On Constitutions, part I

This is the first of two parts responding to Matt Taylor's post here. The first post is background for several points I will make in the second.

Matthew begins with a use of the word constitution that has fallen out of favor. A consitution, small "c," is "what consitutes," or what makes up a political community. The Greek is politeia, which can be translated constitution, regime, or legal institutions. A regime is the combination of the politeia and the bios ti, the institutions and the way of life, or what Tocqueville would call the laws and the mores.

A shared way of life and shared opinion concerning the just and the unjust, the praiseworthy and the blameworthy gives rise to the institutions, offices and laws, which in their turn have some (appreciable) influence on the mores from which they first have their source.

Ancient government was not totalitarian, but comprehensive.

The nature of a thing is found in its perfection, and the complete human being lives in a city. Like an acorn into an oak tree, a man grows from infancy into his completion with good nurture and cultivation only--for body and soul.

Gr. physis, "nature" < phuw, grow

It is not natural for a man to live alone; that is for the beasts and the gods. A man is not self-sufficient, nor is a family, and so for marriage, defense and other reasons, family joins family in a tribe, tribes join in villages and villages into a city, a polis. Just as a family is greater than the sum of its members because it encompasses their individual ends as human beings within its own end, the polis is that sum of partnerships which make possible a complete human life--its end is the highest and most complete of all human communities. And so, of necessity, its laws must encompass everything--from conception to burial.

This is because men are psychosomatic, neither purely instinctual nor purely intellectual. What is natural is what is right, but for humans, it must be chosen rather than simply the product of instinct--thus the need for education and good rearing for a man, if he is to be virtuous. The best part of him must rule the lesser parts, and so too with a city. Nature requires the aid of nurture to come to its fruition, and so it is natural to men to live in cities and have conventions. The great change to all this is wrought by Christianity.

Christianity is monotheistic and universal. It severs the link of "nature" which connects the citizen to the city with divine force, and it renders him equal to all men in the most important of matters. It is the acorn of self-government, and of Tocqueville's "principle of equality." It introduces into Western history what Manent calls "the theological-political problem." With the advent of mdoern natural science and the horror of the religious civil wars which wrack post-Reformation Europe, Christianity brings about the modern era.

Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke all give new accounts of man's nature, based in his origins, not in his perfection. The telological worldview falls. Modern liberalism teaches that FREEDOM is the paramount thing now--it is for men to be virtuous themselves now, not through the rearing and guidance of the city. Self-government requires (and makes possible) limits on political power. A new reflection on the nature of man requires that just government not teach him what to think and worship, but is must secure his right to do so. Government must now confine its power to the actions and not the souls of men. Disestablishment allows for an avoidance of religious civil war, and men of different religions may be fellow-citizens---and citizens of different nations may be fellow believers.

The danger of modern liberal government is that it may extinguish extraordinary virtue along with extraordinary vice and religious war under the suffocating blanket of soft despotism . The safeguards against this cannot be constiutional as they were for the ancients, whose mores and laws were more often the written and unwritten versions of the same thing.