|
19) ESSAYS: PHILOSOPHICAL, POLITICAL, ECONOMIC.
This section will include various essays that did not easily fit in an earlier category.
Here I will include fourteen essays: 1) "Truth as a Democratic Project"; 2) "Democracy and Religion: On the Existence and Non-Existence of Nations"; 3) "Friendship and Political Philosophy"; 4) Entitlements: Unexpected Paradoxes of the Generous State"; 5) "Self-Discipline"; 6) "The State that Justifies"; 7) "Solzhenitsyn at College"; 8) "The Student before St. Thomas"; 9) "The Origins of Conservative Thought: The Christian Tradition"; 10) "Contemplata Tradere"; 11) "'Destined to Eternal Happiness: The Social Teachings of the General Catechism"; 12) "Liberation Theology: Afterthoughts"; 13) "The Full Catholic Message"; 14) "On the Pleasure of Walking about Derby."
“New Series” (which series will come first): I will include the following essays which will appear immediately below; the previous series will follow the New Series: 1) “Philosophy: Why What Is Useless Is the Best Thing About Us,” 2) “What Do Philosophers Know?” 3) “On the Paradoxical Place of Political Philosophy in the Structure of Reality,” 4) “Modernity: What Is It?” 5) “On the Problem of Philosophic Learning,” 6) “On the Academic Discipline of Political Science,” 7) “On the Measure and Conservation of Human Things,”8) “Why Is Political Philosophy Different?” 9) “Worship and Political Philosophy,” 10) “Fides et Ratio: Approaches to a Roman Catholic Political Philosophy.”
New Series:
1) Published in Vital Speeches, LXV (August 1, 1999), 628-32. It also appears in The Unseriousness of Human Affairs. Originally an Address at Department of Philosophy, University of Nebraska at Kearney.
PHILOSOPHY Why What Is Useless Is the Best Thing about Us
“Intelligence (phronēsis, prudentia) does not control wisdom or the better part of the soul, just as medical science does not control health. For it does not use health, but only aims to bring health into being; hence it prescribes for the sake of health but does not prescribe to health. Besides, saying that intelligence controls wisdom would be like saying that political science rules the gods because it prescribes about everything in the city.” – Aristotle, The Ethics, VI, 13, 1145a8-12.
“Dissipation: The mother of dissipation is not joy but joylessness.” -- Nietzsche, “Mixed Opinions and Maxims,” #77, 1879.
I.
Let me begin with a sentence found early in Cicero’s Dialogue De Senectute: “No praise, then, is too great for philosophy!” They are words that shall guide our reflections here. However, we shall mean by philosophy not just the moral philosophy that Cicero praised, nor merely political philosophy that wonders how to render the forceful politician benevolent to the truths of the theoretic life, but philosophy as such, the philosophy that includes metaphysics along with moral and political philosophy. And yes, I do say that philosophy as such is “useless”; yes, I do maintain it is the best thing about us, for it leads to the highest things, to things even perhaps beyond philosophy but not apart from its most perceptive inquiries. In short, there are things “worth doing for their own sakes,” as the Greeks taught us with surprising precision.
The choice of modern man, it is said in a famous book (After Virtue), is between Aristotle
and Nietzsche.
We are all, no doubt, most interested in both health and joy, though perhaps not for the same reasons. Even if we are not healthy, we certainly desire to be so. Even if we be joyless, we want to know joy; otherwise we would not suspect that we lacked it. Indeed, if we are dissipated, we probably, at some point, long for order in our lives. And suffering, which implies the lack of health and perhaps of joy, is not, in the ultimate order of things, totally without purpose. “Is it better to suffer evil or to do it?” is a very ancient and hardly indifferent question already found authoritatively answered in The Apology of Socrates. And if it is better to suffer evil than to do it, we still do not, on theoretic grounds, seek to encourage the existence of the evil just so we can suffer. Suffering evil, though we are reluctant to admit it, may indeed be evil’s ultimate remedy. Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” remains both mysterious and instructive in this light. “Man learns by suffering,” the Greek poet observed. And what does he learn? Surely he learns that just as the purpose of war is peace, so the purpose of suffering is health, even beatitude, the highest activity of health.
Aristotle’s rather enigmatic observation that medical science prescribes for the sake of health but not to health contains one of the most fertile insights in all of philosophy (1145a10). For it says nothing less than that when we have our health, “health produces health,” as he put it in another place (1144a5). That is, once a doctor has helped to cure us (ultimately, nature cures us), once we are healthy, the doctor’s task ends. Qua doctor, he can tell us no more. The question then arises, “now what?” What do we “do” when we are healthy, when we are no longer concerned about our health and how to recover it or preserve it? When we are not confined to a hospital, what is to occupy us? If we are made to be healthy, what is the activity of health? What is the life of “health” that “health” produces? It must be more than just keeping our health. For starters, St. Thomas points out in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics (#1075) that “proper adaptation to (human) affairs and people is more laborious and difficult than knowing remedies in which the whole art of medicine consists.”
When we are healthy, we do not notice the functioning of our various powers and capacities; we are outgoing, noticing what it is that fascinates or interests us. Does man, then, have a peculiar activity that sets him apart, something he delights in just doing? And if he does, would this delightful activity be a mere unintended accident? Is his given being complete without the activity that follows on what he is? “Do the carpenter and the leather-worker have their functions and actions, while a human being has none, and is by nature idle (in vain), without function?” Aristotle asks. “Or just as an eye, hand, foot and, in general, every bodily part apparently has a function, may we likewise ascribe to a human being some function besides all these?” (1097b28-33). And if there is such a function, is it best to be described as “necessary” or “useful”? Necessary always points to the un-necessary. The “useful” always points to what is beyond use. The part points to the whole. Our hand, the ultimate tool in the universe, that “part” by which our mind gets outside of mind to change things, is not a hand if it is not attached to us, as Aristotle also remarked.
The “Little Prince” said that it is the time that we “waste” with our friends that really counts. Is the world so occupied that we have no time to waste? Why do we like to play and to watch others playing? Plato said that human life is not “serious.” Man is the “plaything” of the gods (803c). In saying this, he was not denigrating us, but praising our lives for what they are. It is not “necessary” that we exist. Yet, we do exist. We exist for a reason not rooted in determinism. The fact that we exist but need not exist expresses the most profound thing about us. It implies that we exist because of a choice, a love, a freedom, grounded in what is beyond necessity. It implies that our lives should reflect this non-necessity, this freedom to be what we are not of ourselves.
Aristotle told us not to listen to those who tell us, being human, to devote our lives to human things (1177b32-78a2). Such “human” things are political things, economic things, things that seem to take all of our time, things that have their place in the order of reality yet do not describe what we are really about. It is all right to spend much time on political and economic things, for it is permitted to be what we are, finite, mortal beings. It takes a lot of trouble to keep us going. But Aristotle added, if man were the highest being in the universe, these human and political things would constitute the highest science (1141a20-22). But man is not the highest being in the universe. Thus political science does not “rule the gods,” as our introductory citation reminds us. Yet, Aristotle tells us, to spend as much time as we can on the highest things, even if what we acquire is little by comparison. To be human we must be more than human, a truth that we are often loathe to accept. Aristotle called our capacity to contemplate the highest things precisely “divine,” even while he was sure we are not gods and do not want to become gods. Thinking about friendship, we do not want to cease to be what we are. We don’t want our friend to become a king or a god (1159a5-11). But still we could be tempted to be gods, to make political science the highest science, to claim that the whole order of things, especially human things, falls under the power of our deliberative choice. If we are to have an activity that is called “divine,” it always remains under the light of what we are. The highest things are given to us; we do not make them to be what they are, including ourselves.
II.
