It is clear to any highly intelligent person that this terrestrial world has been created by a Divine Power who governs and manages the supersensible and earthly domains according to specific principles and procedures--Divine Law.

  According to Divine Law, for example, humans are allowed freedom to choose what they will believe and what they will do--within the ever-increasing limitations imposed on them by their current culture.

  Throughout human history organized, sacerdotal religions have attempted to manipulate people into believing that Divine Law is only made known to humans through their specific brands of religious revelation: supposedly holy writings and supposedly divinely-appointed rulers (both religious and temporal).

  The concept Law refers to:
  • A body of rules and principles governing the affairs of a community and enforced by a political authority
  • A legal system such as national or international law
  • The condition of social order and justice created by adherence to a system of laws
  Divine Law refers to:
  • That body of rules and principles governing the supersensible and terrestrial realms
  • Decreed by the Divine Creator
  • That condition of Divine social order and justice created by adherence to Divine Law


   Divine Laws are embodied in Forms:

"In one of Plato's dialogues, the Euthyphro, there is a discussion concerning whether 'right' can be defined as 'that which the gods command.' Socrates is skeptical and asks: Is conduct right because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is right? This is one of the most famous questions in the history of philosophy. The British philosopher Antony Flew suggests that 'one good test of a person's aptitude for philosophy is to discover whether he can grasp its force and point.'" 1

James Rachels, "Does Morality Depend on Religion?

   Plato's conception and understanding of Divine Law is one of the most profound aspects of his entire philosophy. His concept of Divine Law is based on two other elements in his thought: the concept of the goodness of God and the concept of Higher Reason: Noesis (Greek: νοησις) as the ability to discover and recognize ultimate principles which are essences in the Divine Creation:
  • God's goodness: "The Creator is of the Essence Goodness and He desires that all should partake of His nature: the Essence Goodness. . . Since this world of ours is beautiful and its Creator partakes of the Essence Goodness, then clearly the Creator has selected the primordial Essence of Beauty as the blueprint for the world . . ." Timaeus

  • Higher Reason (noesis) apprehends and comprehends the elemental essences (Forms) of the supersensible and terrestrial realms, when the soul is separate from the body. Higher Reason (Noesis) is not only a "faculty" or "capability" of humans but of the Divine as well. That is, not only lower beings such as humans, but also God, use Higher Reason (Noesis) to apprehend and comprehend the essences (Forms) of the two realms.

   Plato referred to a seeming enigma in his dialogue, Euthyphro:
    Socrates: "The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by God because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of God."
   Socrates is asking whether a particular element (person, process, event, or object) is holy or good because God esteems it, or whether God esteems it because it is good. Plato ultimately answers this seeming enigma by asserting that an elelment is good both because 1) God creates it as good and proclaims it as good, and 2) God recognizes through Higher Reason that the element is good.

   God's recognizing and acknowledging an element as good does not diminish His omnipotence. On the terrestrial level, an element that is good in essence cannot be deemed by a true human as not being good, if the person is to remain a true human: a person who acknowledges truth because he has disciplined his character to be honest and trustworthy. A sub-human, because of human freedom, can deem a good element not to be good and can proclaim an evil element to be good. But an element is good or bad in essence, whether a human acknowledges it as such or not.


"The object of Plato is to present to us the fact that there are in the soul certain ideas or principles, innate and connatural, which are not derived from without, but are anterior to all experience, and are developed and brought to view, but not produced by experience. These ideas are the most vital of all truths, and the purpose of instruction and discipline is to make the individual conscious of them and willing to be led and inspired by them."

Alexander Wilder, Introduction to Thomas Taylor's
Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, 1891


   Based on Plato's conceptions of God's goodness, Forms, and Higher Reason, Western thinkers have developed the system of thought called Natural Law.  2


"Human laws are only copies of eternal laws. Those eternal laws are peculiar to man, for only man, on earth, is a rational being. The test of validity for the state's laws is their conformity to reason.  . . .  Learned men know that Law is the highest reason, implanted in Nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite. This reason, when firmly fixed and fully developed in the human mind, is Law. And so they believe that Law is intelligence, whose natural function it is to command right conduct and forbid wrongdoing."

