MARK SHIFFMAN is an assistant professor in the Humanities Department of Villanova University. He reviewed Rémi Brague’s Eccentric Culture in the Spring 2005 Modern Age.

In his most recently translated book,
Rémi Brague displays his usual captivating
breadth of erudition—from Egyptian
papyrology and Icelandic ecclesiastical
history, to the thought of Leo Strauss
and Hans Urs von Balthasar, to The Code
of the Woosters and Tintin in America. His
scholarly style might well be described as
refractory, to suggest both its kaleidoscopic
character and its penchant for puncturing
intellectual orthodoxies; or, using his own
words, his perspective might be described
as a “wag view of history.” That tag would
suit the present work particularly well,
since one of its aims is to call into question
the timeworn linear story of the “inexorable
withdrawal of the sacred,” to suggest
that we “consider the inverse movement,
from the profane to the sacred, as well.”

The Law of God is Brague’s second
magisterial work of intellectual history.
The first, The Wisdom of the World (2003),
investigated the history of cosmology (or
more precisely, to use Brague’s neologism,
cosmonomy) in the West. The two books
form the prongs of a single endeavor,
which is no less than “making the project
underlying modernity more visible.” The
modern project is above all the attempt
to realize human autonomy ever more
completely, which requires breaking the
two principal bonds of heteronomy at the
heart of the various forms of the medieval
synthesis: the divine law and the normative
indications of man’s place in the cosmos.
With an uncommon degree of common
sense, Brague observes that “if we are to
understand modern attacks on divine law
(and, by that same token, the essence of
the modern project), we need to have a
clear grasp of the medieval definition of
divine law.” By examining the diverse
streams flowing into the medieval inheritance
(classical, Biblical, and ancient Near
Eastern more broadly), Brague clarifies
the principal decisions and tensions within
these various syntheses ( Jewish, Christian,
Islamic) so as to bring into higher relief
both what the modern project rejects and
“what is dubious in the modern project
itself.”

Brague contends at the outset that, for
the purpose of understanding the notion
of divine law, it is inadequate to restrict
ourselves to the “theological-political
problem.” He identifies the broader and
more adequate horizon as the “theiopractical”:
“theio” because the passage
from the classical divine (to theion) to the
Biblical God (ho theos) is “a highly revolutionary
event not to be turned into something
banal”; “practical” because the field
of divine law comprises the whole genus
of the practical, which, besides politics,
includes also ethics and economics. So long
as “the theio-practical problem remains
unresolved, any statement of the theiopolitical
problem remains unbalanced and
resolved in a wobbly manner.”

An initial discussion of Egyptian and
Mesopotamian conceptions of the relationship
between law and divinity serves
to highlight what is shared and unusual in
the Greek and Biblical traditions. In the
ancient river civilizations, it is the ruler
who is linked directly to divinity; the law
is divine in a derivative sense, as issuing
through his agency. For Greece and Israel,
divine law issues directly from divinity, and
can thus serve as an independent measure
of the ruler’s legitimacy. This triangular
analysis (law, ruler, divinity) also places
into perspective the modern alternative, in
which law and ruling authority seek legitimation
independently of divinity.

In their respective understandings
of what the divine is, however, Greece
and Israel part ways. For the Greeks,
“[t]he divinity of the laws signifies the
permanence of their manifestness. . . In
this perspective, the divine is in no way
hidden, hence has no need to be revealed.”
It is rather the law of things, “the nature
of what is,” that requires revealing, but
through the exercise of human reason.
Thus, Plato’s Laws, which uncharacteristically
entertains the notion of a god as
lawgiver, ends up affirming the divinity of
good laws inasmuch as they take inspiration
from nature, the divine art.