Though we are sometimes told, sometimes tell ourselves, that joy will result from dissipation, it never quite does. Even Nietzsche warns us. We can take the truth of this observation about dissipation on faith, on the testimony of others, or we can test it ourselves, as I believe the young Augustine did. The results are the same. “Do not envy those who do evil,” one of the Psalms cautions us. We find that the rather cynical but perceptive Nietzsche is quite right. How could a mere philosopher like him know so much? By listening to other philosophers much less logical than he, we suspect. Plato talked of a kind of “divine madness,” as if to say that our senses and our minds are not given solely for their own exercise but to hear and see, to be wholly absorbed by, what is not ourselves, to hear and see what is. Nietzsche’s word, “joylessness,” is one I find to be remarkably provocative, as he intended it to be. “You will not find what you are looking for,” he implies, “if you look for it in dissipation.” He too is here on the side of the gods. “What are we looking for?” we cannot but ask ourselves. We do look and seek, even if we deny that we do.
In this regard, I am fond of citing a passage from a lecture Eric Voegelin gave in Montreal in 1980, probably in a context not too different from this one. “I find students are frequently flabbergasted, especially those who are agnostics,” he tells us,
when I tell them that they all act, whether agnostic or not, as if they were immortal. Only
under the assumption of immortality, of fulfillment beyond this life, is the seriousness of
action intelligible which they actually put into their work and which has a fulfillment
nowhere in this life however long they may live. They all act as if their lives made sense
immortally, even if they deny immortality, deny the existence of a psyche, deny the
existence of a Divinity – in brief, if they are just the sort of fairly corrupt average agnostics
that you find among college students today. One shouldn’t take their agnosticism too
seriously, because they act as if in fact they weren’t agnostics.
Basic principles operate in us even when we deny their existence. It is safer to watch what someone does rather than what he says.
Refusal to observe the commandments or to practice the virtues, declaring our absolute liberty, may often seem positively “romantic.” We delight in being “rebels” with or, even without, a cause. Be it noted, however, it is not the clergy who are here alerting us to these moral dangers. It is not even Aristotle. It is the man who told us that “God is dead, and we have killed him.” On this basis, on our voluntarily killing God in our souls, Nietzsche tells us to be free, or better, perhaps, he tells us that we are condemned to be free. But in our absolute freedom, we still know dissipation, a rather dull, repetitive life, in fact, as St. Thomas implied in a famous passage (I-II, 91, 6). If, contrary to Nietzsche’s prophet, however, God is not dead, is it still possible to hope that joy is open to us even when we discover that our ways do not produce it, when we discover in fact that we ourselves do the evils that cause others to suffer, that lead them to the joylessness of dissipation?
We can at least conceive the divinity in terms of mercy and not merely justice. Justice, the terrible virtue, as I call it, may not be the last word in the universe. Perhaps the world is not created in justice, as St. Thomas implied it wasn’t (I, 21, 4). Knowing ourselves, we could well hope that it isn’t. But if God is indeed dead, while dissipation still leads to joylessness, little is left to us but despair. Nietzsche tells the truth, in his own way. For many moderns, his testimony is more credible than that of God Himself. Ironically, God too promised joylessness to be the result of dissipation. Nietzsche’s biting aphorisms often inadvertently, or, I sometimes think, intentionally, rediscover, point to a lost Christianity. Nietzsche’s main complaint about the Last Christian, the one who died on the Cross, was that His followers, judging by their actions, did not believe in Him. About a century after the death of Nietzsche, when the Pope visited St. Louis, American media was fond of ferreting out famous and ordinary Catholics who affirmed before the world that they “disagreed” with the Pope about how to live. They would have confirmed Nietzsche in his estimate about the weakness of faith. Modernity, if I can put it that way, is nothing other than inventing a replacement for what is not believed. The content of what is originally believed might well be better than anything that we might concoct for ourselves. This is the judgment under which modernity lives.
III.
Josef Pieper once remarked that “joy is a by-product.” He meant by this curious observation that we cannot make joy an object of our choice or even of our intellect. It is not another “thing,” nor is it, like health, something a medical practitioner can restore. We can perhaps recognize it when we have it, but we cannot buy it, demand it, claim a right for it. It seems to belong to that category of things that must be “given” to us. We must be the sort of people capable of receiving gifts. Contrary to our Declaration, but in agreement with C. S. Lewis, we do not have a “right” to happiness, or even its pursuit. Who would enforce the right? Is our happiness “due” to us in justice, or does it come from some other, higher source? Who would develop a public policy to obtain this happiness? Who would define it? What would we be pursuing? We can only deliberate, as Aristotle says, about what we might bring about by our own purposeful actions (1112a20-32). We are quite sure that we want to be happy, that we do all we do to be happy. Likewise, we want to be joyful. We even know that we are made for joy, but we know that joy is not a direct object of our choosing. Joy is rather the result of something else. Happiness is an activity; joy is a kind of receptivity. The second follows from the first, and the first depends on our doing what is virtuous, what is right.
Pieper’s beautiful words on joy as something that arrives as a result of something else are worth our pondering together:
Man can (and wants to) rejoice only when there is a reason for joy. And this reason,
therefore, is primary, the joy itself secondary. But are there not countless reasons for joy?
Yes. But they can all be reduced to a common denominator: our receiving or possessing
something we love – even though this receiving or possession may only be hoped for as a
future good or remembered as something already past. Consequently, one who loves
nothing and no one cannot rejoice, no matter how desperately he wishes to....
Joy is the receiving and possessing of what we love; it is not something that we command or demand. We may never possess what we love and thus we may not be full of joy. But if we love nothing, no joy is possible.
John Paul II made an unexpected remark in Fides et Ratio when he said that, in truth, everyone is a philosopher (#30). I presume he did not intend to denigrate philosophy departments, let alone the diligent philosopher who goes it alone, as all must at some point. That it is possible for everyone to know and know the truth is a very Aristotelian remark, in a way. The Philosopher himself recognized, that since we are all in immediate contact with being, with what is, it is possible for ordinary folks just to see the truth of things, even if they may not exactly be able to explain what they see in complicated or technical language (1180b17-20). I conclude from this reflection that joy and happiness are not to be conceived merely as something open to a few, to the philosophers. Likewise, I am rather sure that it was not the philosophers who made us most aware that what is is open to everyone.
Yet, I am here to praise the philosopher. After all, it was Aristotle, the Philosopher, who remarked, in a touching passage, that “we can do fine actions even if we do not rule earth and sea; for even from moderate resources we can do actions expressing virtue. This is evident to see, since many private citizens seem to do decent actions no less than people in power do – even more, in fact. ... The life of someone whose activity expresses virtue will be happy” (1179a4-9). In a declining, corrupt but prosperous civil society, this may well be our only charter of freedom, our only avenue to both joy and happiness. The initial battles, I think, are not fought in the public forum or in the wars of the world, but in the hearts of men, especially in the hearts and minds of the dons, the intellectual and clerical dons. We all need enough philosophy to give us a chance to estimate erring intellectuals.
IV.
Charlie Brown is lying on his back with his head propped on a stone for a pillow. Lucy is
looking at him in this prone position, but with some confusion. Charlie says to her, “If I tell you
something, Lucy, will you promise not to laugh?” Naturally she replies, “I promise.” In the next
scene, Charlie, still on his back, tells her earnestly that “this is very personal, and I don’t want you
to laugh.” “You have my solemn promise,” she assures him. In the third frame, Charlie explains
his concern, “Sometimes, I lie awake at night listening for a voice that will cry, ‘We like you,
Charlie Brown!’” In the fourth scene, all we see is Charlie flipped over on his head, while Lucy,
with not a thought of her solemn promises, screams in utter delight at the absurdity of this nightly
voice, “Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha!”
Aristotle discovered in us human beings, besides the fact that we are rational and political animals, that we are also homines risibiles. We are the beings who laugh -- and perhaps, recalling Lucy and Charlie Brown, the beings who are laughed at. This same Aristotle had reminded us that there is a time and place for laughter. The buffoon who laughs at everything and everybody is not a charming character, nor is the somber man who laughs at nothing (1128a34-b5). Aristotle also noticed that the ability to laugh is a sign of metaphysical intelligence. Why would he think this? It is because he realized that our laughter results from our ability to see the relationship or lack of it among things? And the ability to see relations is the first requirement of the metaphysician and the essence of our ability to laugh. Laughter means that we see that what is put to side-by-side does not go together, or that what is not in proximity ought to be joined. And we cannot help but thinking that this capacity for laughter is connected to our joy, which is a by-product.
