The Supremacy of God and the Rule of Law in the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms: A Theologico-Political
Analysis
Brayton Iolka*
This note examines the key pair of terms in
the prefatory words to the Canadian Charter
of Rights and Freedoms, “the supremacy of
God” and “the rule of law”, which are said
to be recognized by the “principles” upon
which “Canada is founded”. The author
studies these notions in light of the distinc-
tion which Spinoza makes between theology
and philosophy, and his concept of sover-
eignty. With Spinoza’s distinction between
God and Law, that each is sovereign only
insofar as both are sovereign, we can develop
a theory of interpretation which allows us to
view the principles of the Charter as our ab-
solute or sovereign authority while eschewing
all notions of both proletarianism and
relativism.
Cette note porte sur les termes principaux du
Pr~ambule de la Charte canadienne des droits
et liberts, <(la supr6matie de Dieu ) et <(la
r~gle de droit >, deux notions ( reconnues >
par les < principes >> sur lesquels <( le Canada
est fond6 >. Uauteur examine ces notions A
la lumi~re de la distinction qu’effectue Spi-
noza entre la th6ologie et la philosophie, ainsi
que son concept de souverainet6. Avec la dis-
tinction de Spinoza entre Dieu et Droit, que
chacun n’est souverain que dans la mesure
oft les deux sont souverains, il est possible de
d~velopper une th~orie de l’interpr~tation
qui nous permet d’envisager les principes de
la Charte comme une autorit6 absolue ou
souveraine, tout en 6vitant les dcueils du pro-
16tarianisme et du relativisme.
*Of the Department of Humanities and History, York University. This paper is a revised
version of the paper prepared for the Workshop on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Free-
doms held on 4 June 1986 in Winnipeg in conjunction with the Canadian Society for the Study
of Religion. The general principles of interpretation underlying this paper are presented in B.
Polka, The Dialectic of Biblical Critique: Interpetation and Existence (London: Macmillan,
1986). For a trenchant critique of the jurisprudence underlying the Charter, see R.A. Macdonald,
“Postscript and Prelude – The Jurisprudence of the Charter: Eight Theses” (1982) 4 Sup. Ct
L. Rev. 321. Macdonald includes what he calls (at 321 n. 3) “the explicit paradox in the preamble
and its relationship to sections 2(a) and 7” among the Charters “serious unresolved consti-
tutional difficulties …”. He concludes by noting (at 350) that “[r]ead as metaphor and not as
simile, the Charter engages the entire literary tradition of western civilization. Those who ignore
the codex of that tradition forfeit any claim to participate in the dialectic of Charter
interpretation.”
1987]
NOTES
The thirty-four sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Free-
doms,’ which became constitutionally entrenched in 1982, are prefaced by
seventeen words:2 “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that re-
cognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law”. Whereas the rights and
freedoms guaranteed in the Charter are declared to be founded upon prin-
ciples which recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law, it is
essential that these two critical terms, including their relationship, their
dynamic interaction, their dialectic, be analyzed to help us not only to
understand their import as the ground of our rights and freedoms but also
to be ever alert to the false conceptions to which both “God” as supreme
and “law” as human rule are perpetually subject. To that end this paper
hopes to make a contribution.
It is only when judges, not to mention lawyers, legislators, administra-
tors and citizens, recognize that the rule of law is not relativistic but involves
the absolute notion of relationship, which the theological tradition of the
Bible calls God, and that the supremacy of God is not absolutist fiat but
the insistence that our supreme values be worked out in the lawful rela-
tionship of freedom, equality and solidarity, that the prefatory words of the
Charter will support fruitful interpretation of the thirty-four sections that
follow (including their inevitable conflicts and paradoxes). It is our intention
to show here that, just as the rule of law threatens to become equated with
the supremacy of fact (the status quo) when it is not subject to the supremacy
of interpretation (God), so the supremacy of God threatens to become
equated with authoritarian rule when it is not subject to lawful interpre-
tation.3 Insofar as the dialectic between God and law, between God as su-
preme and law as human rule, is observed, maintained, nurtured, developed
and practiced, Canadians will be blessed with rights and freedoms truly
worthy of men and women. There is much we can learn here from Spinoza
who was the first consistent theorist of democratic sovereignty precisely
because he profoundly understood that neither the supremacy of God nor
the rule of law could be true unless both were equally true. How that is
possible is to understand the genius inhabiting the prefatory words of the
Charter.
