On the Impossibility of Good Laws without Religious Devotion and Living according to Nature (Cicero)
We have reached a crisis of law in
Western society, one predictable enough in light of the rejection of religion
in one way or another. The crisis stems
from not having an understanding of what stands over law. Lawmakers and judges often say, ‘We are a
nation under the law?’, but what happens when the law itself is under nothing?
This brief essay raises the question,
‘Can Western society actually be a society of good laws once it gives up respectfulness
or even reverence for religion and nature/creation?’ The question is not only asked regarding
Christianity, although as a question for Western society in the 21st
century, it is largely about the recently emerged, post-Christian context. The essay will explore the arguments of Marcus
Tullius Cicero, a renowned Roman legislature in the first century BC. He argues that a society’s laws must fit into
a wider cultural context that honours the gods and is willing to live according
to nature, not against it.
In On the Laws, Cicero
argues that wardens of the state (lawmakers and judges) must believe in the
gods because laws must be derived from nature, which they created. He says,
But if rights
were established by peoples’ orders, if by leading men’s decrees, if by judges’
verdicts, there would be a right to rob, a right to commit adultery, a right to
substitute false wills if those things were approved by the votes or
resolutions of a multitude. But if there is such power in the opinions and
orders of the foolish that the nature of things is changed by their votes, why
don’t they establish that bad and ruinous things should be held to be good and
salutary things? Or if law can make right out of wrong, can’t the same law make
good out of bad? But we can divide good law from bad by no other standard than
that of nature (On the Laws I.43-44).[1]
Cicero's view that civil laws must
be based on natural law established by the gods follows the earlier argument by Plato along the same lines (Laws 10.885-897): the argument was well-established over the centuries. In On the
Laws, Cicero defines good law as prudence found in the order of nature:
law is highest
reason, implanted in nature, which orders those things that ought to be done
and prohibits the opposite (1.18).
The reason for such a definition
is to distinguish natural law from civil law.
Cicero warns against laws passed by legislation without any grounding in
nature but only based upon group interests.
Platonic, Aristotelian, Cynic, and Stoic philosophical schools held that
nature is not chaotic but ordered, and our goal in life is to live in
accordance with it. To live against
nature is to live against wisdom (like stepping off a cliff in defiance of
gravity, to give an example).
In Cicero’s work, On the
Republic, the speaker, Laelius, states
'True law is
correct reason congruent with nature, spread among all persons, constant,
everlasting’ (3.27).
Here we have five criteria for ‘true
law’: it must be reasonable, accord with nature, be universal, be constant, and
be everlasting. True law is distinguished from the more ephemeral laws of
society that get passed and repealed for expediency, like traffic laws, or to
protect factional interests, like voting laws. Only laws established in
accordance with nature, as decreed by the gods, are true laws. Many
societies pass bad laws, like the ignorant and inefficient physician
prescribing deadly medication, Cicero notes.
Good and bad laws are distinguished by the standards of
Nature (On the Laws I.44). Cicero warned:
But if rights
were established by peoples’ orders, if by leading men’s decrees, if by judges’
verdicts, there would be a right to rob, a right to commit adultery, a right to
substitute false wills if those things were approved by the votes or
resolutions of a multitude (On the Laws 1.43).
How can a society avoid such bad lawmaking? Cicero’s definition
of law is that 'law is a distinction between just and unjust things, modeled on
nature, the most ancient and chief of all things, to which human laws are
directed that visit the wicked with punishment and defend and protect the good'
(On the Laws 2.13). His point is that civil laws unrelated to
natural law should not even rise to the level of being considered legitimate
laws.
Moreover, above natural law are the gods. He avers that the gods rule over nature
(1.21) and that (civil) law must be modelled on nature (2.7). He says, ‘the chief and ultimate law is the
mind of god compelling or forbidding all things by reason.’ Thus, law is not ‘thought out by human
intellects’ or ‘some resolution of peoples’ but is ‘something eternal that
rules the whole universe through the wisdom of commanding and prohibiting’ (On the Laws 2.8).
Cicero also links types of law to ethics, that is, to the
cardinal virtues. He says that laws
concern four areas: the pursuit of truth, the conservation of organised
society, the pursuit of a noble spirit and the desire for orderliness and
moderation of everything. These types of
law are related to the cardinal virtues of wisdom (or, as he says, to ‘what is
true’), justice, courage (championing the right cause, Cicero, On Duties I.62) and temperance or
self-control (I.15). The virtues, in
turn, give rise to duties, understood as the right and honourable things to
do. From this trajectory, finally, may
arise civil laws. Taking three works of Cicero
together (On the Gods, On Duties, On the
Laws), we might outline his proposal for the relation of the gods to nature
to ethics to civil law as follows:
God/s Ã
Nature Ã
Moral Law Ã
Virtues Ã
Duties Ã
Right & Honourable à Civil Laws
Since ‘the chief and ultimate law
is the mind of god compelling or forbidding all things by reason,’ law is
not ‘thought out by human intellects’ or ‘some resolution of peoples’ but is
‘something eternal that rules the whole universe through the wisdom of
commanding and prohibiting’ (On the Laws II.8). Cicero was wary of what we might call today a
separation of Church and State into separate domains. This separation in, say, the United States,
has increasingly led to the privatization of religion, pushing it out of public
space and society. This separation only
increases the more diverse a population becomes. Perhaps we might appreciate this separation
in certain ways, but Cicero’s arguments might also compel us to approve, at
least, his concern that a state does not become atheistic or areligious. We might further observe how the affirmation
of religion in the governance of a state fares better when the religion is
Christianity rather than any religion.
