you all that is necessary and salvatory for you to know, even if you were never to see or hear any other book or doctrine. Therefore St. James’ epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it. (LW 35:362)

He goes on to treat the subject more substantively in his preface to the book of James, where he opens with the confession: “I praise it and consider it a good book, because it sets up no doctrines of men but vigorously promulgates the law of God.” He goes on to say that the author must not have been an apostle, but instead “must have been some good, pious man, who took a few sayings from the disciples of the apostles and thus tossed them off on paper” or based his writing on the preaching of James. Luther concludes that the author “wanted to guard against those who relied on faith without works, but was unequal to the task,” and so Luther “cannot include him among the chief books, though I would not thereby prevent anyone from including or extolling him as he pleases, for there are otherwise many good sayings in him” (LW 35:395-97).

I wonder, though, whether at least at some level Luther’s negative relative evaluation of James has something to do with Luther’s own penchant for loose talk and the letter’s rather harsh judgment of the same. That is to say, Luther had a big mouth and may not have taken too kindly to James’ rebuke of those with wagging tongues.

Consider the following from James 3:

Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. We all stumble in many ways. Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check…. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell…. With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness.

I love Luther, but as James makes clear, nobody other than Christ is perfect or faultless in every way. When you think of Luther and the book of James, it might be good to think as much about James’ warnings about wagging tongues as about Luther’s comments on the “epistle of straw.”

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In his “Oration in Praise of Constantine,” or “Tricenallian Oration,” given to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Constantine’s reign in 335 or 336, ¹ Eusebius gives an account of the cause of the Incarnation of the Word: men were addicted to senseless images made by human hands, and so Christ assumed human flesh, revealing among men the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15) made incarnate, to turn them away from lifeless wood and stone to the living Creator and Redeemer. The body–the real human body rather than a depiction of it–was made the animate abode of Life itself, “a sensible habitation of an intellectual power.”

1. And now let us explain the cause for which the incorporeal Word of God assumed this mortal body as a medium of intercourse with man. How, indeed, else than in human form could that Divine and impalpable, that immaterial and invisible Essence manifest itself to those who sought for God in created and earthly objects, unable or unwilling otherwise to discern the Author and Maker of all things?

2. As a fitting means, therefore, of communication with mankind, he assumed a mortal body, as that with which they were themselves familiar; for like, it is proverbially said, loves its like. To those, then, whose affections were engaged by visible objects, who looked for gods in statues and lifeless images, who imagined the Deity to consist in material and corporeal substance, nay, who conferred on men the title of divinity, the Word of God presented himself in this form.

3. Hence he procured for himself this body as a thrice-hallowed temple, a sensible habitation of an intellectual power; a noble and most holy form, of far higher worth than any lifeless statue. The material and senseless image, fashioned by base mechanic hands, of brass or iron, of gold or ivory, wood or stone, may be a fitting abode for evil spirits: but that Divine form, wrought by the power of heavenly wisdom, was possessed of life and spiritual being; a form animated by every excellence, the dwelling-place of the Word of God, a holy temple of the holy God. (Oration in Praise of Constantine 14.1-3)

While Eusebius deals here with idolatry loosely conceived, he does not frame his treatment in terms of the worship (latreia) or service (douleia) of images, but in terms of the impact that images have on the affections: we are drawn to things that we can see–we who are to walk by faith rather than by sight. At the affective level, before we even reach the question of whether some kind of veneration is appropriate to a lifeless image, we have already encountered a problem that would render the subsequent debate moot. The issue is not so much what the wood or stone is an image of, but the fact that it is made of wood or stone in the first place. The psalmist makes a similar point in Ps. 135:15-18.

But for those of us who desire to see images of the divine (and I suspect that that is most of us, whether perversely or piously) should not despair, for that wish has already been granted. As Steven pointed out once before, each day we are surrounding by living images of God, reflecting the glory of the archetypal Image: the people around us. Those images, I’m sure Eusebius would agree, we may love and serve.

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“Calling oneself ‘spiritual but not religious’ turned out to more of an antisocial characteristic, unlike identifying oneself as religious,” said Baylor researcher Aaron Franzen, a doctoral candidate and study co-author.

It is a hard time to be spiritual, scientifically speaking: researchers from University College London recently found that that this group is more prone to “anxiety disorders, phobias and neuroses” than atheists, agnostics and religious people.