Chesterton’s profound remark, that the one thing that the Son of God did not show us while
He was on earth was His “mirth,” did not presume that the Lord did not know mirth.
Philosophy, as I have intimated in my subtitle, suggests that what is best about us is what is “useless.” Let us see if we can imagine something that is indeed useless. We throw away useless things and yet here I am suggesting that the highest things are useless, are things we do not use or use up. To us, at first, it sounds wrenching to argue that what is best in us is useless and this “what is best” is, indeed, philosophy. Philosophy, we know, means that we love and seek wisdom, the order and content of the highest things. Philosophy is not merely a knowledge but a way of life, a commitment to what is true. We have heard man described as homo viator, man the traveler. That is, he never seems to have a home, even though home is what he seeks to have, the place in which he is born and in which he dies. Socrates told us likewise that philosophy is a preparation for death. He chided his young followers in his cell on his last day for weeping. Socrates admonished them because their weeping was a sign that they did not understand what he had been trying to teach them all along. Yet, we cannot but sympathize with these potential philosophers who wept at his death.
V.
What is best in us is “useless.” I want to approach this enigmatic proposition by way of pleasure. To say that what is best in us is “useless” does not mean that what is best in us does not have its own proper pleasure. Samuel Johnson, I think, had it right. On the 15th of April, 1778, Boswell records a remark of Johnson concerning the famous thesis of de Mandeville that it is our vices that cause our wealth. Echoing Aristotle, Johnson remarks that “pleasure itself isn’t a vice. Having a garden, which we all know to be perfectly innocent, is a great pleasure. At the same time, in this state of being there are many pleasures (that are) vices, which however are so immediately agreeable that we can hardly abstain from them. The happiness of Heaven will be, that pleasure and virtue will be perfectly consistent” (II, 221). Heaven is not a place in which pleasures are lacking, but a place in which their true reality is seen in the acts for which they are intended.
Aristotle made the same point in another way. He acknowledged that for every activity there is a proper pleasure so that if a pleasure is wrong, it is not because it is pleasure but because the activity in which it exists as a “bloom” or perfection of the activity is wrong. Then he added that there are many activities that we would “be eager for even if they brought no pleasure, e.g. seeing, remembering, knowledge, having the virtues” (1174a4-5). And Aristotle will say later on that having the virtues is itself necessary for knowing reality as it is, otherwise we end up using our knowledge to pursue ends that are not the highest (1178a16-20). But notice that knowledge is among the things that Aristotle mentioned we would want even if there were no proper pleasure attached to it. The point I want to stress here, however, is that there is a proper pleasure attached to knowledge, a pleasure that makes the activity even more what it is, even more delightful, even more absorbing.
I wish to keep our attention on the idea that pleasure varies according to the act. If we do not experience the highest pleasures, it is quite likely that we will lapse into what are called lower ones, that is, into activities that are disordered and that separate their purpose and the pleasure connected with them. Aristotle is quite remarkably certain that those who experience the highest things are not usually those with great wealth or political power. “For virtue and understanding, the sources of excellent activities, do not depend on holding supreme power,” he wrote. “Further, these powerful people have had no taste of pure and civilized pleasure, and so they resort to bodily pleasures” (1176b19-21). Politicians, those “holding supreme power,” resort to bodily pleasures not because they are busy about political things, but because their souls have no taste for “pure and civilized pleasure.” It is difficult for a politician to have a contemplative life, but without it, he is in danger of undermining even the political life. This idea is also found in The Republic’s Myth of Er. “Self-sufficiency and action do not depend on excess,” Aristotle tells us (1179a3). Aristotle was not one to denigrate the political life. But he was quite aware that it stood in a very precarious moral position. It could not fill our souls by its own pleasures, by the honor due to it. A confusion about the relative importance of the political life, the highest of the practical sciences but not the highest life as such, could well leave empty the soul that lacked the taste for the higher things, that lacked philosophy.
Aristotle frequently speaks of things that are worth doing “for their own sakes.” Not everything can be done “in order to” do something else. Ultimately, there must be something that is just worth doing, something that is at the same time ours and that takes us outside of ourselves. Notice that Aristotle said that the politicians who lacked a “taste for pure and civilized pleasure” not only have no inner resources whereby they might see the limitations of power, but they, lacking this higher pleasure, lapse into what Aristotle calls “bodily pleasures.” They are less than complete. The highest things have the highest pleasures. If we do not know them, we do not know their pleasures. We blind ourselves.
This passage about those in power recalls Plato’s discussion of the tyrant, especially Alcibiades or Callicles, both of whom are pictured as attractive, shrewd, and powerful politicians. The tyrant for Plato and Aristotle charmed the people. The tyrant knew citizens’ souls and feared only those with inner virtue. The tyrant paid close attention to the people’s wants, whatever they wanted. What is also characteristic of both Alcibiades and Callicles, of tyrants in general, is that they have no inner soul, no order of virtue. Callicles said that he studied philosophy in college but gave it up as dangerous because it got in his way in politics. Machiavelli was later to say substantially the same things. Alcibiades ends up betraying Athens and seeks, unsuccessfully, to subvert Socrates, the philosopher, himself. He senses that this latter is even a worse betrayal than his betrayal of his polity. Both Alcibiades and Callicles admit that they come first, that they take their norms not from inner principles of what is, but from what the people want. But this very shifting criterion of the wants of a people with souls of disordered liberty, meant that the tyrant knew how to use the people for his own ends. These ends were never contemplative or self-sufficient, never the kind of pure and civilized pleasure that indicates a soul aware of the attraction of the highest things.
VI.
To make this point in another way, let me recount the first letter in the Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy, a book which a friend kindly gave me for Christmas. The letter is dated May Day, 1948, from Foote to Percy. Foote is talking about writing, learning to write, what is involved. To learn to write, Foote tells Percy, anyone has to be an apprentice for five or more years. He has to write, rewrite, tear up, write again. He adds,
but the most heart-breaking thing about (writing) is (this): the better you get, the harder you
will have to work – because your standards will rise with your ability. I mentioned ‘work’
– it is the wrong word: because if you’re serious, the whole creative process is attended with
pleasure, in a form which very few people ever know. Putting two words together in a
sequence that pleases you, really pleases you, brings a satisfaction which must be kin to
what a businessman feels when he manages a sharp transaction – something like that but
on a higher plane because the businessman must know that soon he will have spent the
dollars he made, but these two words which the writer set together have produced an effect
which will never die as long as men can read with understanding.
The human creative process has its own pleasure that resides in the work that almost ceases to be work and passes into contemplation itself, into the “effect which will never die as long as men can read with understanding.”
Aristotle had distinguished between recreation, work, play, and leisure. The purpose of recreation was that we could go back to work. It was a recognition of the limits of our bodily powers. Work meant constructing the world, the houses, ploughing the fields, the world of making that at its highest activities passes over into the fine arts, into painting, music, sculpture. The normal Greek word for business, however necessary, implied a lack of leisure. The word for leisure, skole, the word from which we get our word school, meant the activities of the highest intellectual virtues, to seek the truth, contemplate the beautiful, do the good. Business meant askolia, the lack of leisure. Play or sport, however, Aristotle maintained, was the nearest thing most of us come to contemplation, as it too was something “for its own sake.” Perhaps it was not so serious, yet it could give us a taste of contemplation, of something that absorbed all of our attention, an experience we all need.
The Washington Post, in its columns in preparation for the Superbowl (January 29, 1999), featured a long article on Bill Romanowski, the Denver Broncos’ tough and controversial linebacker. Romanowski, in his eagerness to play, is pictured as a kind of a throwback to a man who liked to play all the time, offense and defense, to play hard, not to count the injuries, “a throwback to the days when football players considered blood stains on their jerseys and a mouth full of cracked teeth to be a badge of honor.” He then added, in a line that I want to reflect on here in the context of doing things for their own sakes, “I’m a guy who plays every play like its his last.... They say if you love what you do, you don’t have to work a day in your life.” This wonderful remark gets close to what we mean by leisure and contemplation, to philosophy, to the best thing in us as precisely useless, to things we enjoy doing for their own sakes, even with blood on our jerseys.
