Our Sunday School class is working its way through Tom Wright’s Simply Christian. The first part of the book talks about four things — echoes of a voice, Wright calls them — that hint at the reality of God. Those things are justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty.

The question that springs to mind for me  is whether these are four things, or different aspects of the same thing. Can justice be beautiful? As it turns out, perhaps so. Aquinas says that there are three conditions to beauty: integrity, proportion, and clarity (or brightness). Can we talk about a law, or the law, in those terms?

Can we say that a law has integrity? “Integrity” comes from the Latin word for “intact.” We can certainly ask whether a particular law is consistent with itself, and with higher principles? Does its enactment, in other words, leave the Law, the collection of laws, more or less intact? Think about the Declaration Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration announces that it intends to comport with principles so basic that they need no proof and cannot be argued.  And then, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Any law that does not comport with those principles must be changed, because it is, Aquinas would say, no law at all. And any government that subverts them deserves to go also.

How about proportion? In the West, we would say today that proportionality is foundational to law. There was a proportionality clause in Magna Carta (Clause 20), and in the United States we all are familiar with the condemnation of cruel and unusual punishment in the 8th Amendment. (This seems to be a principle that for much of Western history was honored more in the breach than the observance; England had a whole host of capital crimes well into the 19th Century.) If we were to make the Law proportional to the risks we face, we would undoubtedly focus more on climate change and less on petty drug offenses. (I recall the columnist George Will saying that if we wanted to allow one thing that most jeopardizes health and safety, it should be not supersized soft drinks or chewing tobacco but left turns — right in the UK.)

And, last but not least, clarity? A law should be nothing if not clear. Punishing someone under an incomprehensible law is barbaric. The law should be both clear in itself, and clear in relation to its purpose. The failure to achieve the latter goal explains much of the current divisiveness in our political discourse, as it relates to legislative activity. Whether it be more severe immigration laws, or a change in our treatment of migrants and refugees, or a tightening of bankruptcy law, or the entry into and subsequent withdrawal from international accords on climate change or nuclear development in Iran or many other things, such debate is largely fruitless unless we can answer this question: what is the problem this law, or treaty, or accord is trying to solve? Such problems are always complex, and so the answers must be. “Climate change” or “controlling our borders” simply won’t do. But only after we answer the clarity question can we get to the other to: does the law have integrity, by dealing with the real problem and not some T-shirt / Twitter catchphrase reference to it, and is it proportional, by being a measured response to the problem? Large numbers of undocumented aliens arriving at the southern border is clearly a problem, but separating parents from children and encaging the latter have neither integrity nor proportion in their favor.

One thing is missing, however, not in what make a law beautiful but in how we might make a beautiful law. That thing is humility. Aquinas rated humility just behind charity and justice on the list of virtues, because he saw them as virtues in themselves, whereas humility was the virtue that oriented us to the proper rather than selfish goals. What would humility in the law be? It would be a recognition that problems are complex and that they don’t always have legal solutions. As terrifying as climate change may be, we in the developed world need to remember that the residents of the developing world may have a different view of how to solve it, because economic development requires increased energy consumption. The second thing to remember is that laws can only take us so far. If I am determined to wash all my clothes in hot water, or eat beef twice a day, and I have the money to do it, no law will stop me. We would do well to remember Dr. Johnson’s admonition: “How small, of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” The solution to climate change and refugee crises ultimately will require a change in heart. When we have more beautiful hearts, beautiful laws will follow.