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 1974


     The alternative view of the social order, Plato pointed out, is anomie: a state of society in which normative standards of conduct and belief are weak or completely absent.

The Divine Law of Human Evolution

   The only way for a Divine Being to create autonomous individuals is to allow them the freedom to manifest whatever ideas and actions they're able to understand through intelligence and inspiration and evolve to their own ultimate highest reality. So humans are created with the possibility of freedom and allowed to discover and manifest themselves. What we discover is that the One Universe--composed of both the terrestrial and supersensible realms--is a Government of Divine Law: we reap what we sow; wrong acts are their own punishment and right acts are their own reward.

      As humans evolve, they come to the realization that God's laws must be manifested as basic human moral values which a genuine human must adhere to. Persons who fail to follow these fundamental principles of Divine Law reduce themselves to retrograde humans at best, bestial at worst. Below we'll examine a few of the Divine Laws that have become moral precepts which are fundamental to human life.

Fundamental Human Precepts
Based On Divine Law
Commentary
You must not commit murder or advocate and conspire in murder. Murder constitutes premeditated killing of an innocent person (one who has not acted in a violent manner).
You must not act in a corrupt or depraved manner. Corruption is deliberate breaking of the law for personal gain.
You must go beyond merely personal development and care to a genuine concern for human welfare in general. Dog-eat-dog egomania destroys humans and human civilization.
Governments should be voluntarily established by free individuals through a willful act of contract, individuals rationally consenting to limit their own freedom and to obey civil authority in order to have public protection of their natural rights. Leaders must follow the laws of the nation and serve as the servant of the people.
You must work to overcome tyranny and oppression. Tyranny and oppression corrupt and degrade the human heart, mind, and soul.
You must realize your intellectual, moral, and spiritual potential (arete). Human potential is realized through intellectual, moral, and spiritual ascent.


     The concept of Natural Law has influenced most societies within Western Civilization, but nowhere was it embodied more fully than in the American Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

     Thomas Jefferson explained how this concept of Natural Law had been the foundation of the Declaration of Independence:

"This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.

Thomas Jefferson, "Letter to Henry Lee"
[May 8, 1825] in Thomas Jefferson, Writings


     "The rational faculty of man was conceived as producing a common conception of law and order which possessed a universal validity. . . This common conception included, as its three great notes, the three values of Liberty, Equality and the brotherhood or Fraternity of all mankind. This common conception, and its three great notes, have formed a European set of ideas for over two thousand years. It was a set of ideas . . . of a sovereign law of nature imprinted in the heart and nature of man, to which kings and legislators must everywhere bow. It was a set of ideas which lived and acted with an even greater animation from the days of the Reformation to those of the French Revolution . . . spoken through the mouth of Locke, [they had justified] the English Revolution of 1688, and had recently served to inspire the American Revolution of 1776 . . . They were ideas of the proper conduct of states and governments in the area of internal affairs. They were ideas of the natural rights of man--of liberty, political and civic, with sovereignty residing essentially in the nation, and with free communication of thoughts and opinions; of equality before the law, and the equal repartition of public expenses among all the members of the public; of a general fraternity which tended in practice to be sadly restricted within the nation, but which could, on occasion, be extended by decree to protect all nations struggling for freedom."

Ernest Baker, Traditions of Civility, 1948



  The United States was somewhat based on the conception of natural law, that citizens of a state have certain inalienable rights and set up governments by law through which elected representatives can implement the will of the people: a representative democracy. As President Abraham Lincoln understood, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is yet a dream.

The Truth About Democracy and America

   As Plato explained in his work, Commonwealth, societies have historically see-sawed between two different unworkable, tyrannical systems of rule: plutocracy and democracy. Plato had seen the "democratic" form of swindle practiced on the citizens of Athens, and had seen the deadly results of such a fraud when a pseudo-democratic mob-ocracy sentenced his teacher and friend Socrates to death on trumped-up charges.