Our real subject is, of course, the contemplative life. We do not have to rule land and sea
to lead it; indeed, that might be an impediment. It has its own pleasure, pure and civilized, without
which we lapse into other pleasures not so innocent or so riveting. In Mel Lazrus’ cartoon, “Miss
Peach,” we are in a kindergarten. We see a very precocious Francine talking with a much slower
Arthur. He asks her, “what are you doing?” “Thinking,” she replies. This confuses Arthur,
“Thinking?” “Yes,” Francine explains pertly, “I’m getting ideas.” “Ideas are wonderful,” she
effuses. “Ideas? What are ideas?” Arthur persists. “You’re kidding. Ideas are, well, ‘thoughts’.”
“Thoughts?” Arthur repeats confusedly, as if thoughts are new to him. “Yes, things that come into
your mind.” With this explanation, Arthur is pictured with a question mark over his head. He
doesn’t get it. “They come into your head,” she explains. “What do they look like?” he wants to
know. Francine patiently responds, “Arthur, ideas are intangible. They don’t look like anything
in particular.” Arthur still bears the question mark; they make no sense to him. “Ideas! Ideas!!
Haven’t you ever had any, Arthur? Wispy things that sort of float in and out of your mind at odd
moments?” Francine awaits light in Arthur’s eyes, but Arthur continues uncomprehendingly to
stare at her. Finally, in the last scene, to a thoroughly disgusted Francine, Arthur brightly replies,
“Oh, yes! I’ve had those! Funny, I’ve always assumed they were Unidentified Flying Objects..!”
Such amusing kindergarten reflections on precisely “thinking” still remind us that “thinking” is indeed what we are about, however successfully we deal with these “intangible,” “wispy” things that come into our heads seemingly in some Cartesian sense ungrounded in reality. And thinking is what sets us apart, not just thinking but thinking about reality, about what is. Our minds are precisely capax omnium, capable of knowing the truth of all things. What fascinates us, what makes us lose track of time and place is precisely the reality that is before us, that reality we are not. Our minds are given to us so that what is not ourselves can become what we are after the manner of our knowing. It is not sufficient that we simply exist. We exist having now within us what is not ourselves, what is the truth. It is all right for us rational beings to exist because in our existing as limited and finite mortals, we have access to all that is not ourselves. This includes in some sense the awareness that reality itself has its own grounding that we did not give it but about which we are curious, about which we want to know the truth.
“Philosophy strives for knowledge of the whole,” Leo Strauss wrote in a famous essay.
Plato, in his Laws, asked what it is that we should be about when all things are done? How should we spend our lives? What is beyond use and why is it the best thing about us? We should spend our lives, he said, “singing, sacrificing, and dancing” (803e). We are not the measure but the measured. Therefore, we can have joy, can rejoice in what is. Of the highest things, we can “do” nothing further but celebrate them. In hearing this advice, Megillus inquires whether it is not denigrating human things, important things, useful things? “Oh,” the Stranger replied, “Don’t be amazed, Megillus, but forgive me! For I was looking away toward the god and speaking under the influence of that experience, when I said what I did just now. So let our race be something that is not lowly then, if that is what you cherish, but worthy of a certain seriousness” (804b). Though we are worthy of a “certain seriousness,” only God is serious, worthy of all attention. The effect of this recognition of our real status in the universe is exhilarating, freeing us to respond to what we are not. The highest things are useless. They are the best things in us.
VII.
Let me conclude by recalling the sub-title of what is to me the most remarkable book
written in recent years. It is called “the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy.”
Pickstock’s thesis, if I might be so bold as to state it in my own words, is that philosophy does lead us, especially through Plato, in the right direction, but it needs an ending that philosophy itself cannot give, though it can intimate. The recovery of Plato is essential to our philosophic souls. But notice that she uses the word “consummation”; philosophy itself becomes absorbed in what is beyond itself, in what is already in Plato “useless” because it arouses in us what is more than mere praise. It brings us to what Aristotle himself called “celebration” (1101b30-35).
If I can go back to Nietzsche, to conclude, the history of modern ideology is the history of a false celebration of reality, a reality that only corresponded to what we ourselves could make for ourselves or impose on our kind. But the celebration of the reality beyond philosophy, or better to which philosophy points us, is not something merely left to us. If we are inadequate to form it solely by ourselves, we cannot exclude the possibility that it is given to us. Philosophy, at its best, leads us to certain questions that it does not by itself answer, but they are genuine questions rooted in the authenticity of philosophy itself.
Aristotle, to take one example, in his treatise on friendship, remarked that it seemed odd that God was lonely, that He lacked what is the highest perfection of human life. The liturgical consummation of philosophy would follow from the revelational possibility that God is not alone, that within the divinity there is a completion that includes otherness. The human race or the cosmos itself need not exist in order to alleviate the loneliness of God. And if this is so, we can “do” nothing for God; that is, we are ourselves unnecessary, and ultimately “useless,” and this is the best thing about us because we can pursue the highest things, the knowledge of the whole, spending our lives “singing, sacrificing, and dancing.” Philosophy, our pursuit of truth, is relieved of the burden of our attempting to make the world after our own images. Joy is a by-product because we are not so serious, but we exist because what is indeed serious is given to us who are capaces omnium. Joylessness is not our destiny. Joy is the receiving of what we love, even in the highest things. The highest things absorb us, and this is our pleasure; this is why we are at all.
“How do we know that we are philosophers?” we might finally ask. I will point to a famous reflection of Cicero, which gives us, I think, the ultimate sign: “Publius Cornelius Scipio, the first of that family to be called Africanus, used to remark that he was never less idle than when he had nothing to do, and never less lonely than when he was by himself” (On Duties, I). Cicero does not deny that philosophy leads us also to friends and to truth, but he does imply that friends and truth will never be secure if we do not ourselves possess an interior, contemplative life, a life devoted to philosophy.
2) James V. Schall, S. J., Georgetown University, A Lecture to the John Caroll Society.
WHAT DO PHILOSOPHERS KNOW?
“Reason must realize that human knowledge is a journey which allows no rest....” – John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, #18.
“All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness, they are loved for themselves; and above all others is the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all of the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.” – Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, Chapter 1, 980a23-28.
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” – Pascal, (✝1662), Pensées, #863.
I.
What do philosophers do? In general, they try to reduce the disparate facts and principles found or observed in any walk of life or discipline to order. They see that contradictory principles cannot both be true. This mention of contradiction implies a reflective “examination” of the mind on itself about itself. We realize that we cannot “prove” the principle of contradiction, namely, that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. It is where we begin if we are to begin at all. We cannot prove it from something “clearer,” for nothing is more evident than the principle itself. We must assume the validity of the principle itself when we try to reject it. We cannot reject it without affirming it. The first exercise of intellectual freedom is the conscious effort to deny the principle of contradiction to realize actively in our own intellects that it cannot be denied. If it were true that contradictories could both be true in all circumstances, then anything can be true, including exact opposites. Likewise, the same things that are true would also, on the same grounds, be false. Thus, the principle of contradiction holds in its very denial or else the denial could not be valid. The mind presupposes this principle that comes into operative existence the moment we try to affirm or deny anything once we know that something other than our mind exists. Indeed, we first know our own minds when we affirm or deny something that is not our mind. Our only alternative to examining or employing this principle, as Aristotle maintained, is to keep silence, to allow nothing to be examined or even spoken. But this “silence” would remove any rational being from any intercourse with other rational beings at any level. He would reduce himself to a vegetative state. We should, as Aristotle said in his Rhetoric be more read to defend ourselves with our words than with our arms.
Robert Sokolowski, in a seminal essay in The Review of Metaphysics, observed that what philosophers do is “make distinctions.” That is to say, they try to understand, to separate one thing from another, to relate things, to see what can and cannot go together. This very effort to make such distinctions is itself a delight, a fascination with things and our relation to them. Plato remarked in The Republic that the philosopher’s function is to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. Notice that the philosopher affirms and denies, as if we need to make such a statement one way or another about the things that are. Indeed, making such statements is principally what the mind is for, its contemplative activity. This is what we mean by truth, the truth of things, which we desire to have even when we do not have it, even when we say it is “impossible,” for that too, ironically, would be a “truth.” We want to know whether what we affirm or deny in our minds does or does not conform with the way things are outside the mind.
