by Anthony Esolen
When referring to the nationalizing of medicine known as the Affordable Care Act, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, “We have to pass the law to see what’s in it.”
“[Law] is nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common
good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated,” said
Thomas Aquinas, defending the claim that promulgation is one of the
essential characteristics of law (
Summa Theologiae, Ia.IIae., q. 90, a. 4).
We should not suppose that promulgation is necessary only as a
practical matter, since it is not possible to be certain that one is
obeying the law unless one knows what the law is. It is also necessary
because law is meant for rational beings. It is not something extrinsic
to the lawgiver or the law-receiver, for “the proper effect of law is
to make those to whom it is given, good, either simply or in some
particular respect” (q. 92, a.1), by the virtue it inculcates. Since
virtue is a habit in accord with reason, the law must be capable of
entering into the minds of those who must obey it, not so that they may
deliberate about it, since the deliberation will already have been
completed, but so that they may order themselves by it. For example,
“the natural law is promulgated by the fact that God has instilled it
into man’s mind so as to be known by him naturally” (q. 90, a.4).
Jonathan Swift understood the point, writing in
Gulliver’s Travels of
the well-governed Kingdom of Brobdingnag, whose laws could not exceed
in words the number of letters in the alphabet, “wherein those people
are not mercurial enough to discover above one interpretation.”
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Professor Anthony Esolen teaches Renaissance English Literature and the
Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. A senior
editor for
Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, he writes regularly for
First Things, Magnificat, This Rock, and
Latin Mass. His most recent books are
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Regnery Press, 2008);
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Press, 2010) and, most recently,
Reflections on the Christian Life (Sophia Institute Press, 2013). Professor Esolen has also translated Dante.
