What is it that I find admirable and worthy of emulation in the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy? Pretty much the same things I find admirable and worthy of emulation in Aldous Huxley’s vision of a just society:

If I were now to rewrite the book [Brave New World], I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity… In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man’s Final End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: “How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man’s Final End?”

See also the following letters written by Thomas Jefferson:

The Earth Belongs to the Living (1789)

“A Real Christian” (1816)

The Ward System (1816)

The Test of Republicanism (1816)

Reform of the Virginia Constitution (1816)

“I Too Am An Epicurean” (1819)

A proper understanding of religion is key, because those who think that religion is even more dangerous than government certainly have a point and a lot of history on their side. Now, I don’t purport to myself really “understand” what needs to be understood, nor do I imagine or intend that anything I write on this blog will “convert” anyone to anything. I am not qualified to teach. But what I nevertheless propose to do in the next few posts is share some things I’ve been reading about religion that seem right to me. In this recent post I recommended, on the authority of Albert Jay Nock and Aldous Huxley, two works by William Law, The Spirit of Prayer and The Spirit of Love. I’ve since read both, and was duly impressed, but must admit that I was a little discouraged at first when I began reading them, because these works are not totally free of what I might describe as an extraneous and unnecessary cosmology. What I propose to do, therefore, is excerpt here in a few blog posts some of what rang true for me. (If Mike at Crime & Federalism can write about what he writes about, it seems I too can without cheating my few and loyal readers take this detour into a topic not advertised by the title of this blog.) And I admit that this project is motivated by a mild case of temporary blogging burn-out, and by the sense that one can only say “fuck the government” so many times and in so many different ways before the negativity kind of gets to you.

So without further ado, for this post’s installment, from The Spirit of Love:

[Love-2.1-154] The Apostle saith, “Avenge not yourselves, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I Will repay, saith the Lord.”

[Love-2.1-155] This is another full Proof, that Wrath or Vengeance is not in the holy Deity itself, as a Quality of the Divine Mind; for if it was, then Vengeance would belong to every Child of God, that was truly born of Him, or he could not have the Spirit of his Father, or be perfect as his Father in Heaven is perfect.

[Love-2.1-156] But if Vengeance only belongs to God, and can only be so affirmed of Him, as Ice and Frost are His, and belong to Him, if it has no other Manner of Working, than as when it is said, “He sent out his Arrows and scattered them, He cast forth Lightnings and destroyed them”; then it is certain, that the Divine Vengeance is only in fallen Nature, and its disordered Properties, and is no more in the Deity itself, than Hailstones and Coals of Fire.

[Love-2.1-157] And here you have the true Reason, why Revenge or Vengeance is not allowed to Man; it is because Vengeance can only work in the evil, or disordered Properties of fallen Nature. But Man being Himself a Part of fallen Nature, and subject to its disordered Properties, is not allowed to work with them, because it would be stirring up Evil in himself, and that is his Sin of Wrath, or Revenge.

[Love-2.1-158] God therefore reserves all Vengeance to Himself, not because wrathful Revenge is a Temper or Quality that can have any Place in the Holy Deity, but because the holy supernatural Deity, being free from all the Properties of Nature, whence partial Love and Hatred spring, and being in Himself nothing but an Infinity of Love, Wisdom, and Goodness, He alone knows how to over-rule the Disorders of Nature, and so to repay Evil with Evil, that the highest good may be promoted by it.

[Love-2.1-159] To say, therefore, that Vengeance is to be reserved to God, is only saying in other Words, that all the Evils in Nature are to be reserved and turned over to the Love of God, to be healed by his Goodness. And every Act of what is called Divine Vengeance, recorded in Scripture, may, and ought, with the greatest strictness of Truth, be called an Act of the Divine Love.

. . .

[Love-2.1-166] Hear these decisive words of Scripture, viz., “Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.” What a Grossness therefore of Mistake is it to conclude, that Wrath must be in the Deity, because He chastens and threatens Chastisement, when you have God’s own Word for it, that nothing but his Love chasteneth? Again, Thus saith the Lord, “I have smitten you with Blasting and Mildew. Your Vineyards, and your Fig Trees, and your Olive Yards, did the Palmer-Worm devour,” and then the Love that did this makes this Complaint, “Yet ye have not returned to me.” Again, “Pestilence have I sent amongst you; I have made the Stink of your Tents come up even into your Nostrils,” &c. And then the same Love that did this, that made this Use of the disordered Elements, makes the same Complaint again, “Yet have ye not returned to me” (Amos 4:9-10).