Plato also tells us of the famous case of the Thracian maidens, who exemplify the ordinary person’s view of the philosopher. Evidently, two famous philosophers were soberly walking down the road one day in Athens, speaking to each other of the things above, when one of them, not noticing a rather large pothole in the road, ignominiously fell in it. On witnessing this, to them, absurd, scene, these charming, normal young ladies are said to have “giggled.” And this giggle has become immortal, for it suggests that philosophers, for all their hauteur, are highly impractical beings who can barely tie their shoe strings or notice holes in the road. What, after all, is the “use” of such impractical types that we have to lead around holes in the road so that they do not fall in them?
II.
What do philosophers “do?” At bottom, they do nothing “useful.” What they do is precisely, as Aristotle implied, “useless.” However, nothing pejorative is intended when we observe the uselessness of the philosopher, provided we also understand that philosophers have been known to call truth “folly,” as we read in St. Paul. Nothing prevents a philosopher from being a corrupt man whose intellectual system is not designed to know the truth but rather to protect his actions and deeds from any examination against the norms or standards of what is. Man, as Aristotle said, can be worse than the beasts, which comment, I have always thought, is a slander on the poor animals. In principle, those who are called to the highest of vocations are the same ones who can fall to the lowest. The examples of Lucifer in Scripture and of the tyrant in the classic authors are cases in point. Lucifer was the brightest of the angels. We can find little difference of raw talent between the philosopher-king and the worst tyrant, except in what each chooses, in what each calls his end, his “truth.” Once the end, good or bad, is chosen, all prudence is designed to achieve it.
Pascal held that we must love the truth even to “know” it. Aristotle began his most rigorous book almost lightheartedly by telling us to delight in the things we see about us so that we could “make distinctions,” which, if we think about it, we love to do. We love to know how things are alike and how they are different, and thus what they are, that they are. And philosophers can be lonely people. They can find themselves, as Daniel Mahoney pointed in is new book on Solzhenitsyn, in gulags with everything taken away from them and asked, in order to be “free,” to affirm only one thing, namely, “a lie.” Plato said the same thing. He told us that the worst thing we could have is a “lie” in our souls about the most important things. But surely he knew that a culture could also be filled with folks with such lies in their souls, not wanting to know and hence not choosing to follow the highest things.
What does a philosopher “know”? John Paul II, following a famous phrase in St. Augustine about our “restless hearts,” told us that we are on a journey in the pursuit of knowledge that “allows us no rest.” I love that phrase -- “a journey that allows us no rest.” The Pope is, of course, right. Some would have this comment mean that there is no “rest” ever. But this alternative, were it true, would just mean, as Aristotle also said, that we were the one being in the universe who is, as such, “in vain,” to no purpose. Both reason and revelation exist in order that we know that our being, and with it the being of the cosmos, does not exist “in vain.”
Still, what do philosophers know? Above all, they are supposed to “know themselves.” However, to know oneself, we quickly realize, we must first know something that is not ourselves. To know ourselves, we must actually be knowing something not ourselves so that we are engaged in an act of knowing, an act the structure of which we do not give to ourselves but find it already there along with our being in which it exists. We can, on knowing something not ourselves, then reflect back on ourselves. We see that “what” is knowing what is not ourselves is indeed something we identify with the who and what we are.
But is it not rather dull, even vain, to know ourselves? Of course, we soon discover that we are unlike any other being in the universe. We ought to know this uniqueness about ourselves, as it corresponds to the truth of our being. The peculiar thing about our knowing is that we begin with an empty slate, as Aristotle put it. If we know nothing or everything, we have the same mind, the same capacity to know. In one case it is, as it were, filled, in the other case, it is empty. It is not a perfection of the mind to know nothing. And since we are not gods, since we are finite, we know after our own manner of knowing, though we really do know some things.
Yet, even when we know and know that we know something, we remain “restless.” Is this a bad thing? It is a bad thing only if we do not first delight in what is, in what is not ourselves that is out there, as it were, for us to know. Our minds are in fact capax omnium, capable of knowing all things. The fact that we do not yet know all things is merely the other side of the journey on which we are engaged by our very living and, indeed, dying. Some, I know, despair because they do not yet know everything. But this not-yet-knowing is not a cause of despair. Again the regulating principle is that of Aristotle, of delighting not merely in seeing, but also in knowing, knowing anything, but especially in knowing the order of things. And to know the order of things, we must make distinctions, to say that this is, but this is not that.
III.
What do philosophers know? One of the things they know, perhaps the most important thing they know, is that they have questions that are not answered, even when some questions are answered. They assume that their answers will also come from philosophy, but this is an assumption, though not an entirely wrong one. Yet, if they do not have the questions of our being properly formulated, they will not know whether answers are proposed to their questions as asked. Nothing requires that answers be given to people who ask no questions, or who ask improperly formulated questions.
Should we worry that philosophers do not see answers? Should we worry that some philosophers are corrupt as philosophers, that is, that they refuse to go in one or another direction because they see, at least darkly, where reality might lead them but they do not want to go there, do not want to change their lives? Indeed, we should worry about these things. Philosophers know that they must ask “why there is something, not nothing?” “Why is this thing not that thing?” They know that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time in the same respect. They know they have intellectual tools. They know that their philosophical knowledge, as such, does not change the world, but it does change them. They are more when they know that what is, is, and what is not, is not.
What do philosophers know? This is my last comment. Philosophers know the delight of knowing what is not themselves. This is what they speak to their friends about, what they want to do above all. Philosophy, when done well, when done rightly, leaves us in a state of expectancy, of wanting no rest, not because we are tired, but because there is so much yet to see, yes so much to see again and again. We did not make reality; it is given to us. This too is a truth of philosophy.
In the end, the “private” lives and the public events both cause us to wonder. Wondering about such common events, the things that need order, as Aristotle implied, is still the beginning of philosophy. But the end of philosophy is the knowing, the delight in affirming of what is that it is, and of what is not, that it is now.
3) James V. Schall, S. J., Georgetown University Published in Perspectives on Political Science, 29 (Fall, 2000), 219-24.
ON THE PARADOXICAL PLACE OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE STRUCTURE OF REALITY
“Every human being and every society is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The city, if it is healthy, looks up, not to the laws which it can unmake as it made them, but to the unwritten laws, the divine law, the gods of the city. The city must transcend itself.” – Leo Strauss, The City and Man.
“I will argue that genuine subjectivity is to be attained through the redemptive return of doxological dispossession, thus ensuring that the subject is neither autonomously self-present, nor passively controlled from without (the pendulum of ‘choice’ available to the citizen of our immanentist city). – Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy.
“For these sophists desire that demonstrative arguments should be given for all things; for it is obvious that they wanted to take some starting point that would be for them a kind of rule whereby they could distinguish between those who are healthy and those who are ill, and between those who are awake and those who are asleep.... Still, they are not deceived in their own minds so that they believe the judgments of one who is asleep and the judgment of one who is awake to be equally true. And this is clear from their acts....” – Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Bk. IV, C. 15, #709.
I.
Philosophic discussions sometimes lend themselves to non-philosophic beginnings. It
seems proper to start with a tract that ended in the last days of the XXth Century. The scene at the
theater is the “Tenth Annual Tiny Tots’ Concert.” Present are Marcie, Peppermint Patty, Charlie
Brown’s little sister Sally, and a diminutive girl with long hair, wearing a head-band. Peppermint
Patty tells us right off that she “hates” such “Tiny Tot Concerts.” Sally in turn complains, “Every
time we come to one of these concerts, they play ‘Peter and the Wolf.’” In the next scene she
continues, ‘They must think we don’t understand anything else.” The little girl with the head-band,
sitting to Sally’s left, asks her, “Don’t you like ‘Peter and the Wolf’?” Sally replies, “I don’t know
... I’ve never understood it.”