Israel, on the other hand, recognizes
the divinity of law in its issuing from the
Creator. Thus, while superficially similar
to other Near Eastern civilizations in associating
the anointed king with divinity,
Israel acknowledges God alone as legitimate
ruler; His law is above the king, and
by giving it to Israel he constitutes the
people, rather than the king, as the subject
of history and the embodiment of wisdom.
Brague sees certain seeds of democracy
here, perhaps even radical democracy:
Israel is distinctive for its scriptural texts
critiquing kingship, as such, as a usurpation
of God in his relationship to his
people through law; but this critique of
one species implicates the whole genus of
the state. The law outlasts both the people’s
political existence and their sojourn in the
land, defining the people ultimately by
religion alone.

At this point, Brague offers a fascinating
analysis of the significance of Deuteronomy’s
recapitulation of the law on the eve of
entry into the Promised Land, comparing
it to criteria of purity posted at temple
doors: the laws to be observed must be
stated and accepted before entry into sacred
space. “The aim of the commandments,”
he observes, “is not to impose obedience,
but to provide an entry into divine mores.
Entry into the land of God is also, by that
token, entering into the intimacy of the
One who lives there.” Thus the aim of the
laws is “not to reduce men to . . . slaves of
God.” On the contrary, before the Decalogue
we are reminded that God is the
liberator: “The law liberates, and at the
same time it teaches.” Brague thus complicates
the opposition of Judaism and Islam
together as religions of law to Christianity
as a religion of doctrines. Judaism and
Christianity share in one spirit of liturgy,
which is a spirit of communion and liberty,
and both generate challenges for overweening
claims to political legitimacy.

Islam, on the other hand, presents an
image of God as supreme commanding
power, imposing law through bare revelation.
A central tradition in Islam teaches
that, “contrary to the Christian view of it,
the goal of creation is not the entry of a
creature into the divine life by adoption.
Its goal is the submission of creatures to
God.” Brague presents the Muslim philosophers
who drew inspiration from Greece
(Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes) as fundamentally
at odds with Islam in attempting
to found judgment of the law on reason’s
apprehension of nature. The ideal of Islam
is the earthly reign of a revealed law that
pre-exists the state, rather than codifying
the fulfillment of the state’s natural potentials:
“the idea of natural law has no place
in Islam.” Thus, “contrary to a legend tenacious
in the West,” Islam exhibits a separation
between the political and the religious—
not, like Christianity, on principle,
but from an inability to achieve its own
principle: Islam has religious legitimation
of political power to offer in abundance,
but it has no clearly designated beneficiary
of this legitimation.

The Qur’an, which existed before
creation, speaks directly to man, bypassing
nature. Thus, parting ways from the standard
academic narrative, Brague presents
Ghazali not as the fundamentalist scourge
of the “liberal” rationalism of the philosophers,
but as the summit of Muslim legal
theory and practice. Ghazali unites legalism
and mysticism, arguing that reason partially
discerns the advantages of the commandments,
but that their ultimate end is man’s
beatitude in encountering God. This good
remains hidden in the commandments, but
reveals itself as immanent in them to the
one who, through the practice of obedience,
attunes his heart to the “slight indications
for which the reasoning of reason
is too narrow.” Obedience to the Qur’an
is both anthropology and theology, man’s
attunement to the logos that existed with
God before the creation; the Qur’an was
made Arabic to draw men to itself.

These accounts help us to apprehend
generically the “medieval definition of
divine law.” Brague observes: “What since
the start of modern times has been called
‘religion’ was perceived in the Middle Ages
as an apparatus established by God within
human history to serve as the framework
for his encounter with humankind, which
was to permit humans to accomplish what
the divine design expected of them [ . . .
]. The translation of these ‘laws’ in history
produced what is usually referred to as
the Middle Ages.” It is within the terms
of this description that we must understand
the sense in which Christianity also
constitutes a law while not consisting of a
code of commandments and prohibitions.
This effort is all the more important for
Brague’s task of making modernity visible,
in that it was the Christian embodiment
of divine law that modern thinkers ranged
themselves against, and this engagement
has only been obfuscated by the stillprevalent
reduction of Christianity to a
“morality.” Brague contends provocatively
that the writings of the New Testament
“contain nothing ‘political’ and, in the
final analysis, hardly any ‘morality’ either.
In compensation, they contain the seeds of
a transformation of the entire domain of
the practical.”