[Love-2.1-167] Now, Sir, How is it possible for Words to give stronger Proof, that God is mere Love, that he has no Will toward fallen Man but to bless him with Works of Love, and this as certainly, when he turns the Air into a Pestilence, as when he makes the same Air rain down Manna upon the Earth, since neither the one nor the other are done, but as Time, and Place, and Occasion, render them the fittest Means to make Man return and adhere to God, that is, to come out of all the Evil and Misery of his fallen State? What can infinite Love do more, or what can it do to give greater Proof, that all that it does proceeds from Love?

But as a practical matter what do we do with these truths? The people are not yet ripe for Revolution, and if the history of the American Revolution and of the United States is any indication mere regime change does not necessarily lead to an increase in liberty or justice. We can hope for and/or fear the outright collapse of the State, but there’s little we can do to either bring about or prevent such a cataclysm, and if it were to happen there’s a very good chance a new band of robbers as bad as the ones in power now would arise to form a new State. No, as Thoreau wrote, only “when men are prepared for it” will they have the kind of “government . . . which governs not at all,” and men are not now prepared for it and probably won’t be for some time.

So again, what do we do with these truths? It is something simply to communicate them to others, since they are not often heard, and thereby do our part to hasten the day when men will be “prepared.” Doing so is not without risk in these United States, and I for one have to be concerned that just by expressing these truths publicly I place my license to practice law in jeopardy. (Fortunately, while I’ll defend on principle my right to practice law if it comes to that, I’m largely indifferent to the prospect of losing my law license, and part of me feels like the powers that be would be doing me a favor by disbarring me.)

Beyond that, I can commend as practitioners and exemplars of practical and constructive anarchism people like David Gross and J. Tony Serra.

But most importantly, we who love liberty can’t allow our lives to be defined and consumed by our opposition to the State. Our lives are greater than that. I’m reminded that life is both fleeting and “charged with the grandeur of God.” The State, like Sin itself, has been poisoning the world long before I got here, and more than likely will go on poisoning it long after I’m gone. Yesterday I happened to be reading an “autobiographical sketch” written by my favorite political philosopher, Albert Jay Nock, shortly before his death in 1945, and noted these words in the penultimate paragraph:

My only failure in emotional self-control which so far has seemed unconquerable is brought about by my hearing a certain order of music or by reading prose or verse that is composed in the grand style. Not even as a child have I ever shed tears for grief or pain, but a suite of Bach or certain quartettes of Haydn will put them beyond my control. So also will choruses of Aeschylus and Sophocles, as passages from English prose writers such as Bishop Butler, William Law, the Cambridge Platonists.

Nock’s reference to William Law in particular reminded me that Law was featured prominently in Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, a book which impressed me greatly when I read it a few years ago. Huxley wrote there of Law:

Granted that the ground of the individual soul is akin to, or identical with, the divine Ground of all existence, and granted that this divine Ground is an ineffable Godhead that manifests itself as personal God or even as the incarnate Logos, what is the ultimate nature of good and evil, and what the true purpose and last end of human life?

The answers to these questions will be given to a great extent in the words of that most surprising product of the English eighteenth century, William Law. (How very odd our educational system is! Students of English literature are forced to read the graceful journalism of Steele and Addison, are expected to know all about the minor novels of Defoe and the tiny elegances of Matthew Prior. But they can pass all their examinations summa cum laude without having so much as looked into the writings of a man who was not only a master of English prose, but also one of the most interesting thinkers of his period and one of the most endearingly saintly figures in the whole history of Anglicanism.) Our current neglect of Law is yet another of the many indications that twentieth-century educators have ceased to be concerned with questions of ultimate truth or meaning and (apart from mere vocational training) are interested solely in the dissemination of a rootless and irrelevant culture, and the fostering of the solemn foolery of scholarship for scholarship’s sake.

Huxley noted in his Bibliography of Recommended Books that “many of Law’s finest works, such as The Spirit of Love and The Spirit of Prayer, have not been reprinted in recent years and are hard to come by.” Thanks to the power of the internet, that is no longer the case:

The Spirit of Prayer

The Spirit of Love