That is to say, as the passage from St. Thomas that I cited in the beginning affirms, we
possess the first principle of being and knowledge without our having formally to elaborate it;
namely, a thing cannot be and not be at the same time. We cannot deny the principle without
implicitly affirming it. Our acts often make our thoughts clear when we do not admit their clarity
even to ourselves. Even when we would be skeptics, we reveal something that is not skeptical.
Our very rational power is given to us. As Samuel Johnson put it in a letter to James Boswell, on
February 9, 1776, “Providence gives the power, of which reason teaches the use.”
In a conversation at the University of Leyden in Holland, on May 20, 1975, the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was asked by Professor H. Phillipse: “Is philosophy a diversion for you, as it was for Pascal?” To this question, Levinas enigmatically responded, in a phrase to which I shall return later, “if the undivertable can be a diversion, and if a diversion can be undivertable.” Phillipse next inquired, “Is the philosophical attitude – which is in essence a skeptical attitude - not in contradiction with the attitude of faith?” Levinas distinguished the meaning of “skeptical,” a point with which I am beginning these considerations on political philosophy. “‘Skeptical’ only means the fact of examining things,” Levinas affirmed,
the fact of posing questions. I do not at all think that a question – or, at least, the original
questioning – is only a deficiency of answers. Functional and even scientific questions –
and many philosophic ones – await only answers. Questioning qua original attitude is a
relation to that to which no response can contain, to the “uncontainable”; it becomes
responsibility. Every response contains a “beside the point” and appeals to an un-said (dé-dit).
The fact is, there are questions to which there are answers, even when we realize that every answer arises out of a reality that is “uncontainable” by our own minds. This questioning is not skepticism but a manifestation of what Socrates called intellectual “eros,” an awareness and pursuit of the revelatory nature of what is.
II.
“Examining things” is what we do when we philosophize. We would not bother to do this examining if we thought a priori that we could know nothing of what we examine. The burden of knowing what political philosophy might be involves the effort to distinguish and identify what it is not. This may be a skeptical enterprise, if you will, but it has the prime purpose of knowing about things as such. It seeks to identify where and how political things fit into the order of reality. “Philosophy is the intellectual activity that works with distinctions,” Robert Sokolowski has written. Philosophy explains by distinguishing. This does not mean that philosophy just asserts
distinctions and lets it go at that; rather, it works with distinctions, it brings them out and
dwells on them, dwells with them, showing how and why the things it has distinguished
must be distinguished from one another.... The activity of making distinctions always has
something contemplative about it. Whenever we make a distinction, we become somewhat
disconnected from whatever practical or rhetorical activity we may be engaged in.
That is to say, the effort to distinguish things at one level simply means that we want to know what they are independently of our wanting to know what to do with them or make of them. In this sense, there is an unavoidable philosophical aspect to our reflecting on political things, even though politics is what Aristotle called a “practical” science, one directly ordered to doing, to acting, not making or contemplating.
The “place” of any philosophy is, properly speaking, within the human mind while it actively thinks about what is, about what is not the human mind itself or anything in it. Our “consciousness” depends initially on the fact that we have a mind that comes to be in act, that is, that comes to know something. Thus, consciousness also depends on what is other than mind. What is not mind is not itself necessarily conscious even though it has some intelligibility to it, something not of its own making. The human mind, that power that is capax omnium, only knows itself indirectly, in knowing what is not itself. In this sense, it is not a divine mind that knows all in knowing itself. It remains a limited, finite mind, yet, still mind, still open to all things, to what is. Therefore, it is capable of receiving what it is not.
This capacity of knowing all things is why finite beings can be content not to be themselves
gods. To talk of philosophy, moreover, is to talk of the knowledge of the whole, to seek this whole.
To talk of precisely “political” philosophy, on the other hand, is to talk of certain conditions that
allow us to continue this enterprise of thinking, of seeking to know, to love the whole. Political
philosophy addresses first the politician to convince him to let philosophy itself be. Political
philosophy in this sense always remains under the shadow of Socrates and Christ, both non-writers
of books, both killed by the best states of their time.
Among the things that are, we find human cities. Indeed, it is worthy of note in the beginning that the description of the whole, as in Plato, the Stoics, and Augustine, is after the manner of a “city” – “The Republic,” the “Cosmopolis,” the “City of God.” Human cities as such are not, properly speaking, “things,” though there are things, primarily human things, within them. Existing human beings are the substantial realities that ground the ontological status of cities. As we see in ruins everywhere, minus human beings, minus cities. Human cities, while not totally or metaphysically “unreal,” do not fall into the category of substance, however un-Hegelian but downright Aristotelian this observation might sound. Human cities do not exist without human beings, without human beings acting for some purpose, some end. Cities fall in the category of “ad aliud,” of “relation.” They indicate the order of actions existing among rational beings acting practically to achieve their chosen ends, ends themselves revealed again and again by their chosen goals, as Aristotle described it so well in the first book of his Ethics.
And human beings themselves do not exist of their own making. Political science does not make man to be man but taking him from nature as already man, causes him to be good man – to summarize the words of Aristotle (1100a30-32; 1102a8-10; 1258a21-23). What it is to be man is not itself an idea concocted from nothing or originally formulated by man. Rather it is something learned by reflecting on some already present order of being and action within him, already within a world, a cosmos. We find ourselves to be, and to be human beings, not turtles or trees or torrents of rain. Human beings want to know the truth of things, including the truth of what their cities are, together with the truth about their own status in reality.
“The experiences of reason and spirit agree on the point that man experiences himself as a being who does not exist from himself,” Eric Voegelin wrote in his second German lecture on “The Development of Diagnostic Tools.”
He exists in an already given world. The world itself exists by reason of a mystery, and the
name for the mystery, for the cause of this being of the world, of which man is a
component, is referred to as “God.” So dependence of existence (Dasein) on the divine
causation of existence (Existenz) has remained the basic question of philosophy up until
today. This was formulated by Leibniz in the classic proposition that metaphysics has to
deal with two questions: Why is there something, why not nothing? And one second
question, Why is this something as it is? These why questions place at the beginning of
all reflections on man, what we can call, with classical philosophical expression, the
etiological problem of the existence of man and the world.
Voegelin insists that at our own beginning, we cannot but know that what we are is not caused by any efficacious action or thought of our own. We can, perhaps, deny that we have this wonderment about ourselves in our fragile being, but this denial again puts us back at the skeptical question. We affirm something in our very denying of it. Moreover, Voegelin’s second question, “Why is this something as it is?” – the question of form – involves in the case of man the Aristotelian affirmation that man is by nature a political animal, a city-living being, again not something of his own making..
III.
Years ago in Spokane, I heard a lecture of the great historian of philosophy, Etienne Gilson. His lecture concerned itself with the starting point of philosophizing. This starting point, I recall him vigorously affirming, was the certainty of the evident propositions that 1) “there are things,” and 2) “I know them.” To doubt this starting point makes it impossible ever to begin. He reminded us that there is nothing clearer than this experience and affirmation. Even the denial of things or knowing them involves things and knowing. Even if we be Descartes himself, we cannot find something clearer from which we might “prove” that there are things or that we know them. Starting points are not known by prior “proofs,” as Aristotle reminded us in the sixth book of his Ethics. The habit of first principles means that some things are known of themselves, per se nota, self-evident truths, as they came to be called. They are known in the first act of knowing anything else, hence their firstness. The attempt to prove all proof is an infinite regression that results in knowing nothing.
Gilson at a certain point in his lecture took a glass of water that was on the podium. He
held it in front of us. We wondered what he was about. He placed the glass of water in his hand
and showed it to us. “If I said that what I have in my hand was a block of wood,” he provocatively
told us, “you would all sit up and pay attention. You would be curious. But if I said that it is a
glass of water, you would say, ‘so what.’” Gilson let this account sink in a bit. No one protested
that the glass of water was really a block of wood. The dream world and the real world were
assumed to be different. Then he added, with some rhetorical force, “but the truth is that it is a
glass of water and not a block of wood. True things may be very common things that we know all
along. It is falsity that often strikes us, makes us pay attention.” I have never quite forgotten that
glass of water that was not a block of wood, that “there are things and I know them.”
