Justice is the Law of the Moral Universe

Greetings and welcome back to the return of our study of Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma where we will continue on with page 829 of Chapter 32.

 

   Some house keeping is in order before I begin today as I have been on an extended hiatus from this study dealing with a case of writers block, bouts of depression, helping my wife through some serious health issues and also trying to come to terms with the despotism and anarchy that Pike himself wrote about extensively throughout Morals and Dogma, that has now invaded the hallowed halls of Washington, D.C. and will seemingly be entrenched there for the foreseeable future.

 

 Columbia herself, whose likeness stands proudly in statue form high on top of the U.S. Capitol Building, is assuredly cringing on a daily basis as are most Americans while we wonder, sometimes aloud, “what is next?”.

 

  In short, there has been a lot invading my mind which has kept me from completing this study which has now altogether, with bouts of hiatus included, been a labor of love transcending 7 years and numerous hours of my life, and I am glad to emerge from my hiatus and begin the journey again to complete the study of Morals and Dogma as a means to improve society and to encourage anyone interested in Albert Pike, freemasonry, esoteric ideals, or just the curious to follow along with me.

 

  Mybe this will be meaningful to someone, somewhere, and that is what matters most to me.

 

   And now, LET’S READ PIKE:

 

    

It is entirely true to say that justice is the constitution or fundamental

p. 830

law of the moral Universe, the law of right, a rule of conduct for man (as it is for every other living creature), in all his moral relations. No doubt all human affairs (like all other affairs), must be subject to that as the law paramount; and what is right agrees therewith and stands, while what is wrong conflicts with it and falls. The difficulty is that we ever erect our notions of what is right and just into the law of justice, and insist that God shall adopt that as His law; instead of striving to learn by observation and reflection what His law is, and then believing that law to be consistent with His infinite justice, whether it corresponds with our limited notion of justice, or does not so correspond. We are too wise in our own conceit, and ever strive to enact our own little notions into the Universal Laws of God.

It might be difficult for man to prove, even to his own satisfaction, how it is right or just for him to subjugate the horse and ox to his service, giving them in return only their daily food, which God has spread out for them on all the green meadows and savannas of the world: or how it is just that we should slay and eat the harmless deer that only crops the green herbage, the buds, and the young leaves, and drinks the free-running water that God made common to all; or the gentle dove, the innocent kid, the many other living things that so confidently trust to our protection;--quite as difficult, perhaps, as to prove it just for one man's intellect or even his wealth to make another's strong arms his servants, for daily wages or for a bare subsistence.

 

In these paragraphs Pike reminds us that JUSTICE is the “constitution or fundamental law law of the moral Universe, the law of right, a rule of conduct for man (as it is for every living creature) in all his moral relations."

  As I read this I am reminded that morality, and moral law is interwoven into the fabric of mankind.

We KNOW when a thing feels “right” and we KNOW when a thing feels “wrong”, mostly without much effort from our upbringings or copious amounts of time in the church pew or synagogue or mosque ot whatever form of moral teachings from our childhood or even our local or contrywide laws would dictate upon us under penaties should we stray.

 Pike reminds us that OUR notions of justice are short of the actualties of the Creator’s intent of what justice is.

  Especially in the 21st century where we are now instantly distracted mostly by what entertains usrather by that which nature offers us to study, we often fall short of the opportunity to silence our minds and our voices or to focus our eyes onto what is important, and maybe what is important is to be assured we are acting to be purely just in our interactions with one another and to observe the needs of others and be subserviant to those needs in our society.

Next:

To find out this universal law of justice is one thing--to under-take to measure off something with our own little tape-line, and call that God's law of justice, is another. The great general plan and system, and the great general laws enacted by God, continually produce what to our limited notions is wrong and injustice, which hitherto men have been able to explain to their own satisfaction only by the hypothesis of another existence in which all inequalities and injustices in this life will be remedied and compensated for. To our ideas of justice, it is very unjust that the child is made miserable for life by deformity or organic disease, in consequence of the vices of its father; and yet that is part of the universal law. The ancients said that the child was punished for the sins of its father. We say that this its deformity or disease is the consequence of its father's vices; but so far as concerns the question of justice or injustice, that is merely the change of a word.

p. 831

It is very easy to lay down a broad, general principle, embodying our own idea of what is absolute justice, and to insist that everything shall conform to that: to say, "all human affairs must be subject to that as the law paramount; what is right agrees therewith and stands, what is wrong conflicts and falls. Private cohesions of self-love, of friendship, or of patriotism, must all be subordinate to this universal gravitation toward the eternal right." The difficulty is that this Universe of necessities God-created, of sequences of cause and effect, and of life evolved from death, this interminable succession and aggregate of cruelties, will not con-form to any such absolute principle or arbitrary theory, no matter in what sounding words and glittering phrases it may be embodied.

 

In these paragraphs Pike visits the old ideas (unfortunately these ideas also exisst in some modern religious thought) that a child born with a deformity is the living punishment for the sins of their parents, Pike uses this example to illustrate mankinds notion of “justice”, which are not neccesarily a pure form of justice that a perfect creator would espouse.

Pike also reminds us that a broad notion of justice, “absolute justice” is a difficult ideal to embody in our human form.

Though we are a product of creation and the creator, we do not have the pure mind of that which created us, and Gnostics/Gnosticism teaches that since our creator created us in an imperfect state (the god of our existence was also created imperfect according to the Gnostics) so we may not have the ability to issue a verdict of perfect justice, nor can we really know what pure justice is, BUT, as I mentioned earlier, we innately can understand when we have been incorrect or correct in our actions.

It takes time to mature enough to try to correct our misdeeds and admit to them, but hopefully we all get the chance to do so as we chisel away at our imperfect ashlars.

 

   With that, I will end our study for this time.

     It is my intent to return next week and continue chapter 32.

 

     Thank you for your time to read along, please remember you can also read earlier chapters at masonicme.wordpress.com

    I will be working later this year to combine all of the chapters into one readable format/website.