Reinhold Niebuhr: The law of love and the omnipresence of power

Two unsatisfactory explanations

One explanation of Niebuhr’s frequent resort to such paradoxes might be that Niebuhr was seeking a middle way or compromise between extremes. While such a course could seem attractive in an era of polarization, in which as a response all are urged to find common ground, this solution to the difficulty seems unlikely, given Niebuhr’s vigor in combating what he saw as mistaken, even dangerous, interpretations of political rights and wrongs. He was forthright in denouncing the cynicism of the “children of darkness,” such as exponents of racism or Nazism, even as he recognized their political sagacity, and he could be sharp in criticizing those whom he saw as foolishly and shallowly optimistic among his fellow liberals (Boulding, 1960: 1–41). He sought always to debate his opponents on the merits of the case, but he distrusted any “mushy middle.”

A second explanation of this resort to pressing logically incompatible positions to the sharpest possible alternatives could be that Niebuhr followed this path in order the more effectively to discredit one side of the disagreement he had created and grasp the remaining horn of the dilemma. This answer too seems unlikely, given his distrust of overly simple solutions as too quick to find an easy path through what he saw as a maze of complex human relations. Indeed, the unpredictability of history; the regularity with which events confounded confident forecasts; the frequent disappointment of even the most well-intentioned hopes that seemed supported by expert opinion; the ever-present ironies of existence in which, by responding to what we fear, we bring on exactly the outcome we are desperately trying to avoid—all these facets of reality for Niebuhr counsel against believing that the resolution of any intellectual dispute or policy debate is obvious and clear-cut (Niebuhr, 1950: 338–344). The grayness of the political landscape is due not so much to a generous assumption that every position holds within it some truth as to a grim recognition that no position is entirely free from the warping effect of self-love.

Rather, Niebuhr’s purpose is more than simply rhetorical—it is substantive. He wishes to make it impossible to avoid the difficult, even agonizing, choices that must be made in political life. Citizens, public intellectuals, and those holding positions of political responsibility all let themselves off the hook far too easily if they make these decisions seem easier than they in fact are. And yet well-meaning observers are congenitally tempted to do exactly this: to assume that the just and the advantageous will automatically go together, to dismiss any possibility that self-interest may have distorted their own thinking, to believe in an automatic harmony of all interests, or to declare that apparently conflicting interests may be easily harmonized through the application of methods that are far too simple and superficial.

Human beings as creature and creator

This temptation to run to superficial answers beckons because each and all hold to a shallow understanding of human nature—and in no period of human history has even the sagest political thinker been more prone to this error than in the contemporary era, marked as it is by overconfidence in technology and a too-easy trust in goodwill unsupported by precautions against ill-will, including one’s own less-than-fully good will (Niebuhr, 1968: 67–76). Therefore it is necessary to go to what for Niebuhr is the beginning—the nature of human beings—and here to find one of those pairs of stark alternatives in which Niebuhr seemed to delight: human beings as creature and as creator.

On one hand, the human is uniquely gifted with creative abilities. The capacity to reason and to communicate in complex ways, making possible deliberation over large and complicated collective ends, gives human beings creative possibilities. In Niebuhr’s Christian view, these abilities are the particular gift to human beings from God, and in exercising them humans share in an extremely small and pale way in the status of creator—a “creator of history” (i.e. within history)—that is held in its fullness by the Creator of the Universe (Niebuhr, 1945: 1, 8, 80–81). Dismissing and failing to employ human rationality is a sure way, first to barrenness and a lack of creativity, and eventually to barbarism. Combined with this purely intellectual capability is the human gift of empathy or “self-transcendence”—of placing oneself in the position of others and at least partially seeing conditions from their point of view (Niebuhr, 1932/1960: 25–26). Empathy brings humaneness to what would otherwise be the purely technical capacity to communicate and calculate; true deliberation over a common interest becomes possible, rather than the skillful employment of intellect and speech to dissemble and get the better of the other party.

