Legion: Many Faces, One Rebellion

How Ideology Masks Humanity’s Rebellion Against the Eternal Law

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Americans today face deep and troubling questions about their future.

How can we safeguard freedom in a time of growing division and distrust? How do we defend justice when rival visions of truth seem irreconcilable? What happens when politics becomes war by other means - when the temptation to dominate replaces the call to persuade?

We see trust collapsing in government, media, corporations, even our own communities. Fierce cultural battles are waved daily over speech, religion, identity, and law. Social media accelerates outrage and fear, making enemies of neighbours overnight. Across the country, there is real anxiety that its political system might collapse under the weight of its own conflicts.

Beneath all these worries lies an even deeper question: What can truly restrain power?

Is it enough to rely on laws, elections, or courts? These matter enormously, of course, but they are human constructs. They depend on something more fundamental: the shared conviction that there exists a higher standard of justice - an objective moral order that no one, not even our leaders, may transgress.

When a society forgets that standard, its safeguards become fragile. Laws can be reinterpreted, rights redefined, freedoms revoked in the name of safety, prosperity, or even righteousness - and, most dangerously, in the name of freedom itself.

History offers sobering testimony to this uncomfortable truth.

Take the Soviet Union, for example. Tens of millions died in famines engineered by leaders who insisted their ideological vision justified any cost. They silenced dissent, treated human lives as expendable, and abolished every limit on state power.

China’s Great Leap Forward killed even more - not because planning necessarily fails, but because criticism was outlawed, truth was subordinated to ideology, and moral accountability was erased.

North Korea’s gulags are not the inevitable result of Juche philosophy. They persist because power there recognizes no law beyond itself, no obligation to human dignity or truth.

Cambodia’s killing fields, Nazi Germany’s extermination camps, Imperial Japan’s wartime atrocities - each used different symbols, languages, and goals. However, despite their differences, they all shared the same root rejection of any higher moral law that might limit cruelty.

Even nations that claim freedom can fall to this temptation.

In the Gospel of Mark (5:1–20), Jesus encounters a man possessed by demons. When He asks the spirit’s name, the reply is haunting: “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

Demons are many in number but united in purpose - not by nature, but by their shared perverse will. Evil is not just chaos without order. It is a counterfeit order, many voices bound in one rebellion.

Although it may seem like an ancient tale of possession, this is in fact a revelation of evil’s nature in human affairs. Oppression, injustice, and cruelty wear many faces. They cloak themselves in ideology, nationalism, religion, progress, and security. These are not identical evils with identical causes. Each is a distinct twisting of some particular good, whether that be truth, justice, human dignity, the sanctity of life - each of infinite value and beauty. It is these precious goods that are injured and betrayed whenever power refuses to be bound by the eternal moral law. However, despite their differences, all such betrayals share the same fundamental rebellion: the refusal to order human power to what is truly good and right.

It is not enough to see this in history books, imagining ourselves safely removed from it. Many living under the Third Reich once thought they were immune to such evil - and discovered too late they were wrong in this assumption. To avoid repeating history, it seems wise to confront this temptation in ourselves - even in the way we invoke Christianity in public life.

There are many people today who claim the name of Christ while twisting His mission to serve their own agendas. They reduce the universal truth of the Gospel to the interests of a single nation or culture. They try to force God’s kingdom through political power, conflating the Church with the state, imagining Christ’s reign as something imposed by law rather than received by free assent.

They cast opponents as enemies of God, turning faith into a badge of cultural or ethnic belonging. They exalt temporal goods, whether that be prosperity, strength, security, as if these were ultimate ends blessed by God. They use Christ’s name to justify division, factionalism, and even coercion, forgetting that He calls sinners to repentance through mercy, not force.

This is one of the most dangerous forms of Legion: evil cloaked in religious language. It invokes Christ’s name while denying His heart. It forgets that He ate with sinners, welcomed the outcast, and refused to be made a king on earthly terms. It ignores that He insisted His kingdom is not of this world, that His reign begins with conversion, not conquest.

Those who would turn Jesus into a tyrant, a racist, or an oppressor of women and outcasts betray His teaching. They disfigure the Gospel by reducing it to a civil religion demanding allegiance to a political order rather than to the living God.

But the answer to this corruption is not to abandon moral law. It is to recover what Christ actually reveals: the one true eternal law, the unchanging order of divine wisdom by which all creation is governed.

So, who defines the eternal law most clearly? The essential starting point, of course, is Scripture itself. But Scripture requires interpretation, and history has seen many competing claims. Figures like Luther and Calvin offered their own readings, often in sharp disagreement. After careful study, I have found no more faithful, reasoned, or comprehensive account than that offered by Thomas Aquinas. This is not about denominational allegiance, but about seeking the clearest, most honest understanding of what God’s law truly is. He explains that what we mean by “eternal law” is nothing less than God’s own ordering wisdom that governs all things.

Aquinas defines the eternal law specifically as “the type of Divine Wisdom, as directing all actions and movements” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q.93, A.1). It is God’s own rational ordering of the universe, and certainly not one option among many moral systems. It is the single standard that binds all human power.

Where is this law written? In the very structure of creation. It is discoverable by human reason as natural law. It speaks in the conscience that tells us life is sacred, that justice is giving each their due, that no end justifies treating people as objects.

For Christians, this law is revealed perfectly in Christ. Now, that is not as an excuse for coercion, but as an invitation to true freedom. He teaches that real authority is service. He calls sinners to repentance without denying their dignity. He refuses to crush the bruised reed or quench the smoldering wick. He offers redemption to prostitutes, tax collectors, and the poor. He commands love for enemies.

So, why is this the only answer? It’s because only this law restrains human power from turning into domination. Without it, even the best constitutions can become instruments of oppression. Rights can be rewritten, justice redefined, freedom reduced to privilege for the strong.

Legion still speaks with many voices. But its rebellion is one: the refusal to be bound by the eternal law.

If we want freedom to endure - real freedom that protects the vulnerable and holds the powerful accountable - we must return to that law. That’s not to impose domination, but to restrain it. The motivation is not to enslave conscience, but to free it. And the ultimate objective is not to wield power as an end in itself, but to order it toward justice, peace, and the common good.

This begins with examining our own loyalties and desires in the light of that law. It means refusing to treat any ideology, party, or nation as beyond moral critique. And it calls us to practice justice and mercy in daily life - to defend the dignity of every person, to listen before condemning, and to choose truth over convenience - even when it costs.

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Oliver created the account Only Form Holds where he explored Aquinas’s metaphysics of truth. He recently rebranded as Ordo; a community building approach that applies the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas whole - without synthesis, dilution, or adaptation - to the practical life of organizations.

https://x.com/OnlyFormHolds