God’s Word

It follows that the principles or laws of mutual benefit and ‘mutual consideration’ and reciprocity apply even to governments and states as it pertains to their relations with their citizens and subjects. Taxing one’s citizens and usurping a nation’s energy and resources while giving nothing but corruption and political instability in return to one’s people simply does not cut it. And if one were to espouse the Hegelian, Kantian, and perhaps even Darwinian idea that humankind “naturally evolved from a primitive condition of war to a civilized condition of lasting peace” – then it naturally follows that some concept or notion of mutual benefit, mutual consideration, cooperation, and reciprocity is integral to our social relations as an international society. 

Plus, and as mentioned before, what is required above all else is an agreement or a “social contract” between people to create a society and in turn maintain one, whereby people give something up to a chosen sovereign in order to gain or retain something else, which in most cases involves giving obedience to a sovereign in exchange for security and social welfare. If people are not subject to a sovereign whom the people deem as credible and legitimate, then “their peace, quiet, and property will still be at the same uncertainty as it was in the state of nature” to borrow from John Locke. But in a state of corruption and degeneration which happens to begin right at the conception or inception of a body politic and government and in turn persists as time progresses, the laws and precedents of ‘antiquity’ become more and more ‘venerable’ to borrow from Rousseau. 

Man-made laws and rules must also be made “according to the general laws of nature, and without contradiction to any positive law of scripture, otherwise they are ill made.” And as John Locke contended, the laws and rules which rulers and legislators make must be “conformable to the law of nature, i.e., to the will of God, of which that is a declaration; and the ‘fundamental law of nature being the preservation of mankind,’ no human sanction can be good or valid against it.” 

It is due to the “excellence” of the laws and precedents of antiquity which enable them to “continually gain new strength in any well constituted State; the precedent of antiquity makes them daily more venerable.” And it is perhaps for these reasons that certain intellectual and spiritual traditions contend even to this day that “God’s Word” is “the only sure guide in politics” and as a result “kings and magistrates should submit themselves to the guidance of the Church and its ministers in all things.” It was John Calvin who wrote that kings should “throw down their crowns” before the Church “and lick the dust from off her feet.” 

René Guénon argued that “as long as a regularly constituted spiritual authority continues to subsist, even though it be unacknowledged by almost all (including its own representatives) and reduced to no more than a shadow of itself, this authority will always prove the better part, and this can never be taken away from it because it contains something higher than purely human possibilities; even weakened or dormant, this part still incarnates ‘the one thing needful,’ the only thing that does not pass away.” Whereas ‘temporal’ authority is ‘contingent and transitory’ in both essence and form, ‘spiritual authority’ is such that it “partakes of the eternity and the immutability of all principles” to borrow from Guénon. “That which ye have wasteth away, and that which God hath remaineth.” It follows that “in all conflicts that pit temporal power against spiritual authority, one can rest assured that, whatever the appearances may be, it is always the latter that will have the last word.”