The New Law, the New World Order, and the Cultural Revolution
By Alejandro Ordóñez Maldonado
(Continued)
iv. The Calvinist Origin of the New Law
"The source of all wrongs lies in the
candid optimism of most of the public
men of our nineteenth century, who
indiscriminately applied the English
liberal doctrine and the essential
North American public law principles
in our land without realizing that the
new creed could not signify any
progress in Latin America.
Alfonso López Michelsen.
It has been well said, by authors of the most dissimilar extraction, that behind every political issue lies a theological issue, an assertion which for many chaste democratic ears is inadmissible and extravagant, but which for renowned writers of Colombian constitutional history, such as Alfonso López Michelsen and Leopoldo Uprimy results in a basic presupposition to understand our institutions. Let us remember the famous debate at the Universidad Nacional between the two above, sometime around 1950, which versed precisely on the topic, and was left in writing in two well-known publications: "La Estirpe Calvinista de Nuestras Instituciones" (The Calvinist Lineage of our Institutions) and "Capitalismo Calvinista o Romanticismo Semiescolástico de los Próceres de la Independencia Colombiana. Réplica al Profesor Alfonso López Michelsen" which I have re-read carefully and which might well have been titled "The Scholastic Lineage of our Institutions."
I confess that the origin of the writers of treatises on the New Law called more my attention every time, in their great majority Anglo-Saxon or German, regions where Calvinism has designed their political, social and cultural institutions until I found in the work of Professor Francisco Díaz de Tejada the most substantial study on the relationship between Calvinism and the New Law, which in its fundamental ideas I will follow in the following paragraphs, making some brief comments.
Text by Francisco Díaz de Tejada
For Catholic Theology, the Universe has an immanent order willed by God, contained in the natural law, which reason can discover, and which in its physical aspect is complied with by every being, but in its moral aspect man can disobey.
Man's eternal destiny depends on the use of his liberty, signaled in a logical judgment in which God rewards and punishes human conduct in this world, checking it for compliance with the eternal law, so that God's action as judge depends on God's action as the legislator.
With Protestantism, the terms are inverted, to a Protestant, God's action as a judge is more important than that as a legislator. The individual's salvation does not depend on his earthly conduct but on such predestination, to heaven or to hell, which God for all eternity chose for him. Man's actions do not count against a decision taken by God for all eternity.
The closed voluntarism of Protestantism gets to place God's action as a legislator in a second plane. From the moment that the law is not the logical criterion for God to forgive a man, but salvation appears instead as an individual and concrete decision of the Divine will, forgiving some and condemning others, whether a man observes the law or not, he will be saved or condemned not for observing it or violating it but because God willed it to be so. For a Protestant, God is judge, simply judge; His general legislating action means nothing for concrete salvation. For Calvin, Justice is purely and simply God's will when He acts as a judge. Protestant voluntarism which places the Divine Will above the Divine Laws makes God more important as a judge than as a legislator and entirely free to condemn or save solely at his own discretion without taking any kind of laws into consideration, even when He Himself has established them.
From those theological principles emanate the concept of law sustained by Calvin, with precedence over the norm. The law is for Calvin the perception of what is just, the sentiment of the just in any given case with independence from the norm; the law is a sentiment, it is reduced to the conscience of the magistrate who dictates the sentence.
We will later see the strange correspondence with the postulates which characterize the new law.
The Ciceronian equaling of the law with the judge takes in Calvin a sense different from that which the classics gave to it. When he picks up Cicero's passage according to which the law is a mute magistrate and the magistrate is the law alive, it will not be to subject the judge to the norm, not even to equate them, but to indicate that after the rulers, come the laws, to place the concrete before the general, equity before strict justice, the judge before the norm; all this in accordance with his position of transferring to the human judge the extreme arbitrary criteria which he had attributed to the Divine judge.
The foundation of such a position is that owing to the doctrine of predestination, the grace received by the judges allows them, in the privacy of their consciences, to sense the just more clearly than the way in which the legal norms establish it. The judges, in relation to human norms, are the law and are the precepts. For Calvinist voluntarism, the law does not obligate the judge, it is for the judge mere indicative advice, never imperative.
