They admit natural law, but where does this law come from? What gives it authority over our behavior? To speak of natural law is to say that there is some moral order intrinsic to human nature, a law that tells us not what we tend to do, but what we ought to do. No group of men sat inside the human mind and legislated that murder, adultery, theft, deceit, or hatred toward one’s parents should be troublesome to the conscience. Yet when a man commits such acts, he feels as if he were dead. He feels as if he were in a pit, he feels as though he has crossed a boundary that existed before his iniquity. Why is there such a boundary? Is there such a thing as sin, or is it simply a manifestation of social conditioning?
Where Does Natural Law Come From?
A strictly evolutionary viewpoint may attempt to explain this by arguing that certain moral behaviors benefited our survival. Cooperation strengthened these chances for survival. This may offer an explanation for how certain moral instincts developed, but it does not yet explain why those instincts are morally true. Evolution can explain why a man feels that murder is wrong. It cannot, by itself, explain why murder actually is wrong. In a purely secular view, some do not have this “natural law.” Some have a debased desire to murder, and when they do murder they feel a type of fulfillment. In fact, evolution has produced impulses toward both cooperation and violence. Human beings protect their families, but they also compete for territory, resources, status, and mates, regardless if these mates consent to being mates as we see in our supposed “cousins”, the apes. Nature contains cooperation, but it also contains domination. It contains deception, rape, infanticide, (which ironically atheists seem to be the most adamant at promoting), and killing. If both compassion and aggression can serve survival under different circumstances, then survival itself cannot tell us which impulse a man ought to obey.
Suppose a man could kill another person, gain wealth or power from doing so, escape punishment, and improve his own chances of survival. To say that humans evolved a general aversion to murder does not answer the deeper question: why ought this particular man refrain from killing when killing benefits him? This then transcends mere biological inclinations, it is now moral. To call the killing “murder” already assumes that some killings are unjust. To call certain types of sex “rape” already assumes that not all sex is good. But what makes a killing unjust? What makes rape unjust if it is beneficial to the survival of the man? What standard stands above desires, the customs of his society, or even the laws of his government? If morality is nothing more than an adaptation produced because certain behaviors once benefited human survival, then it becomes difficult to explain why a person is obligated to obey that adaptation when disobedience benefits him.
So what, then, is natural law in a purely evolutionary sense? Is it merely an inherited instinct that proved useful to our ancestors, or is it evidence that human nature participates in a moral order greater than itself?
The Problem
Now that we have proven that you cannot have natural law without a natural law giver, how then can we go on to view political science without the lens of this law giver? If there is a moral law intrinsic to human nature, and if that law is not created by governments, majorities, or social customs, then political authority cannot be the highest authority over man. The state does not create good and evil; these have already existed before its own generation. At most, it recognizes them, reflects them, or violates them.
This creates a problem for any political theory that attempts to separate government entirely from the moral order that precedes it. Laws written by legislatures are not automatically just simply because they are legally enacted. A government can legalize something immoral just as easily as it can illegalize something immoral. If there is no standard above the state, then there is ultimately no objective basis by which we can call a law unjust. We may dislike it, protest it, or replace it, but we cannot say that the government has violated anything higher than itself.
The Solution
If political authority must answer to a moral order that existed before its creation, then the next question is where that moral order can be known. It is not enough to say that there is a natural law. Men disagree about what nature demands, consciences can become corrupted, societies can normalize evil as we have seen with those with atheistic tendencies, and governments can redefine justice according to whatever happens to be politically convenient. Natural law therefore requires more than individual intuition. It requires a proper understanding of man himself: what man is, what he was made for, and what constitutes his good.
Every political system makes assumptions about the human person, even when it claims to be religiously neutral. Every system forces their ideology on another. Therefore a government must inevitably decide what human beings are entitled to, what is justice, what acts deserve punishment, what relationships deserve protection, what obligations parents have toward children, what duties citizens have toward one another, and what limits should be placed upon power. Beneath each of these questions lies a more fundamental question: what is man?
Man is not an advanced animal, nor is he an animal at all. Our current system teaches men and women that they are just animals, and we are surprised when they act like such. Why then must mankind ought not to act like animals? Because they are created in the image and likeness of God. Our nature therefore possesses a purpose that precedes every government that has ever existed. Humanity is not granted by the state, because the state did not create man, nor did the state form him from the dust. This world taught me that I am an animal, but Christ taught me I am a man. Likewise, the state cannot erase that innate value, because value was given from above.
This provides the foundation that political science by itself cannot provide. Politics can describe institutions, constitutions, elections, governments, and the distribution of power, but it cannot determine the final purpose for which power ought to be used unless it first possesses some understanding of the good. If the good is merely whatever a majority desires, then justice changes whenever the majority changes. If the good is whatever the state commands, then good is a fleeting definition. Then tyranny becomes indistinguishable from justice so long as the proper legal procedures have been followed. If the good is merely whatever advances survival, prosperity, or social stability, then anything could theoretically become permissible if it served those ends.
Let us introduce a Church that Christ founded. Where every other Church has failed, the Orthodox church never fleeted. The Orthodox solution, then, is not that the Church should simply replace the state or that bishops should administer every matter of civil government. Church and state possess distinct functions. Rather, political authority must recognize that it is not the creator of morality and that it exists beneath a moral order given by God. The Church bears witness to that order, forms the conscience of man, and continually reminds political power that Caesar himself remains accountable to a higher King.
Political science cannot therefore be separated from theology, because politics ultimately concerns man, and the question of man cannot fully be answered without asking where he came from, what he is, and what he is here for. If man is created by God, then political authority must be understood in relation to that reality. Amen.