What is law? This question rings down through the centuries, never quite resolving: Is law a fixed and eternal order, or something that breathes and shifts with relationship and circumstance? Well, if it breathes and shifts it’s not much of a law. Perhaps law touches both an eternal order and the brevity of our lives.

Ancient natural law holds that there is a rationality discoverable but not created by us. Ancient philosophers, from Plato onward, understood law not as a dictate, but as a wisdom that aligns the soul and community with the grain of nature itself. Here, reason is almost a kind of sensitive intuition—a living faculty attuned to the patterns of the world. To act well is to move in harmony with what is quietly right, as a stream finds its channel—not forced, but guided by the deeper logic of things. This........

© Psychology Today