On the other hand, this very intellectual capacity allows human beings to conceive of, even if they cannot fully grasp, infinity, eternity, and omnipotence. So far as is known, humans are the only form of life able to conceive of the world as it will exist after their own death, and this ability, according to Niebuhr, awakes in them the desire to ward off death indefinitely. Gaining this end in turn requires power, or control over the aspects of the human environment that could bring one’s existence to an end, most particularly the actions of one’s fellow human beings. As those threats are potentially unlimited, so must the desire to acquire more power to defend oneself also be unlimited, ending only in unchecked power, or omnipotence. This side of human nature, then, arrives at a wish to make oneself like God.

Still, in humans’ status as creature, they recognize how very far they are from this condition of invulnerability, and they are consumed by fears for their security. The result is an ever-present quest to exercise more power over others to protect oneself. Sometimes frantic and obvious, sometimes so subtle as to be hidden even from the seeker after power himself or herself, the desire for power, so as to make others the instrument of one’s will, is ineradicable and practically universal (Niebuhr, 1944/1972: 10–11; Niebuhr, 1955–1956: 20).

Thus the second part of the title of this essay—“the omnipresence of power.” For Niebuhr, this seeking after power marks all human relationships. In the field of international relations, some theorists of international politics begin with what makes international life unique—one thinks of Raymond Aron’s characterization of international relations as taking place in a “strategic situation,” or a setting in which the use of force is a real and ever-present possibility (Aron, 1966: 5–6). Other theorists begin with what they believe international politics shares with other aspects of life, and Niebuhr would be among this group. From the most intimate dealings of husband and wife or parent and child up to the strategies and policies of international actors with their vast consequences, the pursuit of power will be found.

Throughout his career Niebuhr became ever more convinced of the depth of the desire for power and the tightness of its grasp on human thinking. He grew ever more skeptical of the proposition that human reason alone could tame and subdue this desire, and bring human beings into mutually beneficial cooperation. “A purely rational and analytic attitude toward life can corrode ancient loyalties,” he wrote in 1934, “but, of itself, it cannot fill the vacuum which it has created” (Niebuhr, 1934: 346). Even in his early days as a more or less conventional liberal, he was dubious of reliance on appeals to individual conscience and reform. What attracted him to Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s was the Marxist argument that power relationships more fully explained political life than did the laws and paper charters on which liberals relied. He grew disillusioned with Marxism because he saw Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat and Lenin’s leading role for the Party as the vanguard of the revolution as creating an unprecedented union of unchecked political and economic power that would, as any unchecked power will, be used to the benefit of the holders of that power, while oppressing everyone else. That disillusionment led him to the ideas of his mature career, which may be called Christian Realism, and when Niebuhr’s thought is referred to in this essay, it is that Niebuhr, the Niebuhr who wrote from the late 1930s until his death in 1971, who will be discussed.

The need for community

But in saying all this, does one not attribute to Niebuhr the very tactic that this essay begins by assuring the reader that he did not employ—sharply distinguishing two alternatives so as to endorse one and discredit the other? In particular, what has happened to the other half of the title—“the law of love”? To answer those questions will require returning to the starting point and looking again at Niebuhr’s conception of human beings.

A first step is to examine that word “law.” Niebuhr was anything but a quantitative social scientist, but he certainly believed that the historical record—Santayana’s “daylight of common experience”—bore out what he observed about the prevalence in all relationships of a human desire to make others the instrument of one’s will.