  One of the reasons why ignorant and ill-intentioned thinkers have attacked Plato, is because he was forthright enough to reveal the reality of democracy--that it is in actuality the manipulation of the masses by an elite group who fools the common people into thinking they are ruling when they aren't.

   America's supposed democracy is in reality a pathocracy: a corrupt political-economic system in which capitalist psychopaths and sociopaths have seized power and rule in an insane (psychotic) manner that enhances their power and wealth while utterly destroying working class people

   The United States has devolved to an anomic "law of the jungle," a total state of barbarism. We are now seeing this in the aftermath of the totally psychotic former (twice-impeached) President Donald Trump. The Republican Party has now devolved to an insane gang of white-supremists, truth-denyers, and destroyers of all democratic principles and safe-guards.

     In such an anarchical environment as Americans now suffer under, as Plato explained in his Commonwealth, ". . . in politics, the tyrannical ruler regards his subjects exactly like sheep, and thinks of nothing else, night and day, but the good he can get out of them for himself."

     A major contribution of the Perennial Tradition to human evolution is its preservation of fundamental Divine and terrestrial laws and principles in all aspects of human existence. When a culture such as the United States devolves to a state of imperialistic dictatorship, as is now the case, it is necessary that the people be provided a means through which to rediscover Divine Laws.




Discerning Divine Law

"Dialectic is the only philosophical method which attains wisdom by anagogically activating our foundational underpinnings so that our Higher Self ascends to the Origin."
Plato, The Commonwealth VII, 533d


  Divine Law is only discovered and understood by genuine philosophers through dialectical reflection and meditation.

  Only genuine philosophers have the capability to discern and comprehend the Intelligible Realm, which includes Divine Laws. Plato, who originated the disclosure of the Perennial Tradition titled Philosophy, taught select students how to attain a state of higher discernment called Wisdom through dialectical interchange. Instruction in attaining this state was named philosophia, the love of and the search for Wisdom.

Implementing Divine Law

"We will never have rest from evil until philosopher-guardians are installed as rulers by the people, or the rulers of this world pursue the spirit and power of philosophy seriously and effectively so that political greatness and philosophic wisdom meet in one person. Those persons of a debased nature must be compelled to stand aside from ruling. In my opinion, only then will our nation implement a just constitution such as we are outlining."

Plato, Commonwealth V, 473


   Since true philosophers, the cognoscenti within any population, are the only persons capable of apprehending and comprehending Divine Law, and Divine Law must be incorporated into human law, the rulers of a just society must be philosopher-guardians. Such persons of advanced discernment can only be developed within cooperative commonwealth communities. And such communities, as Edward Bellamy understood, can only be created when the general populace has developed its intelligence and critical consciousness to the point where such communities become possible.


"The idea of an integrated economic system co-ordinating the efforts of all for the common welfare, which is the basis of the modern state, is as old as philosophy. As a theory it dates back to Plato at least, and nobody knows how much further, for it is a conception of the most natural and obvious order. Not, however, until popular government had been made possible by the diffusion of intelligence was the world ripe for the realization of such a form of society. Until that time the idea, like the soul waiting for a fit incarnation, must remain without social embodiment. Selfish rulers thought of the masses only as instruments for their own aggrandizement, and if they had interested themselves in a more exact organization of industry it would only have been with a view of making that organization the means of a more complete tyranny. Not till the masses themselves became competent to rule was a serious agitation possible or desirable for an economic organization on a co-operative basis."

Edward Bellamy, Equality


Understanding and Applying Divine Law

Natural Law


Secret Powers


Seven Laws Governing Human Life


The Universe and Its Laws



                                   






Notes:

1 This linked essay is an illustration of the inability of a thinker to reason to the same conclusion at which Plato arrived.

2 "The core idea of natural law theory is that there exists in nature a standard for right and wrong that is not mere convention, but an independent standard existing in nature, against which conventional, human laws can be measured." Christine Hayes, What's Divine about Divine Law?, 2016

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