Only once does Jesus give a new
commandment: to love one another. What
is new is neither the content (Leviticus
19.18) nor the singling it out for emphasis
(as Rabbi Hillel had already done), but
Jesus’ “reference to a specific history,
when he immediately follows ‘love one
another’ with ‘as I have loved you.'” The
commandment is placed within a new
“context of practice within the action
that God deploys in favor of mankind.”
The original law of the Sinai covenant,
understood in the context of liberating
exodus and entry into communion in the
land, recrystallizes around God’s new selfrevelation
in the person of Jesus, the new
liberating exodus of the Passion and death
on the cross and the new communion of
Eucharistic liturgy.

The first axial figure in the Christian
reconception of law is Paul, who claims
that “Christ is the end (telos) of the law.”
“He does not speak of an abrogation of
the law, to be replaced by another and
more perfect law. That concept is Islamic
rather than Christian.” In the Qur’an,
knowledge of right action without the
revealed commandments is impossible,
such that this revelation necessarily supersedes
anything else. For Paul, all men
have a basic law written on their hearts by
nature; the revealed law not only guides
aright but also intensifies awareness of our
failure to follow its demands. Pagans have
conscience to convict them; to the extent
that a pagan satisfies conscience’s demands,
he is a “law unto himself.” This is the
embryonic appearance in Christianity of
the notion of autonomy, here understood
as the conformity of created natures to the
rule of their being that constitutes them
as what they are. As Creator, “God does
indeed appear as the origin of the Law, but
not as a lawgiver, strictly speaking.” Paul’s
“law of Christ” signifies “less a collection
of commandments and prohibitions than a
different regime of salvation,” which Brague
describes as “an entire program of liberation—
which is an infinite task.”

Paul’s reconception of law is not a
systematic, coherent theory, so much as “an
entire set of effects produced by a new fact
of colossal importance that, like a powerful
magnetic field, reshapes everything that
approaches it.” Working out that theory in
a decisive way was left to Brague’s other
axial figure, Thomas Aquinas. Certain
indispensable developments were already
to hand for Thomas. The canon law tradition,
following in the wake of Augustine,
had already attempted to draw a boundary
around its own concern with salvation in
contradistinction to the state’s concern
with secular justice. (Contrary to the standard
narrative, it was the church that envisioned
the secular state, resisting kings and
emperors who wanted to add coronation
to the list of sacraments.) Jurists had also
enunciated clearly that what is the right
(ius) for every being is its “doing what is
in conformity with its nature.” They also
concurred with mystics like Bernard and
Bonaventure that God “lives by the very
laws by which He governs the world”—
laws reflecting His very nature, not just
His will.

Thomas offers an account of law that
orders all these ideas into a coherent
system. Two principle features are of paramount
importance for Brague’s purposes.
First, Thomas introduces eternal law (by
which God governs the creation) as a category
distinct from natural law, indeed as a
“condition of possibility” for all the other
forms of law, thus placing them within the
context of divine providence as related
but particular modes. “Divine law” thus
refers both to eternal law that founds the
whole regime of divine governance and
to the revealed law through which man is
brought most perfectly to God.

Second, in the case of man, God
“delegates his providence” in the form
of prudence. Here Brague elucidates a
crucial difference between Aquinas and
Maimonides, who represents the peak of
Jewish reflection on law. For Maimonides,
the sign of the law’s divinity is that it both
directs non-philosophers to their bodily
good in the city, by practical guidelines
and salutary opinions, and at the same
time provides indications guiding philos
ophers to fulfill their rational nature in
contemplation of the nature of things.
Maimonides follows the Muslim Aristotelians
in making nature the measure of
law and impersonal union with pure intellect
its highest aim. For Thomas, since we
participate intellectually in divine providence
also by the perfection of our own
prudence, the personal nature of man is
not severed from his intellectual destiny.
In the form of prudence, providence
“pertains to individuals within the diversity
of circumstances in which they must
act, the complexity of which they themselves
are able to grasp.” Brague observes:
“It is not a question of teaching man what
he must do, but rather of putting into his
hands the instruments that permit him
to do it.” Hence the divine law does not
provide guidelines for ordering the city; it
is not in the business of “‘humbling proud
reason’ but, to the contrary, of liberating
reason and permitting it to be itself.”

