Andrew Willard Jones goes full nuclear good at the end of Episode 6 of our new podcast, "The Catholic Social Difference," and we're canonically obliged to make a thread of it. postliberalthought.com/blog/catholic-… He says, "In Christendom the legal regime is always provisional...
...because it is for those people who are still living under vice; who need to move into virtue.
Within [medieval] political theology who [the kings] are depends on who they are acting upon. Are they leading the saints? Then they’re Christ. Are they disciplining the sinner? Then they’re David. But it’s the same king and the same office.
Why did we have the Old Testament? Because people needed to be lead into the worship of the true God, into virtue. That doesn’t go away with the New Testament. That still has to happen.
But now that [positive legal regime of the Old Testament] is coupled with grace which assists and allows the fulfillment of the law.
So the temporal order has an eschatological disconnect within it.
The positive legal regime is not complete precisely because it contains within itself the mechanism of its fulfillment.
It can’t become a complete legal regime, because people only need positive law here or there, not everywhere -- because there are people who are virtuous. @johnmilbank3
And it would be the height of injustice for the king to effect his will against people who are living the fulfillment of the law.
The New Covenant is a recipe for the decentralization of power, because now communities of people are capable [through grace] of instantiating the natural law justly in their particular human laws. @suzania
A judge can assess these different human laws and determine whether or not they are just, but he doesn’t have the right to legislate those laws to them.
The king can enforce justice, but not human law. The distinction is crucially important, and completely lost in both ancient and modern political theory. @tradistae
The natural law is a participation in the eternal law. It’s not submission to some higher law. It comes from within. It flows out of virtuous people as they become more perfectly human. It is exactly their will.
When [people] achieve perfect freedom, it is the moment of their total conformity to the natural law. In a just order, it would [also] be freedom from the will of another. @Vermeullarmine
In the Middle Ages, they come to know that this is the case. The people are achieving peace, and that peace is the law. That’s what has to be maintained and enforced. Not some centralized, monarchical power. That would actually be the definition of tyranny.
[The king’s] role is to lead them better into virtue. In a sense it’s to lead them more perfectly into independence.
And because we’re not perfect, because the New Law is the movement towards Heaven and not Heaven itself, the sword is retained. But the sword is retained as remedial, as punishment, as pedagogy -- not as the basis of order itself.
@brandonmcg you'll dig this, @SohrabAhmari you might, @ccpecknold, this is gold, @josias_rex well, can see you going either way on this. Thanks, all, this AWJ-transcription brought to you by @BadCatholicBlog.
