Select Works of Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke

to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust; and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author and founder of society.”³⁵

      AUTHORITY AND

      THE ORDER OF CREATION

      This sense that authority is a trust given by God is all the more necessary “where popular authority is absolute and unrestrained.” No one can and no one should punish a whole people, Burke said, but this conclusion followed: “A perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world.” It is essential, then, that the people “should not be suffered to imagine that their will, any more than that of kings, is the standard of right and wrong.” To exercise political power or any part of it, the people must empty themselves “of all the lust of selfish will, which without religion it is utterly impossible they ever should.” They must become “conscious that they exercise, and exercise perhaps in a higher link of the order of delegation, the power, which to be legitimate must be according to that external immutable law, in which will and reason are the same.”³⁶

      The phrase concerning the place of the people in the order of delegation is interesting because it may refer to a theory of the origin of political authority which was generally accepted in Late Scholasticism and was most elaborately presented by the sixteenth-century Jesuit Francisco Suarez. In this theory, all political authority comes from God, not by any special divine act, but simply as a consequence of God’s having made man a political animal by nature. This authority consequently inheres in the first instance in the body politic or whole community. But the community can and, for its own common good, normally will transfer its authority to a king or a body of men smaller than the whole.³⁷

      In any case, God plays a larger role in Burke’s political theory than in Paine’s. For Paine, once God had given man his original rights at the creation, His work was done. Men then were able to create political authority out of their own wills. But for Burke, the authority of even the people was a trust held from God. They were accountable to Him for their conduct in it, and they must perform it in accordance with “that eternal immutable law, in which will and reason are the same.” In Burke’s thought, arbitrary will was never legitimate, because will was never superior to reason, not even in the sovereign Lord of the Universe. In God, however, will is always rational because His will is identical with His reason. The people, for their part, must make their will rational by keeping it in subordination to and conformity with the law of God.

      THE MORAL ORDER OF CREATION

      The law of God that Burke has in mind is not only or primarily His revealed law but the natural moral law, because it is a law that follows from the nature of man as created by God. The Creator is

      the institutor, and author and protector of civil society; without which civil society man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable, nor even make a remote and faint approach to it. . . . He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection—He willed therefore the state—He willed its connection with the source and original archetype of all perfection.³⁸

      There is an entire metaphysics implicit in this passage. God, as Creator, is the source of all being. The infinite fullness of His being, therefore, is the archetype of all finite being and becoming. All created beings reflect the goodness of their primary cause and tend toward their own full development or perfection by approaching His perfection, each in its own mode and within the limits of its potentialities. The state, as the necessary means of human perfection, must be connected to that original archetype. In Burke’s philosophy, there can be no merely secular society, because there is no merely secular world.

      The end of the state, for Burke, is divinely set and in its highest reach is nothing less than the perfection of human nature by its virtue. (According to Burke, “in a Christian Commonwealth the Church and the State are one and the same thing, being different integral parts of the same whole.”³⁹ He thus found it easy to attribute to the state, or commonwealth, or civil society, the totality of men’s social goals, whereas we today should be inclined to divide them between the political and religious spheres.)

      Hence Burke could say, “Society is indeed a contract,”⁴⁰ but with a difference. The constitution of civil society was a convention whose shape and form was not a necessary conclusion drawn from principles of natural law. Nonetheless, society was natural in the sense of being the necessary and divinely willed means to achieve the perfection of human nature. If one equates the natural with the primitive, one will say that it is more natural to live in a cave than in a house; that is what is usually implied in the phrase “back to nature.” But if one equates the natural with the mature perfection of any species of being, one will say that it is more natural for human beings to live in houses than in caves. Houses are undeniably artificial works of human hands, but they are a natural habitat for men because they more adequately satisfy the needs of human nature than caves can do. Similarly—and this was Burke’s meaning—civil society is artificial, conventional, even, if you will, contractual. But it is natural to man because “he is never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated, and most predominates.⁴¹ The Aristotelian teleology of this remark seems obvious.

      THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

      Society, then, is indeed a contract, but not one to be regarded in the same light as a commercial contract that is entered into for a limited and self-interested purpose and can be dissolved at the will of the contracting parties. Paine could look upon human society as rather like a vast commercial concern, potentially worldwide in scope, that was held together by reciprocal interest and mutual consent. Burke could not share this utilitarian view of society:

      It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.⁴²

      Because of the nature of its purposes, the contract of society has a character and a binding force that are different from those of ordinary contracts. “As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”⁴³ This sentence offended Paine’s commonsense mind and led him to ask what possible obligation can exist between those who are dead and gone, and those who are not yet born and arrived in the world; a fortiori, how could either of them impose obligations on the living? In a literal sense he was, of course, quite right. But if one turns one’s attention from contracting wills to the rational moral ends which those wills are bound to serve, one may conclude that, in the light of those ends, obligations descend upon the present generation from the past, and there are obligations in regard to generations yet unborn.

      Men achieve their natural social goals only in history. The structures inherited from the past, if they have served and still serve those goals, are binding upon those who are born into them. These persons are not morally free to dismantle the structures at pleasure and to begin anew from the foundations. For the goals in question are not those alone of the collection of individuals now present on earth, but also those of human nature and of God.

      The constitution of a society, conventional and historically conditioned though it is, becomes a part of the natural moral order because of the ends that it serves. This is the thought that lies behind Burke’s rhetorical language in the next part of the passage on the contract of society:

      Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law.⁴⁴

      The “great primaeval contract” and the “inviolable oath” are, of course, the moral order of the world as established by God. That moral order