Abstract

Saint Thomas Aquinas harmonized four ostensibly competing views of law: positive (governmental enactment); natural (discovered by reason); Divine (revealed in scripture); and Eternal (God, Logos, or the ultimate nature of reality). He postulated that this was an ascending order - thus enacted law which was intrinsically unjust was not law at all. Both our own Martin Luther King and Thomas Jefferson used this understanding to indicate that unjust law could be disobeyed, and in fact, was not law. Plato, father of Western Philosophy, reinterpreted a pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses as instead, a system of eternal values known as Forms or Ideas. Thus God became the Good, and the other personalities were described as values, such as Truth and Beauty. For thousands of years, in Western Jurisprudence, a definition of Law has been attempted. These definitions have ranged from morality to anarchy. They have speculated law should be economic-based to the other pole that law should be liberty-based. As of this writing much of the world believes, as did Aquinas that law is God-based. It is queried, is it possible that all of these views have some correct quality in them? That is the thesis of this paper: that law is a timeless balancing of certain legitimate and immutable values and approaches; that these approaches go from the mundane command approach, to the transcendental spiritual approach. Law includes dignity and truth values, but also includes - and has room for - spiritual values. The approach is based on the methodology of Aquinas and Plato, but has greater specificity, which is synchrony with case law. The article traces the great jurisprudential debates and the possibility that there is a timeless approach to law.