Nevertheless, this is what Niebuhr has to say in an essay on “Augustine’s Political Realism”: “A realism becomes morally cynical or nihilistic when it assumes that the universal characteristic in human behavior must also be regarded as normative. . . . Man, according to the biblical view, may use his freedom to make himself falsely the center of existence, but this does not change the fact that love rather than self-love is the law of his existence, in the sense that man can only be healthy, and his communities at peace, if man is drawn out of himself and saved from the self-defeating consequences of self-love (Brown, 1986: 130; Niebuhr, 1945: 170–171).” Niebuhr sometimes employed the term “the ideal of love” as a synonym (Niebuhr, 1945: 37). Thus, Niebuhr uses the term “law” to refer neither to an unvarying or even common observable pattern of behavior (the usage of the positivist social scientist) nor to an enactment of human authorities that is backed by coercive force (the usage of the Austinian interpreter of legal systems created by secular human authorities). Rather, Niebuhr addresses himself to a standard of aspiration defined by what is natural or intrinsic or given to human beings. This law is the “law of love,” set out in God’s love for humankind, but not completely beyond reach even in the relations of flawed human beings among themselves. That humans have the ability to observe the law of love is evident for Niebuhr in his contention that unmixed altruism is possible only for “mothers, martyrs, mystics, and monastics.” He means to emphasize the rarity of the occasions on which self-love can be completely overcome, but in doing so he grants the possibility that such transcendence can be achieved.

Again, Niebuhr is not sanguine about the success of pure “rationalism” in politics—of submission to restraints on the use of one’s power derived solely from being convinced through argumentation and demonstration of their value to a common good. He is inclined to see the best chance of restraining the irresponsible exercise of power coming from the assertion of countervailing power and the creation of a kind of balance of power. But once all parties come to accept a framework that balances power, usually out of a common culture and a shared if inchoate conception of a general good, then reason can have an effect in deliberative discussions over measures that may require sacrifices of immediate self-interest in order to protect a recognized common interest.

Therefore, in any social setting one needs a common power that will restrain the inordinate ambitions of any subordinate center of power, but is also subject to some constitutional or other checks that will restrain its own desire for power. The international realm is noteworthy because through international competition and rivalry it possesses strong though blunt instruments by which each subordinate center of power restrains the others, but very few authoritative exponents of a common global good. In part, this state of affairs exists because of the lack of “social tissue” binding the various communities of the world into one community that would possess the legitimacy to oppose the power urges of any subordinate community. Such social tissue may be sustained by the community’s use of “social myths.” Niebuhr uses the term “social myths” to refer to claims made about the rightness and justice of the principles and actions of the community. Social myths never precisely correspond to the realities of history, but they must bear some relation to those realities if the organs of the community are not to lose legitimacy in the eyes of its inhabitants. Without legitimacy, any institution will rest only on coercion, and a community that relies only on coercion is in Niebuhr’s reading of history destined sooner or later to fall. Its defiance of the law of love will cause it to tear itself asunder amid struggles among its component parts, each of which is cynically maneuvering only to advance its individual power.

How then to maintain the power of the center so that it can provide coherence to the whole, while restraining the power of the center so that it does not undermine the vitality of the parts? This is Niebuhr’s formulation of Madison’s dictum in Federalist 51 that “you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” The fact that power is needed to hold any community together, for Niebuhr, demonstrates one-half of his formulation (the omnipresence of power), while the need to support the common good in order to earn the legitimacy necessary for the community to continue demonstrates the other half, the true realism of the law of love.

One thus returns to the original question. Niebuhr insists on starkly contrasting these two aspects of life because he believes that each is a natural part of the human condition. His fear is that his audience will be tempted to assume that the two can be too easily reconciled. For example, he accuses his fellow liberals of looking at the tremendous strides that humans have made in controlling the forces of nature (to produce higher standards of living) and believing that they can take similar steps to control the desire for power among human beings. He sees the two problems as entirely different, with the problem of dealing with human psychology or human nature being by far the more difficult challenge.

To avoid shallow optimism about this task, Niebuhr refuses to conceal its thorniness. It is necessary to see clearly the deep-rooted self-love that brings forth the desire for power. And it is just as necessary to see clearly the law of love that makes human souls unsatisfied with anything short of a selfless devotion to the common good. Only when one confronts the dilemma face to face can one hope to pursue the sole path that is open to those acting in the political realm—to find ways of balancing power that will allow a space for something like justice to emerge among self-interested parties, while appealing to the law of love, and the resonance that it has within the human heart, for the virtue to go beyond mere justice in search of a stronger sense of community and the sense of a common responsibility for one another that it will bring.