‘Part 1 of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B of the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.), 1982,
c. 11 [hereinafter Charter].
2There are twenty words in the equally authoritative French version: “Attendu que le Canada
est fond6 sur des principes qui reconnaissent la suprrmatie de Dieu et la primaut6 du droit.”
31t will become apparent that I regard lawful interpretation as necessary to a true rule of
law. In other words, the rule of law demands a conception of interpretation which overcomes
both relativism and authoritarianism. If citizens, the courts, etc., are not committed to lawful
interpretation, it will be fruitless to discuss what the rule of law may mean.
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 32
In his Theologico-Political Tractatus,4 published anonymously in 1670,
Spinoza shows that, in order to develop what we today know to be the first
conception of sovereignty as democratic rule (the first conception of de-
mocracy as sovereign rule) in history,5 orle must undertake to separate phi-
losophy from theology. Spinoza conceives of the separation of philosophy
from theology (or the separation of the secular from the religious) in terms
of his conception of sovereignty: the sovereignty of God, the sovereignty of
the Bible, the sovereignty of the reader (the faithful individual) of the Bible,
the sovereignty of the ruler, the sovereignty of the subject, the sovereignty
of the covenant, the sovereignty of a democratic people. The concept of
sovereignty is articulated as “the cause of itself’ by Spinoza at the beginning
of, and as the ground of, the Ethics,6 of which Part 1 is entitled “On God”
and the fifth and last Part is entitled “On Human Freedom”. 7
Spinoza defines the cause of itself (causa sui), which he understands as
God, God sovereign over all, in terms of the ontological argument for ex-
istence. The cause of itself, Spinoza writes in the first words of the Ethics,
is “that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be
conceived except as existing.” 8 But Spinoza understood implicitly that the
cause of itself, that which is its own sovereign cause, refers no less to the
human than to the divine, no less to the human rule of law than to the
supremacy of God. The cause of itself, both human and divine, is sharply
distinguished from merely natural (scientific) causation in the first Axiom
of Part 1: “whatever is, is either in itself [as the infinite cause of itself] or
in another [through the indefinite regress or progress of the finite causes of
nature which but reflect another effect].” 9
The cause of itself is sovereign: it involves existence; its very conception
expresses existence. What Spinoza shows in the Theologico-Political Trac-
tatus, in separating philosophy from theology, is that both are sovereign:
each is the cause of itself, and neither is caused through another. The su-
4The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, trans. R.H.M. Elwes, vol. I (New York: Dover,
1951) 13; see also E. Curley, ed. & trans., Theologico-Political Tractatus, The Collected Works
of Spinoza, vol. 2 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, [forthcoming]).
5The irony of the conception of sovereignty which Thomas Hobbes develops in the Leviathan
is that, although theologically and politically consistent only with democracy, he presents it in
order to uphold absolutist monarchy which, however, it absolutely contradicts: see C.B. Mac-
pherson, ed., Leviathan (Harmondsworth, G.B.: Penguin, 1981).
6E. Curley, ed. & trans., Ethics, The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1985) 408. Although published subsequent to Spinoza’s death in
1677, the Ethics is now thought to have been substantially complete by the time of the pub-
lication of the Theologico-Political Tractatus in 1670.
7The full title of Part V is “On the Power of the Intellect, or on Human Freedom”.
8Supra, note 6 at 408 (Part I, Definition 1).
9Ibid. at 410 [emphasis added].
1987]
NOTES
preme test of all thinking and, we may say, the supreme test of all democratic
practice is how to develop a conception of separation –
of difference,
uniqueness, otherness –
such that that which is separate recognizes the
dignity of that from which it asserts its separateness. Spinoza, in demon-
strating the separation of philosophy from theology, reason from faith, the
secular from the religious, the State from the Bible, is very careful to show,
in rigorously precise terms, that the separation of philosophy from theology
does not involve the subordination either of theology to philosophy or of
philosophy to theology. Rather, he holds that for philosophy to be sovereign
it must recognize the sovereignty of its opposite –
theology; and that for
theology to be sovereign it must recognize the sovereignty of its opposite
–
philosophy. To conceive of something as separate but not subordinate
involves and expresses the dialectic of truth: for one to be true the other
must equally be true.
