JUDAIC AND CHRISTIAN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

JUDAIC AND CHRISTIAN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

It is conventional to reckon the death of the polis at the death of Aristotle in 322 BCE and to believe that nothing new of importance to political philosophy appeared until the Roman Stoics evolved the universalistic dogmas of natural law. It is undoubtedly true that no systematic philosophical discussion of political principles can be traced in Judaic thought or in early Christian thought. But it is important to recognize that the symbols and the symbol system of subsequent political thinking derives from Judaic as well as from Greek sources and that its psychological assumptions are deeply tinged with Christian revelationism.

The three social institutions of the ancient Hebrews, whose significance for the history of political thinking has only recently come to be recognized, are patriarchal-ism, the sense of the people, and kingship. The text of the Old Testament that proclaimed the duty of obedience as the basis not only of political discipline but of all social order, including economic order, was the commandment “Honor thy father and thy mother.” Throughout the Christian centuries, therefore, all questions of obedience were seen in a patriarchal context, and the political power of the Hebraic patriarch (Judah, who condemned his daughter to death for playing the harlot, or Abraham, with his fighting army of servants) was the model for the power exercised by kings and ministers. Quite as significant was the Judaic sense of the chosen people, the people led by the hand of God through the wilderness because they had an enduring purpose and being. Whenever Christian political theorists thought of the people as having a voice in the appointment of a king or a regime, or of the king as having a duty to his people, their model was the peculiar people of Israel. European kingship was also conceived in biblical terms, and the tribal hero-king whose actions committed the people before God and whose power came from God can be seen behind the western European dynastic regimes.

Even more authoritative, of course, were the words of Jesus himself on political matters, and the few texts which could be made to bear at all upon them have been perpetually cited throughout the Christian era. Christ’s submission to the Roman authority, his use of an inscription on a Roman penny (“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”), and his repeated insistence that his kingdom was not of this world made it difficult to find authority in the New Testament for any doctrine of resistance. Saint Paul’s sayings pointed in the same quietist direction (“The powers that be are ordained of God”). But more interesting to the twenty-first century are those fragments of evidence from the apostolic era that make it possible to believe that Christ’s immediate followers lived a communistic existence.

ROMAN STOICISM AND NATURAL LAW

The belief that there is a universal and eternal moral ordering which is common to all men and which therefore carries weight on certain issues in every collectivity is a widespread ethical and religious notion, and it need have very little specific content. Its origins have been sought in Plato’s immutable Ideas and, further back, in Greek poetry. The source most often favored, however, is the religious-philosophical sect of the Stoics, who took their name from the stoa, or porch, before which Zeno, their reputed founder, preached and taught in Athens soon after the time of Aristotle, about 390 BCE. Stoicism was brought to Rome during the classical generations of Roman republicanism, and it continued to be a system widely accepted, although changing in content, from the time of the Scipios (about 100 BCE) until about 200 CE, when even the great Roman political families began to feel the attraction of Christianity.

The orator-statesman Cicero, although eclectic in his intellectual outlook and not usually thought of as a philosopher, wrote probably the most widely read of all works in political philosophy until recent times, On the Laws (De Legibus, c. 46 BCE) and On the Duties of the Citizen (De Officiis, a year or two later). The Laws was composed in deliberate imitation of Plato and was intended to complement Cicero’s De Re Publica (his Republic of a year or two before), a work that was lost until 1820. De RePublica contains, however, the classic text for the univer-salistic theory of natural law as it entered into political philosophy:

True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting ... there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and one ruler, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator and its enforcing judge. (Book III, Ch. 22, Sec. 33)

The cosmopolitan character of this doctrine—a society of all humanity ruled by one God—is in sharp contrast with the earlier Greek outlook, which assumed that only the small-scale polis could embody political good. The individual is recognizably the unit of this universal society and is the subject of the rights conferred on all citizens, all Roman citizens, by the Roman law. The identification of law with reason must be noticed in this process; reason carries its own claims to the individual’s obedience. The final sanction of law and authority is placed here outside the collectivity altogether, in the Deity. Nevertheless, nothing in Stoicism could be taken as an argument against the deification of the later emperors, and one of them, Marcus Aurelius, was himself a Stoic thinker. So also was Epictetus, who began life as a slave. A rough doctrine of original freedom and equality, even the use of the contractarian model for the collectivity, has been read into Stoic texts—“All seats,” so the Stoic proverb went, “are free in the theatre, but a man has a right to the one he sits down in”—but it was religious rather than specifically social equality. Much of the intellectual groundwork, in fact, of subsequent political philosophy can besighted in the intellectual-religious tradition of Stoicism, and it is only the philosophizing tendency of historians which has prevented its attracting more attention than it has done.