The law of love, natural law, and human norms

Niebuhr often resorted to a tripartite division of norms, by which he sought to illustrate both the political requirement to employ power to prevent the desire for power from causing either excessive injustice or anarchy, on one hand, and, on the other, the prophetic recognition that the sheer balance of power will always be ethically inadequate, since it does not incorporate the selflessness that for him is the highest moral attainment. Thus, the supreme statement of moral good is the law of love, to do good and avoid evil. As this formulation suggests, the law of love is of such universality that it can be expressed only as an aspiration; it cannot be a prescription for what to do in any specific circumstance (although it is a vital admonition to recall when making any decision). The most famous expression of the law of love—“Love thy neighbor as thyself”—has provoked reams of exegesis and dispute over its application to the complexities even of individual life, to say nothing of collective life. “The ethic of Jesus does not deal at all with the immediate moral problem of every human life—the problem of arranging some kind of armistice between various contending factions and forces,” Niebuhr told his listeners in a lecture delivered at the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in 1934. “The absolutism and perfectionism of Jesus’ love ethic sets itself uncompromisingly not only against the natural self-regarding impulses, but against the necessary prudent defenses of the self, required because of the egoism of others.” In the face of the “completely unprudential rigorism” of the law of love, one must find something more fitted to the difficult choices of social life (Niebuhr, 1935: 39, 42). Subordinate to the law of love, therefore, one may discover principles of justice that transcend the positive statements of the law of historic states, but are nevertheless of greater specificity than is the ultimate law of love. Here one may locate something like the classical and Catholic expressions of natural law, and, despite Niebuhr’s concerns that natural-law thinking always ran the risk of over-emphasizing the rational side of human existence and under-playing the influence of the self-interested will (i.e. of failing to give the insights of Augustine their proper weight), Niebuhr did concede that in many ways the analysis of natural law by Aquinas was a synthesis superior to any that had followed it.

Is this love that is at the heart of the law of love a political virtue? In the political realm Niebuhr seems to say that justice is all that one can expect to achieve, but that it is possible to attain a more just justice—a readiness to accord to all what is their due less grudgingly and more freely than could be extracted from an unwilling holder of power through the coercive means of the punishments and deterrent threats imposed by other self-interested holders of power in the operation of a balance of power. For example, Paul Schroeder has described the development of a sense of raison de systeme elevating the European balance of power from an interplay of one self-interested and ambitious center of power against another, to a conscious, shared concern for the stability and peace of Europe as a whole (Schroeder, 1994; Watson, 1983: 209). Schroeder found this evolution to constitute an increase in the wisdom of statesmanship, resulting at least in part from a thickening of Niebuhrian “social tissue” that re-knit part of the area previously known as Christendom into a shared sense of being “European” and therefore willing to devote effort and make shared sacrifices to the common project of European order. Niebuhr would be the last to idealize this achievement, but he would argue that, if one were to adjudge this form of the balance of power as superior to the form that had preceded it, even while perceiving the flaws and injustices that still marked this more advanced conception of the balance of power, one needed a vantage point—an Archimedian place to stand—outside the political realm from which to observe political events. For Niebuhr that vantage point—that point beyond the immediate play of politics that nevertheless through its more specific expression in particular circumstances allowed one to make judgments relevant to politics—was the law of love.

It should be noted that it is just at this juncture that the language of justice begins to replace the language of love or grace, and that is a point to which it will be necessary to return shortly; but at the moment what should be emphasized is that natural law or something like it forms a kind of bridge between the moral greatness of the law of love and the practicality of positive law. For it is the positive law—the specific rules governing duties and obligations found in identifiable communities—that one finds at the third and lowest rung of Niebuhr’s hierarchy of norms. “Whenever common loves or loyalties, or even common fears, lay the foundation for community,” Niebuhr tells us, “it must of course be our business to perfect it by calculations of justice which define our mutual responsibilities as exactly as possible (Brown, 1986: 134).”

