Rémi Brague’s The Law of God is the second part of a larger philosophical project that seeks to uncover and explain the origins and development of modern human behavior. In his previous work, The Wisdom of the World, Brague traced how modern behavior broke away from the “cosmological”: the notion that the cosmos was a mirror of God and that by studying its astronomy we would have insight into the nature of divinity. Over time this perspective became discarded for one that viewed our planets and stars as a part of a random universe, jettisoning our understanding of the cosmos as divine.
In The Law of God, Brague makes the same argument; but, instead of using the cosmos, he looks at the divine law as understood in the pre-modern civilizations of Greece, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Whether revealed in reason and nature, as in Greece, or in faith and creed, as in the three great monotheistic religions, the divine law, like the cosmos, would become supplanted by a modern conception of law that was autonomous, independent, and humanly self-legislated. Like the “cosmological,” the “theological” would disappear as a guide for modern human conduct.
Adopting the method of Leo Strauss, Brague performs a close reading of major philosophical texts and compares how these different civilizations understood the divine law. For the Greeks, the divine law was expressed in the perfectly intelligible and rational structure of nature which human reason could access, whereas for the Jews, the divine law was revealed by a transcendent and personal deity who was the master of history. It was the idea of a covenant between God and a people that made the Jews unique in their conception of divine law, when compared to the practices of Egypt where kingship and divinity intersected in one person. After the Jews lost their state, this notion of the divine law as covenant became the focal point of the Jewish people’s identity: the law was perfect because it had originated from God and, because it was perfect, brought God’s adherents closer to Him. The divine law commanded a people, defined a community, and perfected human beings in order to bring them in contact with the divine.
By contrast, the divine law in Christianity no longer appeared as a relationship to law because Christians had turned away from the world. But the turning away from the world was not a rejection of the law; rather, the law was internalized, with Paul reducing the divine law to the Holy Spirit who would dwell inside the conscience. For Brague, it was faith—not the law—that defined the Christian’s relationship to the divine. Augustine wrote about the voice of God as a type of internal law written in the hearts of men, as opposed to the written, external law of the world; and Aquinas would make the divine law an internal principle instead of an external norm.
Islam would accept a divine law that resembled the Torah more than the New Testament. The content of revelation for Muslims resided in the commandments of the Qur’an, which were to be obeyed by its believers. Prophecy and its fulfillment culminated in this new text of revelation of the divine law. In addition to the Qur’an, Brague notes that the historical experience of conquest and the aspiration of a universal empire also affected the practice of Islam where the political and religious became inextricably connected. Whereas Christianity inherited an empire and sought a separation between the political and the religious, Islam had conquered its empire and consequently believed such a separation was not a sign of progress but of decadence.
The divine law in modern Western civilization would eventually become emptied of any significant meaning and ultimately would be rejected for human self-legislation. According to Brague, the laws of nature invented by Descartes, Hobbes, and others became identified with the laws of God. Over time this law of nature would become free of any association with divinity and thereby vulnerable to human manipulation and exploitation. Combined with this notion was the nineteenth-century historical analysis of law that pushed divinity back to a primitive civilization that was no longer needed. With a progressive account of history and a belief in evolution, jurists like Maine, Bachofen, and Coulanges paved the way for a positivist theory of law where humans and their law would be entirely autonomous and independent of divinity.
The following four articles explore Brague’s account of divine law in the pre-modern and modern Western civilizations. The first one, “A History of Eternity,” provides an overview of The Law of God and raises questions about Brague’s interpretation of Greek philosophy, particularly about Brague’s idea of the commonality between philosophy and revelation. Indebted to Leo Strauss, Daniel Doneson suggests a separation rather than a connection between philosophy and revelation in Greek and Jewish divine law. For Doneson, Brague’s interpretation of the divine law in these two civilizations raises more questions than it purports to answer about the nature of philosophy, religion, and divinity.
The next article, “Nomos, Nature, and Modernity in Brague’s The Law of God,” defends Brague’s interpretation of Greek philosophy, with special attention to Aristotle’s concept of nature (a thinker strangely neglected by Brague). By focusing on Aristotle’s concept of the right to nature, I attempt to demonstrate how Brague’s interpretation is a more accurate understanding of Greek philosophy than Strauss’s. I conclude the article with a look at the modern Western conception of nature and contrast it with Aristotle’s conception as both are related to divinity and law.
The third article, “God’s Co-workers: Rémi Brague’s Treatment of the Divine Law in Christianity,” looks at Brague’s account of the divine law in Christian civilization, focusing on Aquinas. John von Heyking explores the relationship between the Old Law and the New Law in Aquinas. He concludes that, although the divine law was revealed to the Christian in the figure of Jesus Christ rather than as a text, it still requires the older law, both Jewish and Greek, in order to clarify its own understanding of divinity and our relationship to it.
The last article, “Islam and the Divine Law in The Law of God,” investigates Brague’s contention about the divine law in Islamic civilization. Khalil M. Habib reviews and agrees with Brague’s account of Islamic divine law and the various jurists who have commented on it. However, Habib asks whether this study could serve as something more than a foil to our understanding of Christianity and modern Western civilization. Instead, Habib suggests that a study of Islamic divine law for its own sake may yield insights about the nature of divinity and law that would be of value not only to Christians but to all philosophers.
Brague’s underlying project in this work and in his previous one, The Wisdom of the World, is to show that the modern world has its origins in the pre-modern one, with a disproportionate influence from Christian civilization, and that a neglect of these origins may have disastrous consequences for contemporary civilization. The modern belief in human autonomy, power, and progress eventually will collapse if unmoored from its divine origins. The recovery of these divine origins therefore is the purpose of Brague’s project. Hopefully the following articles will be able to illuminate whether it succeeds.
Lee Trepanier
Saginaw Valley State University