For his part, Cicero insists on laws promoting religious piety and
practices, for without this all law diminishes into the powerplays of the
political party in momentary ascendancy.
If Western society continues to
dig its heels into a post-religious culture, its laws will increasingly be suspect. Society will be less one under law and more
one that manipulates law towards political ends. Moreover, laws will be passed to advance
group interests. Most especially, laws
will be passed that are actually against nature, such as the hideous law equating
heterosexual marriage with same-sex marriage.
Indeed, a post-religious culture is an antinatural culture.
Orthodox Christians are deeply
concerned with laws passed in post-Christian, Western societies that are
against nature. A case in point is the law in America that
recognised same-sex ‘marriage’ (Obergefell v. Hodges). The Chief
Justice, John Roberts, dissented from it,[2] and it
passed by only one vote on the nine-member court. Like the infamous abortion ruling in 1973, Roe
v. Wade, a single member on a nine-member court upended the entire society. In both cases, the majority failed to
understand the relationship between law and nature.
A law allowing or defending
same-sex 'marriage' is a law that is not only out of accord with nature; it is
a law establishing as law what is in fact against nature. Such a
law fails each of Laelius's five criteria for good laws. It is unreasonable
in defying the meaning of ‘marriage’. Marriage does not equate to
close relationships or sexual activity, nor is it a small unit of persons
involved in other close activities. It is not merely a contract or
covenant. That which elevates marriage and family to something higher than
these is where law is construed with respect to nature—to God’s intentions in
creation. Marriage has to do with a ‘one flesh’ kinship between a
male and a female for the purpose of multiplying. The ‘one flesh’ (Genesis 2.24) understanding
is not any kinship relationship but, as the narrative in the text underscores,
is a male-female ‘one flesh’ bonding that separates the man (and woman,
implied) from parental relationships, and therefore it is a sexual bonding that
produces a new family. Same-sex
‘marriage’ only mimics this. Intercourse
is purely sexual passion apart from the potential of producing children. The telos of sex is rejected. It also mimics marriage in taking children from
those who have produced them according to nature. It redefines
‘parents’ from being mother and father to being merely two adults. Instead of understanding love to develop in a
family around natural relationships, it begins with erotic love that tries to
introduce marital and familial relationships.
Same-sex ‘marriage’ is, ultimately, a mimicry of marriage that is
parasitic on true marriages and natural reproduction.
In Plato’s Laws, his
Athenian spokesperson proposes laws against sex outside marriage between a man
and a woman on the grounds that these practices are against nature. He says,
Were one to
follow the guidance of nature and adopt the law of the old days before Laius — I mean, to pronounce it wrong that male
should have to do carnally with youthful male as with female, and to fetch his
evidence from the life of the animals, pointing out that male does not touch
male in this way because the action is unnatural, his contention would surely
be a telling one, yet it would be quite at variance with the practice of your
societies (Laws VIII.836).[3]
Cicero, we have seen, cautions
against civil laws that have no higher source than legislative or judicial
pronouncements: ‘But truly the most foolish thing is to think that everything
is just that has been approved in the institutions or laws of peoples’ (On
the Laws 1.42). He adds that both laws and what is
considered socially honourable and disgraceful must be rooted in nature
(1.45). Typical language to describe homosexuality in antiquity was
that homosexuals lived ‘against nature’ (so also Paul in Romans
1.26-27). A law claiming that homosexual marriage is legal amounts
to being nothing more than a bad civil law establishing a dishonourable
practice as though it was grounded in nature when it is not.
The example given, a civil law
establishing same-sex cohabiting as equivalent to heterosexual marriage,
calling both ‘marriage’, is not the only example of Western society’s struggle
in a post-Christian era with law. Other
antinatural practices raising social concern are: gene editing, abortion, so-called
‘artificial intelligence’, laws against ‘conversion therapy’ for persons with
same-sex attraction who want to change, inventions of genders other than male
and female, distinguishing biological sex from gender identity, cloning,
etc. Laws against religious devotion are
more complex, since some religions incorporate wicked practices and attempt to
protect them in the name of religion.
Yet a society that regularly attempts to squash religion in favour of a
kind of public atheism/private religion distinction is the sort of society that
Plato, Cicero, and Christians in the West need to oppose. In Europe, ‘hate speech’ laws are regularly
used to silence Christian beliefs and practices. Thus, the crisis facing the West today is one
of law, the crisis of the impossibility of establishing good laws without
religious devotion and living according to nature. (The future of Europe and Great Britain, and other Western cultures, already in evidence, is increasingly one posing a whole different sort of crisis of law as Muslim immigration takes a foothold.)
[1]
Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Republic and On
the Laws, trans. David Fott (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).
[2]
Cf. Jack Jenkins, ‘Abortion fight won, conservative
Christians mimic Dobbs tactics to go after same-sex marriage,’ Religion
News Service (March 26, 2025); Adelle M. Banks, ‘Southern Baptists
seek overturning of same-sex marriage,’ Religion News Service (June
11, 2025). See the Southern Baptist's resolution, 'On Restoring Moral
Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family': https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2025/06/5-on-restoring-moral-clarity-through-gods-design-for-gender-marriage-and-the-family.pdf.
[3]
Plato, The Laws of Plato, trans. Alfred Edward Taylor (London: Dent
& Sons, Ltd., 1934).
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