Thus we have moved from the realm of love to the realm of justice, from the practice of giving without reciprocity to the practice of calculation and from the language of unmixed selflessness to that of rights and duties. This transition is so important to Niebuhr that the three-level portrait of ethical life he painted that is described above often tends to collapse into a pair of rather more starkly defined alternatives. Niebuhr is clear that complete love—love unsullied by an admixture of less-than-fully-loving motives—is extraordinarily rare, and almost non-existent in social or collective life. As such love can be defined, however (as in the law of love) or as it can occasionally be glimpsed in practice, it comes through grace. Such total selflessness is an ecstatic experience free from any sense of “ought” or obligation, prompted solely by a sense of gratitude for divine forgiveness. It is unbidden and it demands no recompense; its only concern is the good of the other, with no regard to the consequences for oneself. For Niebuhr, anything short of this complete self-abnegation is tainted by some element of sin, and the greater the degree of self-regard, the greater the proportion of sinfulness. Justice has a distinctly different character. Justice, in the Niebuhrian view, begins precisely from a close calculation of what is due to each party, and those motivated by justice seek to translate the results of this calculation into practical political results as precisely as possible. Justice, therefore, as a worldly concern that is made necessary by humanity’s fallen nature, speaks unmistakably in the tones of rights, duties, and obligations, and those guided by justice are quick to point out what they or others “ought” to do. This “ought,” particularly in the case of the positive law, may well be backed by coercive power (and it should be remembered that for Niebuhr coercive power did not come only in the form of military capabilities; it included prestige, popularity, persuasiveness, moral standing, economic advantages—anything that gave one human being influence over the thought and actions of another).

In the international realm, a kind of “law” might be found in the maxims of the balance of power, which guard international order against the depredations of those who would seek to take more than is their due. International law, in the form of the sanctity of national boundaries, is enforced through the careful calculation of the total power of any national community that could break through those barriers, and the practical calculation of the balancing power needed by any opposing nation or coalition. (Thus it is that Robert Jackson includes the preservation of a balance of power among his “prudential norms” of international life (Jackson, 2000: 19–22).) All other things being equal, the order produced by such a balance of power—and for Niebuhr, some degree of order must be achieved before other reforms can be undertaken—will introduce more justice in international life than would a mad scramble of unrestrained aggression on the part of the major powers. On the other hand, that degree of justice would also likely be more attainable and stable than an unrealistic attempt to apply the rigorism of the law of love directly to political problems. “The social problems of the modern world must be solved by the guidance of clear and unambiguous principles,” he wrote in 1933—a point at which the problems of the modern world seemed more than usually stark—“but when principles are applied to the actual complexities of a specific situation the clairvoyant intelligence of the statesman is more helpful than the philosopher’s passion for consistency” (Niebuhr, 1933: 419).

Nonetheless, in Niebuhr’s view it would be a limited and always fragile order, because it would remain within the realm of self-interested drawing of boundaries, both physical and conceptual, that separate what each community takes as its due, to which it has a right. In Niebuhr’s words, “The law seeks for a tolerable harmony of life with life, sin presupposed (Brown, 1986: 158, emphasis added).” The prescriptions of the balance of power would therefore be a response—a necessary response—to the omnipresence of power, but it would be a mistake to identify them with the law of love. As Niebuhr put it more pithily, “an equilibrium of power is not brotherhood” (Niebuhr, 1945: 265).

Although he had long discarded the Marxian dialectic as inadequate, the Christian Realist Niebuhr continued to find relevance in the concept of a dialectic between omnipresent power, on one hand, and the law of love, on the other. Thus he told his audience in his Gifford Lectures that “the Christian conception of the relation of historical justice to the love of the Kingdom of God is a dialectical one. Love is both the fulfillment and the negation of all achievements of justice in history” (Niebuhr, 1945: 246). Love is the fulfillment of justice in that, when love brings the participants in any scheme of justice to be less wholly self-interested than they might be in the absence of love, a balancing of interests constitutes a step toward a the realization of love, though only a small and partial step in a world in which the law of love will never be achieved within history (Niebuhr, 1945: 247–251). Yet love is the negation of justice in that, by standing on the assumption that communities will always demand what is their due (though they may be persuaded, or coerced, into demanding no more than what is their due), justice rules out the self-abnegation that is the essence of the highest expression of love (Niebuhr, 1945: 252).