A friend of mine, to continue this theme, Professor Thomas Martin, was asked to give the eulogy in Arizona for his friend and mentor, the late Professor Richard Arlen Wood, who had been for many years a famous professor of philosophy at Northern Arizona University. Wood had a great influence on Martin and generations of students at Northern Arizona. Martin, in his eulogy, recalled the first time he encountered Wood in a class at Flagstaff. Martin, through his recollection of Wood, makes Gilson’s point in another way.
“I stood there remembering the first time I had met Dick Wood at NAU in 1973 when he walked into ‘Philosophy 353: Man and Reality...,’” Martin recalled.
Twenty-five of us were seated in the classroom when in walked this man with his hair slicked back, wearing brown jeans, a western shirt, and cowboy boots. He stopped and stood eyeing the class while twitching the corner of his mouth, straightening out his mustache with his forefinger and thumb. He frowned and looked about as though he were searching for something to say. He took a puff on his half-smoked cigar and began to read the roll. After reading a few names, he suddenly stopped and asked a student sitting in the front row, “Do you have a mind?” “Yes,” the student brightly responded. “Well, you will like this course and reading Descartes’ Meditations because he also had a mind about which he is going to tell us. Do you have anything in your mind?” “I have a lots of things in my mind,” the student replied. “That’s nice, but could you give me an example of one thing you have in your mind?” Wood asked. “Well, currently I have you, Professor Wood, in my mind.” “I am in your mind?” Wood wondered. “Well, it’s not really you that is in my mind, but an image of you which has come through my eyes to my mind,” the student explained. “An image of me has come through your eyes and is in your mind?” “Exactly,” the
student affirmed. “So do you see me or do you see an image of me?” “I see an image of
you,” the student acknowledged. “Have you ever seen me?” Wood wanted to know. “No,
I have only seen an image of you,” the student replied. “Then how do you know that this
is me if you have only seen an image of me?” “I don’t,” the student admitted. “Then to
whom are you speaking?” Wood asked. No response.
This amusing classroom scene, of course, illustrates what we mean by the crisis of modernity, the inability to get outside of ourselves to a reality that we did not create or know before we encountered something that is, but which something is the cause of our knowledge because it is.
Modern political philosophy is, at bottom, the product of this inability to get outside of ourselves so that what we really know is only ourselves with no possible check on ourselves by what is not ourselves. When Machiavelli, in his famous Chapter XV of The Prince, made it impossible, as he thought, for men to pass from what they “do” do to what they “ought” to do, or vice versa, he left the will of the Prince and the wills in the Republic free to create any form of man they wished. By destroying Plato, nothing stood in their way. The Prince became an artist, not a politician, or better he became an artist whose subject matter, whose raw materials, were human beings themselves devoid of any intrinsic form. No check on the Prince’s actions was to come from the “form” of what man is, the form by which he knows that he himself did not make himself. What ought to be is what exists, as Hegel is later to postulate the logical conclusion of this position for us.
IV. In a famous essay, Leo Strauss asked the question, “What Is Political Philosophy?”
I use the word “paradoxical” about the place of political philosophy in the structure of reality because the subject matter of political reflection, namely, human actions insofar as they are blameworthy or praiseworthy, do not reach reality apart from human thinking and choosing. In other words, the fact that man is “by nature” a political animal, one whose full being is not available to him without the city, means that, unlike other beings in their flourishing, human beings must actually “act” for political things to exist and thus for themselves fully to exist. Likewise, he must actually “think” if he is going to understand where these actions are to be located in the order of things.
The intellectual virtue of the moral virtues is precisely “prudence,” the virtue that supplies the form or content to the will so that we can know what the act we put in existence really is. The wide variety of ethical and political things, of which Aristotle speaks, is due to the fact that their subject matter is variable both among good alternatives and evil ones. The potential variability of human choice and understanding in each individual prudential act means that it could have been “otherwise.” This “otherwiseness,” as it were, must be included within the meaning of the act or else it cannot have its note of praise or blame that indicates what it is in the order of things. This is why the so-called “social sciences” cannot “know” their subject matter after the manner of those sciences whose subject matter is by nature invariable. Modern social sciences lack this sense of altereity. Hence their method is “reductionist,” that is, it presupposes that reality must be as its method demands. Classical political science does not assume this demand that reality and a mathematical method of knowing it correspond because political science cannot expect more certitude than its subject matter allows..
Aristotle often uses the analogy of the doctor and the politician to shed light on political things. This distinction goes back to the difference between art and prudence. Political things are “recta ratio agibilium,” whereas artistic things are “recta ratio factibilium.” What is the point of this distinction for our purposes here? The doctor knows that human health is a normal reality that occurs if nothing goes wrong. What it is to be humanly healthy is not something the doctor “makes.” He presupposes this given healthfulness as his first principle of action. His task is not to ask, what is essentially the philosopher’s practical question, “what do I do when I am healthy?” but rather “how do I become healthy when I am sick?” The doctor, as Plato warned us, is a dangerous man to us if he is our enemy, since he knows best how to inflict damage on us. He can use his knowledge qua man for good or ill, but not qua doctor where he can only use it for our good, the end of the art.. Once we are healthy, the doctor’s task is finished. He does not tell us how to live. Good doctors can be unhappy men; indeed, they can be evil men.
Aristotle tells us to examine the typical “motion” of all things – the movement of the stars, of the plants, of the animals. He also tells us to examine our own “motions.” The ethics, economics, politics, poetics, and rhetoric are designed to clarify one or another aspect of human “motion.” Certain things are in the universe because human beings are in the universe. Political philosophy exists because of this peculiar human “motion” by which human beings inter-act to achieve a common good in which the human being can flourish. Political science is called an “architectonic” science, that is, it is a directive knowledge with a focus on action. We can step back from this active knowledge to analyze in general what men do or do not do in their personal, familial, or political actions. The organization of this knowledge into intelligible form results in The Ethics and The Politics.
Political philosophy appears when it is necessary to justify the non-political being of man before the politician. The same man is politician and metaphysician. Essentially, political philosophy exists to explain that there are things that transcend man, that the highest things, not merely political things, are worth spending time on. In this sense, political philosophy points to metaphysics and revelation, to the things that are brought up by, but not answered by political life. Without this more contemplative thought, man cannot be what he is. This is the meaning of that famous passage in the sixth book of The Ethics of Aristotle where he writes:
Wisdom must be intuitive reason combined with scientific knowledge – scientific knowledge of the highest objects which has received as it were its proper completion. Of the highest objects, we say, for it would be strange to think that the art of politics, or practical wisdom, is the best knowledge, since man is not the highest being in the world.... It is evident also that philosophic wisdom and the art of politics cannot be the same; for if the state of mind concerned with a man’s own interests is to be called philosophic wisdom, there will be many philosophical wisdoms... (1141a18-30).
This less than highest status of politics too is the reason why Aristotle tells us not to listen to those who tell us only to look to and work for “human” things even though we be humans (1177b30-78a4). The very condition of our humanness points to what is not “human” but which is “mind.” Mind is related to mind. Man remains a rational being for whom all his non-rational powers and capacities are related to his highest faculty.
V.
The passage in classical philosophy that is most central to political philosophy as such is found in Plato’s Gorgias, the famous passage in which Callicles, the intelligent, smooth, handsome politician, the man whose god is the demos itself, ceases to answer Socrates’ questions (505c). It is at this point, shades of The Apology itself, that we know that Socrates is dead. As a philosopher, his hold on life is only guaranteed by his ability to speak with the politician who always retains the power to kill him. Political philosophy is not merely the philosophical consideration of political things but the effort to convince the politician to allow the philosopher to continue in the city with his (the philosopher’s) own task. The philosopher’s task in turn is to lead the politician to at least an awareness of what is not simply politics, itself deprived of any criterion but itself.
Leo Stauss put the issue well in his essay “On Classical Political Philosophy.” The precarious status of philosophy in the city is contingent on rendering the politician, who ordinarily has no time or inclination for such things, benevolent to the higher things.