In the Theologico-Political Tractatus, in particular, Spinoza argues that
the Bible, as the sovereign cause of itself, must be interpreted separately –
“from itself alone” –
that is, on its own terms. The Bible, in other words,
must not be subordinated to a conception of reason (or political authority)
which is either superior or inferior to it, either its master or its slave. Thus
Spinoza is unique as a philosopher and as a political theorist in recognizing
that, if we are to comprehend the dialectic of God and law, our conception
of interpretation must be applicable no less to philosophy (the secular world)
than to the Bible. The supremacy of God is not merely compatible with but
fundamental to the rule of law, just as the rule of law (including the rule of
lawful interpretation) is not merely compatible with but fundamental to
conceiving of God as supreme.
Spinoza shows that the separation of philosophy from theology, in-
volving as it does the sovereignty of the Bible and the sovereignty of the-
ology, expresses the sovereign content of the Bible, that without which the
Bible cannot exist or be conceived –
the golden rule of willing to do unto
others as you would will them to do unto you. The golden rule itself em-
bodies the differentiation between self and other such that for one to be
true both must be true. In the beginning is relationship, Buber says in I and
Thou. Original beginning is that which, having begun, presupposes and thus
tolerates, supports, and embodies distance in the sense of difference, unique-
ness, independence and otherness. The separation of philosophy from the-
ology expresses the golden rule of existence, the ontology of life, that which
cannot be conceived without existing. The golden rule is the sovereign cause
of itself, that which is both theological and philosophical, both religious and
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[Vol. 32
political. It simultaneously involves separation from and expresses rela-
tionship with others as ourselves.’ 0
In terms of the linguistic “turn” of contemporary philosophy, we may
say that the golden rule of the separation of philosophy from theology ex-
presses the rule of the separation of our two great streams of discourse,
secular and religious (rational and theological, human and divine) or, in the
dualistic terms of philosophy, materialism and idealism (empiricism and
rationalism, scepticism and dogmatism). The dualism of language is una-
voidable (just as the separation of languages, and thus of peoples, according
to the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, is inevitable). Whether we
involve ourselves in theological or philosophical expression, in religious or
political discourse, what we must comprehend is that our linguistic involve-
ment, any involvement in language, in order to be true and not merely one-
sided, must express the ontological commitment of the golden rule –
that
than which there is nothing more perfect. Our commitment must be to the
supreme sovereign –
that which cannot be conceived without existing. We
must comprehend that there is no political involvement that does not ex-
press the supremacy of God and that there is no theological involvement
without political expression. This is not to say that any one speaker or any
particular Charter would be required, as such, to employ both ranges of
discourse; although, whether we use materialism or idealism, each, properly
understood, always involves the other (if only indirectly or implicitly). But
it is doubtless true that our foundation (founding) texts, both literary and
political, not to mention theological, invoke both streams of discourse (met-
aphor) without fail in their dialectic, indicating that, to cite the proverb
recalled by Spinoza in the Ethics, “horninem homini deum esse” (man is
god to man, or god is man to man, but not, be it noted carefully, man is
man to god).I’ When either of our two separate ranges of discourse is forced
to test out its worth, its dignity, its truth, its expressiveness in relationship
to its opposite, in true obedience to the golden rule of truthful discourse,
then it must explicitly recognize the sovereign standard enunciated by Spi-
noza in the Ethics: truth is its own standard, the standard of both what is
true and what is false.1 2 Opposites, in their separation or dualism, are sov-
ereign only in their mutual (dialectical) recognition of the truth. They are
not sovereign or true in their subordination of otherness.
When Pilate, the pagan representative of imperial Rome, asked Jesus:
“What is truth?”, Jesus, the theological Jew of the covenant whose logos
was God and who had declared that he had come to bear witness to the
‘0See M. Buber, “Distance and Relation” in The Knowledge of Man: A Philosophy of the
Interhuman, trans. M. Friedman & R.G. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) 59.