To return to the discussion of law above, the law of love “is a matter of law in the sense that the essential nature of man, with his indeterminate freedom, requires that human relations should finally achieve such an intimacy” (Brown, 1986: 155). The capacity for such love is implanted in the nature of human beings, however much it may be obscured by the fears and power ambitions of the human creature. To think that such love can be regularly, or even occasionally, attained in the life of nations is, for Niebuhr, a utopianism that “regards the love commandment as possible of fulfillment” (Niebuhr, 1935: 116). But to abandon the law of love in the belief that the omnipresence of power wholly defines the world, and careful calculation defines the entirety of political leadership, is to descend into a self-defeating cynicism—self-defeating because it will always provoke a challenger, and sooner or later even the holder of great power will be destroyed by such challenges.

Conclusion

The argument may be summed up by another of Niebuhr’s formulations in which alternatives are pressed to the sharpest extreme: his proclaimed “confidence that life is good in spite of its evil and that it is evil in spite of its good.” If one keeps in mind both the omnipresence of power, which will last as long as the world lasts, and the law of love, which will last as long as human nature lasts, “both sentimentality and despair are avoided” (Niebuhr, 1935: 105–106). One avoids sentimentality and despair, not by attempting vainly to meld power and love into one, but through a dialectic between them, in which power always reminds love that the full realization of the law of love is impossible within human history, while love reminds power that humans are always capable of a greater ethical achievement than is counseled by the exponents of a shallow power politics and nothing else. Keeping both facets of reality in mind makes the citizen and the statesman mindful of “the highest possibilities and the darkest realities of the political order” (Niebuhr, 1945: 276). ¹

The chastening mutual admonitions of love and power can have their beneficial effect, however, only if each maintains its distinctness. By muddying the distinctions between the two, one will probably suffer the fate of either the naïve children of light or the cynical children of darkness, whereas if one balances one against the other one may attain the “indeterminate [if necessarily incomplete] approximation of love in the realm of justice [that is] possible” within history (Niebuhr, 1945: 265). Even this achievement requires that the tension between love and power (or love and justice) be sustained in its fullness, without giving way to what Niebuhr called “premature unities,” or beliefs that any existing state of affairs will embody the selflessness demanded by the law of love and is not corrupted to some extent by self-interest (Niebuhr, 1944: 9–10, 15; Niebuhr, 1951: 155). “Character is created by a balance of tensions,” Niebuhr confided to his notebook as a young pastor, “and is more lovely even when the balance is imperfect than in a state of complete relaxation” (Niebuhr, 1956: 83–84). To the end of his life he insisted on maintaining the tension between the necessity of calculating power within human history and the prophetic call to recognize the insufficiency of any distribution of power when measured against the limitless love of God.

G.K. Chesterton noted the Christian objection to the “rational . . . compromise between optimism and pessimism—the ‘resignation’ of Matthew Arnold. Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour. . . . Thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble. Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of them” (Chesterton, 1908/1959: 93–94). Although not sharing Chesterton’s Catholicism, Niebuhr nevertheless echoed his belief that the truest balance between two equally palpable though diametrically opposed realities was to be obtained, not by blurring the distinction between them but by emphasizing their difference and resolutely declaring that the complex, paradoxical nature of human beings demanded a corresponding clarity of language in distinguishing between them. “The positive relation of principles of justice to the ideal of brotherhood makes an indeterminate approximation of love in the realm of justice possible,” Niebuhr declared. “The negative relation means that all historic conceptions of justice will embody some elements which contradict the law of love” (Niebuhr, 1945: 256). Possessing both the courage and the humility to recognize this state of affairs, he never shied from painting such contrasts in the sharpest tones.