Such is the Calvinist doctrine regarding the superiority of the judges over the laws. Spokesmen for the Divinity itself, interpreters of revealed law in the deep of their consciences, they can well prescind from or contradict human norms because they are the living law and what they approve or prohibit is the law, the exclusively applicable law. God has conferred to them an inviolable majesty, will Calvin stress in his ¨Institution of the Christian Republic.¨ If what is important is God as a judge above God as a legislator, in accordance with the conception of predestination, the judges will be more important than the laws in translating to the juridical plane such theological proposition. The voluntarist measure in theology hops with ideological coherence to the realm of law. There will not be more authentic law than that which the judges dictate, be it approving, be it prohibiting in each concrete case.
To Calvin, the judges carve out the law with a supra-legal authority coming from their decisions to be just because of their having been inspired by God regardless of their content: such deified judges construct the law from their majestic pedestal of elected, it suffices for them to possess the grace of the just.
(To be continued)
Go to Chapter V Go back to Chapter III
With Protestantism, the terms are inverted, to a Protestant, God's action as a judge is more important than that as a legislator. The individual's salvation does not depend on his earthly conduct but on such predestination, to heaven or to hell, which God for all eternity chose for him. Man's actions do not count against a decision taken by God for all eternity.
The closed voluntarism of Protestantism gets to place God's action as a legislator in a second plane. From the moment that the law is not the logical criterion for God to forgive a man, but salvation appears instead as an individual and concrete decision of the Divine will, forgiving some and condemning others, whether a man observes the law or not, he will be saved or condemned not for observing it or violating it but because God willed it to be so. For a Protestant, God is judge, simply judge; His general legislating action means nothing for concrete salvation. For Calvin, Justice is purely and simply God's will when He acts as a judge. Protestant voluntarism which places the Divine Will above the Divine Laws makes God more important as a judge than as a legislator and entirely free to condemn or save solely at his own discretion without taking any kind of laws into consideration, even when He Himself has established them.
From those theological principles emanate the concept of law sustained by Calvin, with precedence over the norm. The law is for Calvin the perception of what is just, the sentiment of the just in any given case with independence from the norm; the law is a sentiment, it is reduced to the conscience of the magistrate who dictates the sentence.
We will later see the strange correspondence with the postulates which characterize the new law.
The Ciceronian equaling of the law with the judge takes in Calvin a sense different from that which the classics gave to it. When he picks up Cicero's passage according to which the law is a mute magistrate and the magistrate is the law alive, it will not be to subject the judge to the norm, not even to equate them, but to indicate that after the rulers, come the laws, to place the concrete before the general, equity before strict justice, the judge before the norm; all this in accordance with his position of transferring to the human judge the extreme arbitrary criteria which he had attributed to the Divine judge.
The foundation of such a position is that owing to the doctrine of predestination, the grace received by the judges allows them, in the privacy of their consciences, to sense the just more clearly than the way in which the legal norms establish it. The judges, in relation to human norms, are the law and are the precepts. For Calvinist voluntarism, the law does not obligate the judge, it is for the judge mere indicative advice, never imperative.
Such is the Calvinist doctrine regarding the superiority of the judges over the laws. Spokesmen for the Divinity itself, interpreters of revealed law in the deep of their consciences, they can well prescind from or contradict human norms because they are the living law and what they approve or prohibit is the law, the exclusively applicable law. God has conferred to them an inviolable majesty, will Calvin stress in his ¨Institution of the Christian Republic.¨ If what is important is God as a judge above God as a legislator, in accordance with the conception of predestination, the judges will be more important than the laws in translating to the juridical plane such theological proposition. The voluntarist measure in theology hops with ideological coherence to the realm of law. There will not be more authentic law than that which the judges dictate, be it approving, be it prohibiting in each concrete case.
To Calvin, the judges carve out the law with a supra-legal authority coming from their decisions to be just because of their having been inspired by God regardless of their content: such deified judges construct the law from their majestic pedestal of elected, it suffices for them to possess the grace of the just.
(To be continued)
Go to Chapter V Go back to Chapter III