1’Supra, note 6 at 563 (Part IV, Prop. 35, Corolary 2, Scholium).
21bid. at 479 (Part II, Prop. 43, Scholium).
19871
NOTES
truth, remained silent, although on another occasion he was reported to
have said that we must render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto
God that which is God’s. What we are to understand by this exchange
between Pilate, the descendant of Alexander the Great, himself the fateful
telos of the Greek polis, and Jesus, the descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, the founders of the covenant, is that the proper question can not be
expressed in terms of a Greek (or pagan) agon between politics and theology.
It is not a blind struggle between a representative of the rule of law and a
representative of God. Pilate does not embody a rule of law which would
support a charter of rights and freedoms, for he lacks a conception of God
in whose image all humans are created.
Jesus, in contrast, is quintessentially Jewish in bearing faithful witness
to the truth of God’s word, to the covenant whose word is both divine and
human, both theological and political, the covenant between God and man
which divinely embodies the human rule of law. God’s word, always a par-
able, is revealed to those who have ears to hear (who recognize that truth
is its own standard of interpretation). To render unto Caesar that which is
Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s is to render nothing to imperial
Rome and everything to the covenant, to render nothing to Athens and
everything to Jerusalem. It is to recognize that the golden rule of the cov-
enant –
involves both God and neighbor, both theology and politics. God does not
belong to some Platonic realm of unchanging, finite perfection, with politics
identified either with the contradictions of actual appearance or with the
possible logos of the law of contradiction in opposition to human practice
(the practice of democracy), which is how Socrates describes politics in the
Republic. God’s word is the archetype of human practice, the standard by
which men and women are to live –
the standard simultaneously political
and theological. The standard of divine justice is that which is sovereign
for human beings; their rule of law is just insofar as it embodies the su-
premacy of God.
to love God above all others and your neighbor as yourself –
The invocation of Spinoza, and behind Spinoza of the Bible, with the
sharp delineation of the liberating dialectic of the biblical covenant from
the fatal dualism of the Greek polis, serves to underline the two fundamental
truths which a theologico-political analysis of the prefatory words of the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms reveals. That Canada is founded
upon principles which recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law
means, first, that God and law involve a dialectic of separation and unity
such that for one to be true both must be true and, second, that conceptions
(practices) of theology and politics, of God and man, whose separation does
not involve their unity and whose unity does not involve their separation,
express dualistic oppositions. Such conceptions engender either relativism,
McGILL LAW JOURNAL
[Vol. 32
which is conscienceless and thus unfree and unjust, or totalitarianism, which
violates conscience and thus all the other rights and freedoms of the Ca-
nadian Charter which are grounded in the dialectic of divine supremacy
and the human rule of law.
Principles which recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law
embody the critical truth that, first, they are absolute or sovereign (but
neither certain nor uncertain) and, second, they absolutely eschew all so-
called principles (beginnings or authorities) which either claim certainty
(totalitarianism) or deny certainty (relativism).’ 3 The absolute sovereignty
(authority) of God and law constantly puts us humans into crisis, demanding
that we be responsible for the lawful embodiment of supreme truth, that
we subject all that we do and think to the highest critical standards –
simultaneously political and theological. The distinction between absolute
truth and certainty is precisely that which the Bible makes between truthful,
‘3Hegel, in the context of presenting the process of mutual recognition as the master-slave
dialectic, in which the slave, modeled on the ancient Israelites enslaved to the Pharaoh, repeats
the story of Exodus by initiating history as the story of liberty, systematically distinguishes
between (finite or immediate sense) certainty and truth (as the principle of absolute or infinite
knowledge –
sovereign recognition of otherness). See The Philosophy of Mind, trans. W.