In Brague’s fine formulation, the aim of
divine law as understood in Christianity is
“to construct a mechanism capable of freeing
freedom itself.” The mechanism proceeds
by three coordinated modes. Natural law,
accessible to man as man, provides basic
guidelines for conduct; human law, taking
counsel from natural law, provides authoritative
norms in specific historical communities;
the divine law enters human history
as an economy of salvation offered to man
as a means of attaining his further perfection
by liberating will and rational judgment
from sin. This last, “divine law” in
the specific sense, is not imposed but rather
proposed as something we enter into by way
of love, in which we seek perfect adherence
to God, such that law ceases to be external
to us: “the difference between the law and
the person subject to the law is not intended
to be definitive. It is abolished in the long
run.”

It is precisely the unraveling of this
threefold mechanism that gives modern
law its characteristic features. Before
modernity

law [i.e. human law] bathed in counsel
[i.e. natural law and revealed law]
as in a nourishing environment.
Counsel preceded the law that was
based upon it, but it also surpassed
the law by adding a further stage to
it. On the one hand, law was what
had to be observed in order to assure
the full deployment of a nature that,
by that fact, realized what counsel
wanted. On the other hand, counsel,
in the form of evangelical advice, led
to reaching beyond the minimal demands
stated in the law and to striving
for perfection.

In modernity, natural law is replaced
by “interest” without orientation toward
the good; law as it applies to man becomes
pure command seeking a legitimating
principle; the beauty of saintly perfection,
the terminus of man’s pursuit of his good,
is replaced by the ascetic sublimity of disinterested
altruism. In the realm of nature,
we now have “laws” imposed on creatures
and absolutely obeyed, reflecting a shift
from wisdom to power as the primary
characteristic of the divine; the “constant
relations that exist between observable
phenomena” are laws of nature, now in
the plural, ultimately implying “the disappearance
of the idea of global order.” Man,
alienated as a moral agent from nature, is
stuck with autonomy, the law he imposes
upon himself.

Brague’s best summing up of what has
become visible and questionable about
modernity is the following passage:

Our societies, with their agenda of
law with no divine component, are
in fact made possible, in the final
analysis, by the Christian experience
of a divine without law. Even atheism
as “unbelief” supposes the primacy of
faith in the definition of the religious.
It is possible that the theologico-political
problem is a serious problem in
appearance only. All it does is to cash
in, on the level of the species (politics),
on a separation that had been
acquired some time ago on the level
of the genus (practice). The supposed
combatants for the “secularization” of
institutions fly to the aid of a victory
that was assured centuries ago, and
which is, what is more, the victory of
Christianity itself in its most official
form, that of the church, establishing
the borderline that separates it from
the secular domain. . . . Whether human
action can unfold freely, with no
reference to the divine, rather than
losing its way in suicidal dialectics,
remains to be seen.

In the end, Brague’s profoundly analytic
histories of the crystallizations and fracturings
of the two pre-modern heteronomies
leave us with many questions. Above all,
once we have gained greater clarity about
what is dubious in the modern project,
where is it possible or necessary for us
to stand in relation to the alternatives it
rejected? Are the two heteronomies recoverable
for us, and if so, in what way and to
what extent? Are they essentially related
or separable from one another? Does our
position at the far end of modernity shape
distinct conditions for the possibility of
such a recovery, or does it require us to
orient ourselves in a fundamentally new
way toward the cosmos, law, and divinity?
It is to be hoped that the projected synthetic
finale of the trilogy, if it does not answer
these questions, will at least sharpen their
contours.