 

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I’m going to begin with the definitions at the commencement of the Institutes (Book I, titulus I, De justitia et iure), breaking them up into very small sections.

So, first: what is justice?

Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuens.

“Justice is the constant and perpetual disposition granting to each person his right.”

So of “justice,” this abstracted concept, is predicated a “disposition,” voluntas. The term signifies will, willingness, inclination. Justice, then, consists in a will, a wish, a desire.

But this disposition is qualified in important ways. First, it is steadfast and enduring (constans et perpetua), not fickle and ever fluctuating. It is solid and predictable.

Next, it is a disposition necessarily finding fruition in action: note the participial modifier of voluntas, “bestowing” or “granting” (tribuens). Justice is a consistent-bestowing-disposition.

That action, that “granting,” has, in its turn, an object: ius–what is right, what is obligatory, what is due. Ius, then, encompasses both rights and duties. A person has a right to receive his ius, his due, and the other is obligated to give it to him.  There is an etymological connection in Latin that is absent in English: the peculiar quality of the concept iustitia consists in a rendering of ius (for a discussion of the range of this term, see here).

Finally, justice is impartial, for it consists in rendering his due (ius suum) to each person (cuique), not just to some. For justice to obtain, each person’s ius, his due–whatever that may be–must be granted. ²

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Above all Gaifman deserves praise for her precision. Unlike her predecessors, she never speaks of “divine representation” in non-figural objects but always understands them as “markers of divine presence.” Stones and steles designate the god or goddess; they are not relics of ancient aniconic veneration. If the Greeks performed cultic rites in front of stones, these objects helped the worshippers to experience divine power—we can only speculate at the level of intensity. The Greeks never venerated the objects as if they were the gods themselves. Steles are not the actual divinities. Rather, they demarcate divine presence in the context of the subject. Even when the steles bear a goddess’s name such as Aphrodite, they do not indicate that she was venerated in aniconic form. Instead they reveal that a stone was used to represent her presence as ritual was performed. In the sphere of athletics, steles similarly functioned to demarcate space.  Here and elsewhere, their purpose was to “set the scene,” not to be worshipped.

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This one deals with the breaking of images of Constantine himself.

Nazarius, an early fourth-century rhetorician, has a nice statement of the psychology of (the absence of) images in his “Panegyric of Constantine” (321). The usurper Maxentius, who controlled the city of Rome for several years before he was vanquished at the famous Battle of the Milvian Bridge (28 October 312), had destroyed images of Constantine, which represented the imperial presence even when the emperor himself was absent (Ecce enim, pro dolor! (verba vix suppetunt), venerandum imaginum acerba deiectio et divini vultus litura deformis [Behold, for sorrow! (words come with difficulty), the violent overthrow of venerable statues and the ugly erasure of the divine visage], Panegyrici Latini IV (X) 12.2). ¹

Nazarius apostrophizes and castigates the dead Maxentius:

Sed quid tandem adsequeris, caeca dementia? Aboleri vultus hic non potest. Universorum pectoribus infixus est , nec commendatione cerae ac pigmentorum fucis renitet sed desiderio efflorescit animorum. Una demum Constantini oblivio est humani generis occasus. Nunc vero commendabiliorem iniuria tua faciet patientiam eius: avidius expetent quem pictura non reddit. Flagrantiora sunt animorum desideria, cum oculorum solacia perdiderunt. (Panegyrici Latini IV (X) 12.4-5)

But what did you attain in the end, blind madness? This countenance cannot be effaced. It is impressed on the hearts of every person; it does not shine because it is beautified with wax or falsified with paint, but blossoms through the longing of our spirits. The one and only oblivion of Constantine is the end of the human race. But now your injury will make his patience the more commendable: they will long more keenly for him if no picture represents him. The desires of the spirit are more passionate when they have lost the consolation which the eyes provide.

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Natural law theory, if true, affords nobility to such uncreative fidelity.  According to the theory, the will of the many, as defined in law, can represent a participation, albeit imperfect, in Divine reason.  Judicial fidelity to a popular Constitution, then demands not humility before the masses, but piety before nature’s Author.  The piety of the faithful originalist might thus represent a virtue that can rival the glamorous creativity of the judicial artist.

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