Wallace & A.V. Miller, The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1971) at 157 and 176-77:
Ordinary thinking does not distinguish between certainty and truth. What it is
certain of, what it holds to be a subjective thought that agrees with the object, this
it calls true, no matter how trivial and bad the content of this subjective thought
may be. Philosophy, on the contrary, must essentially distinguish the Notion [Con-
cept] of truth from mere certainty;, for the certainty which mind has of itself at the
stage of mere [immediate or natural] consciousness is something as yet untrue and
self-contradictory, since here, along with the abstract certainty of being at home
with itself, mind has the directly opposite certainty of being related to something
essentially other to it. This contradiction must be resolved; the urge to resolve it
lies in the contradiction itself. Subjective certainty must not find itself limited by
the object but must acquire true objectivity; and, conversely, the object, on its side,
must become mine not merely in an abstract manner but with regard to every aspect
of its concrete nature…. The result of the struggle for recognition brought about
by the Notion of mind or spirit is universal self-consciousness…. In this stage,
therefore, the mutually related self-conscious subjects, by setting aside their unequal
particular individuality, have risen to the consciousness of their real universality,
of the freedom belonging to all, and hence to the intuition of their specific identity
with each other. The master confronted by his slave was not yet truly free, for he
was still far from seeing in the former himself. Consequently, it is only when the
slave becomes free that the master, too, becomes completely free. In this state of
universal freedom, in being reflected into myself, I am immediately reflected into
the other person, and, conversely, in relating myself to the other I am immediately
selr-related.
1987]
NOTES
loving obedience to God and idolatry,14 between men and women made in
the infinite image of God and the reduction of human beings to finite images
of nature whose comparisons engender domination of one over the other
in terms of differences in class, race and sex.
The critical point to grasp, the crisis which we must constantly render
creative, is that sovereign authority –
the ontological argument of existence:
the supremacy of God and the human rule of law –
is neither certain nor
uncertain because it demands interpretation. Whereas the dualism of cer-
tainty and uncertainty applies to the realm of immediate (finite) nature and
is the domain of the quantitatively exact sciences, absolute sovereignty em-
bodies the infinite dialectic of divine and human such that its truth involves
interpretation and its interpretation expresses truth. The critical distinction
between absolute truth and certainty shows us that, while truth is neither
certain nor uncertain, it can be falsified by being denied, oppressed or en-
slaved. It is precisely that absolute sovereignty of God and human law which
always demands interpretation for, in good faith, neither God nor law can
be either certainly known as a finite whole or reduced to the relative un-
certainty of finite parts.
14In 0. Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1965) at 185-86, distinguishing between original and final participation, Barfield
concludes as follows:
[A]s Augustine of old could contemplate the greatest of evils and exclaim Felix
peccatum! so we, looking steadily on that world, and accepting the burden of ex-
istential responsibility which final participation lays on us, may yet be moved to
add: Felix eidolon!’Peor and Baalim [in Milton’s poem “On the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity”] Forsake their temples dim …’ The other name for original participation,
in all its long-hidden, in all its diluted forms, in science, in art and in religion, is,
after all – paganism.
We may note that there is no choice between what Barfield calls original participation and final
participation and between what I here call paganism and faithfulness or idolatry. It is precisely
final participation in the principles which recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law
which guarantees, which creates choice. We cannot choose not to choose, we are not free not
to be free; for not to choose is to exercise choice, just as the state of unfreedom (or slavery)
is a condition revealed only in and through freedom. Kant recognized the absolute constraint
upon freedom –
that we are not free not to be free – when he viewed the Genesis narrative
of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden as the story of freedom; see I. Kant, “Conjectural
Beginning of Human History” in L.W. Beck, ed., On History (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963)
53 at 59-60:
From this account of original human history we may conclude: man’s departure
from that paradise which his reason represents as the first abode of his species was
nothing but the transition from an uncultured, merely animal condition to the state
of humanity, from bondage to instinct to rational control –
in a word, from the
tutelage of nature to the state of freedom. Whether man has won or lost in this
change is no longer an open question, if one considers the destiny of his species.
This consists in nothing less than progress toward perfection, be the first attempts
toward that aim, or even the first long series of attempts, ever so faulty.
REVUE DE DROIT DE McGILL
[Vol. 32
Although interpretation is infinite, this is not to say that all interpre-
tations are equal or that there are not inadequate or false (inhuman) inter-
pretations. Interpretations which are inadequate or false are precisely those
which, in failing to recognize that they must will to interpret others as they
would will to be interpreted, reduce the sovereignty of God and the rule of
law to either certain knowledge or uncertain relativity. The absolute is the
relationship –
the golden rule of interpretation – which guarantees the
difference (uniqueness or separation) of that which is different, sharply dis-
tinguishing the truly different from either the relatively certain or the rel-
atively uncertain. The founding principles of Canada, which recognize the
supremacy of God and the rule of law, are precisely those which acknowledge
the truth of all gods and the rule of all laws, insofar as those gods and those
laws are compatible with the absolutes of conscience, religion, thought, com-
munication, peaceful assembly, and association. But the principles which
recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law equally deny the validity
of all gods and of all laws which violate the fundamental freedoms and
rights of humankind.
