Logos and Nomos: A Perspective on the Polity Theory in Plato and St. Augustine
Resource
政治科學論叢, 2, 153-180
Journal
政治科學論叢
Journal Issue
2
Pages
153-180
Date Issued
1991-05
Date
1991-05
Author(s)
Chen, S.S.
Abstract
This passage deals with a species of political language adopted in the discussion of the nature of politics and, accordingly, the most ideal polity during Greek and late Roman ages. Plato and St. Augustine have been selected and the representative thinkers who used the antithesis of Logos and Nomos to expound the human dilemma in conducting the political life. Logos appears as the source of the moral order from which man completes himself and realizes his nature as a social being, and Nomos comes to stand for sets of rules, conventions and enactments with which humans regulate their social interactions with each other and maintain a legal order. It is argued that Plato, as a moral philosopher, envisages a radical transformation of social fabric in such a way that every man’s social functions are predestined in order to partake of a part of the total picture, harmonious and well-designed, which he calls justice. In so doing, his plan of social engineering amounts to “philosophizing politics”, i.e., political space is somewhat eliminated and the political process becomes the “ordering of the world.” Augustine, as a theologian whose major concern is absolute peace and the salvation the soul, conceptually distinguishes the world into two: civitas Dei and civitas terrene; and it is his goal to persuade people that Nomos stands for no more than human gloria, but Logos is to be found in the union with God. Therefore faith, rather than human intellect, should be on the front stage of human politics, in which abound, nonetheless, eternal struggles rather than eternal peace. The antithesis of Logos and Nomos hence provided itself as a paradigm for theorists who were confronted with the choice between a moral order and a legal one before the early Medieval time. And a lesson is perhaps in sight that in human politics neither order is conceivable without leaving room for the other.
Type
journal article