In this context it is important to appreciate the critical significance of
the fundamental distinction which the Bible makes between Idolatry, of
which only members of the covenant (those committed to the God of the
chosen people) may be guilty, and Paganism, as that from which, being
nothing in itself, God creates the human rule of law, the covenant binding
on all its members. It is only the faithful members of the covenant, not
pagans, who can become faithless through the practice of idolatry, through
whoring after false idols whose finite supremacy involves the hierarchical
subordination of otherness. In being seduced by idols, members of the cov-
enant become pagans, something impossible for and inconceivable to pa-
gans, who cannot become what they naturally are. It is precisely members
of the covenant who, in bearing responsibility for living the complex and
demanding dialectic of the supremacy of God and the rule of law, are ever
wont to unshoulder their burden of freedom and to take comfort in the
certain idols of hierarchical difference which deny the validity of the dif-
ferences of others. It has frequently been the God of the Bible, above all,
the God of Christians (in their various sects), to which we may add the
God of Islam, in whose name the most horrendous acts eclipsing the su-
premacy of God and violating the rule of law have been done.
It is not at all inconceivable that the atheism of modernity will be
viewed, sub specie aeternitatis, as more profoundly religious than the faiths
of past and present ages whose theos I deus has frequently been rationalized
as supporting ideologies of domination and oppression. It is precisely be-
cause God is the supreme rule of law that he (she) can (in bad faith) be
turned into one or another idol justifying the rule of legal discrimination,
1987]
NOTES
something inconceivable to the pagan. Thus it is the atheist, and not the
pagan, who is either a faithful or a faithless person. The atheist can con-
stantly strive to overcome idolatry, discrimination rationalized as “natural”,
by recognizing that all persons are equal as created in the image of God, or
the atheist can succumb to the anxieties of uncertainty and become a pagan
(that is, an idolater), something inconceivable to one who is a pagan by
nature, and thus cannot become what he (she) already is naturally. Just as
the pagan cannot be an idolater, so the pagan cannot be an atheist. The
Bible is the unique (universal) source of a-theism, theism taken so seriously
that, in the tradition of Job, the opponent risks, in his struggle against (with)
God, nothing less than the integrity of his being. To oppose God, in truth,
is nothing less than to acknowledge the principles that recognize the su-
premacy of God and the rule of law. To champion the God of the Bible in
words, but not in deeds, is nothing less than to deny the supremacy of God
and the rule of law.
A theologico-political analysis of the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms, undertaken in the spirit of Spinoza, shows us that Canada’s foun-
dation upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule
of law embodies the separation between theology and philosophy, between
the divine and the human, between the religious and the secular. But Spinoza
shows us that the only way in which we can, in truth, separate philosophy
from theology is through the elaboration of a concept of sovereignty such
that that which is separate, different or unique recognizes the difference and
uniqueness of that from which it is separate. Spinoza’s very conception of
separation or difference embodies the sovereignty of the golden rule. If
separation or difference is not founded upon mutual recognition which
grounds differences in the sovereignty of truth as its own standard, then
separation is reified either as certainty ruling over that which is viewed as
uncertain or as uncertainty which is vulnerable to rule by that which claims
certainty for itself while denying it to others. Spinoza shows us that we must
conceive of the separation between the supremacy of God and the rule of
law which, the Charter declares, are recognized by the principles upon which
Canada is founded, as the critical ground of sovereign or absolute authority.
It is only in light of the paradox of sovereignty (universality) and uniqueness
(difference or separation) that we can overcome both the uncertain (or rel-
ative) differences that falsely divide us and the certain (or totalitarian) sim-
ilitudes which falsely unite us. It is in their very difference that the
supremacy of God and the rule of law are our truly sovereign authority.