The adjective “political” in the expression “political philosophy” designates not so much
a subject matter as a manner of treatment; from this point of view, I say, “political
philosophy” means primarily not the philosophic treatment of politics, but the political, or
popular, treatment of philosophy, or the political introduction to philosophy – the attempt
to lead the qualified citizens, or rather their qualified sons, from the political life to the
philosophic life.
In both Plato and Aristotle, the bridge that allows the politician to open himself to things he does
not fully understand is largely provided by music and poetry, both of which, as we know from the
same sources, can equally corrupt the soul if they themselves are disordered. Plato recognized that
the only way he could “defeat” Homer and the corrupting nature of poetry would be for himself to
provide philosophy with its own poetic attraction and enchantment. This Platonic poetic
counterpart to Homer, designed to counteract his charm with an even greater charm, is called,
precisely, The Republic.
“There is aesthetic creation because there is creation,” George Steiner wrote in his Real Presences, a title with obvious philosophical and theological overtones.
There is formal construction because we have been made form. Today, mathematical
models proclaim access to the origins of the present universe. Molecular biology may have
in reach an unraveling of the thread whose beginning is that of life. Nothing in these
prodigious conjectures disarms, let alone elucidates, the fact that the world is when it might
not have been, the fact that we are in it when we might, when we could not have been. The
core of our human identity is nothing more or less than the fitful apprehension of the
radically inexplicable presence, facticity and perceptible substantiality of the created. It is;
we are. This is the rudimentary grammar of the unfathomable.
Steiner’s observations follow from Voegelin’s two questions, “Why is there something and not
nothing?” “Why is this thing as it is?”
Leo Strauss states bluntly that “‘scientific political science’ is in fact incompatible with
political philosophy.”
“The social scientist is a student of human societies, of societies of humans. If he wishes to be loyal to his task, he must never forget that he is dealing with human things, with human beings,” Strauss explains in his essay, “Social Science and Humanism.”
He must reflect on the human as human. And he must pay due attention to the fact that he
himself is a human being and that social science is always a kind of self-knowledge. Social
science, being the pursuit of human knowledge of human things, includes as its foundation
the human knowledge of what constitutes humanity, or rather, of what makes man complete
or whole, so that he is truly human. Aristotle calls his equivalent of what now would be
called social science the liberal inquiry regarding the human things, and his Ethics is the
first, the fundamental, and the directive part of that inquiry.
“The liberal inquiry regarding human things” recognizes that the “social sciences,” in the Aristotelian sense, are a kind of “self-knowledge.” That is, they realize that their subject matter has passed through and reflects on “the human as human.” This also means that it knows that there are things that are not “human” both below and above man; it is aware of the beasts and the gods as well as men. The place of political philosophy in the structure of reality is at the point where the sub-human, the human, and the transcendent meet, but meet not as hostile combatants but as members of an ordered whole, a whole that includes beings who can freely reject what they are.
VI.
In the beginning of these considerations on the place of political philosophy in the structure of reality, I cited, in addition to the passage from Aquinas on skepticism, a passage from Leo Strauss in which he pointed out that of its very nature, the city looks not to laws that it can unmake but to those it cannot, because man did not make himself to be man. The city must transcend itself, or perhaps better, the substantial beings among whom the city is a relation have ends that go through and beyond the political. In a further passage, with which I shall conclude, I cited Catherine Pickstock, in a remarkable book pointing to, as she puts it in her sub-title, the “liturgical consummation of philosophy.” Pickstock intimates that human consciousness cannot be guaranteed by ideological constructs or by “autonomous self-presence,” the only alternatives available in an “immanentist” world, as she puts it. It can only grounded by a “redemptive” return of “doxological dispossession,” caused by a proper human response to the transcendent, a response that implies that man does not “make” his own salvation..
Earlier, I had cited the response of Levinas to the question of whether the absolute could be a “diversion,” of whether, following Pascal, and indeed Plato and Aristotle, the relation of man to transcendence was one of “serious play,” as Plato put it in The Laws. Doxological dispossession means that human completion is not a response to itself or to what it has itself made – to recall Voegelin’s questions about our awareness that we do not create ourselves to be or to be what we are. Doxology, praise, causes us to let go of the illusion that we are the end of our own actions in any absolute sense. All our actions, including our political ones, while remaining what they are, point beyond themselves. If we do not allow for this pointing, we do not understand what we are or the nature of that “good,” as Plato called it, that lies at the origin of things.
Political philosophy takes us back to the proper being of cities in relation to man and to his
own personal destiny. Cities are not things that will be saved. Any empire, be it Roman, Holy
Roman, British, Soviet, or whatever, “declines and falls,” to use a famous and still haunting
expression. Important as they might be, cities and empires are passing things, even though they be
also human things intended to surpass the length of the lives of their individual citizens. The Greek
classics, when they explained politics, explained them as an order of human actions by which
citizens were praiseworthy or blameworthy, and this not in some just ephemeral sense. It was in
and through the city that the citizen transcended the city. As Strauss put it at the end of his
explication of Aristotle’s Politics, man transcended the city only by what is highest in him, only
by pursuing “true” happiness.
“Doxological dispossession” suggests that what is worthy of man’s highest praise is not the state. It is not even man himself. Since the state is a good, however, it can itself be set-up as apparently worthy of total human commitment. No one, perhaps, has put the alternative better than C. S. Lewis’ famous Screwtape in his advice to his colleagues about how to distract the human being from his major purpose. It seems fitting to close these reflections on the place of political philosophy in the structure of reality by citing, who else? The Devil!
Screwtape advises his fellow devils that human beings must be fostered in a certain delusion – not “diversion,” to recall Levinas. Ordinary human beings have a real presence in the world but also they have a real awareness that they did not cause their own being. Human beings then must be deluded into believing that
the fate of nations is in itself more important than that of individual souls. The overthrow
of free peoples and the multiplication of slave states are for us [devils] a means (besides, of
course, being fun); but the real end is the destruction of the individuals. For only
individuals can be saved or damned, can become sons of the Enemy or food for us. The
ultimate value, for us, of any revolution, war, or famine lies in the individual anguish,
treachery, hatred, rate, and despair which it may produce.
Political philosophy is itself an effort to place the nations in a proper perspective with respect to their being. The fate of nations, however exciting and capable of being made to seem more important than it is, is not the central focus of political philosophy which points through the city to what transcends it. It points to the beings capable of being saved or damned, to one beings capable of praise, of responding to the glory that man did not make.
Human beings are precisely, in Steiner’s phrase, “real presences.” We do not see their image in our eyes, but we see them. We know to whom we are talking; we know that we did not cause ourselves to be or to be what we are. Do not listen to those, as Aristotle told us, who, being human, tell us to concern ourselves only about human things, about the fate of the nations. Human things, as Plato remarks, do have a certain importance, but compared to the “divine seriousness,” they are diversions. But man remains the political animal even in the highest things. We do have the power to distinguish between being awake and being asleep, as Aquinas put it.
In the end, “doxological dispossession” is the highest form of being awake. It is this awakeness to which the city points. It is the paradoxical place of political philosophy in the structure of being that the being of the city finds itself in its rightful rank, in its rightful category, amid the things that are. The highest life, as Aristotle said, is not the political life, but the contemplative life, the life which, compared to political live, is “divine.” But to the degree that the philosopher does not convince the Callicleses of this world to make a place for these higher considerations, to that very degree will political philosophy fail in its mission both to the city and to that which transcends the city. Political philosophy must be thought into existence in order that what is might be complete in knowing its own word.
4)Published in The Homiletic and Pastoral Review, CII (October, 2001), 15-23. Originally presented as a lecture at Thomas More College, Merrimak, New Hampshire, Winter, 2001.
MODERNITY: WHAT IS IT?
“Modern thought reaches its culmination ... in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity. For oblivion of eternity, or, in other words, estrangement from man’s deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay, from the very beginning, for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.” – Leo Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy.”
“‘Christian philosophy’ is a label that may be given to what philosophers do when they deliberately relate their professional work to their religious or ecclesiastical commitments.” – Jude Dougherty, “Christian Philosophy.”
I.
We are wont to classify the history of philosophy in the following manner: First, while not entirely forgetting the ancient empires such as Persia, Babylon, Egypt, and distant China and India, we have Homer and the pre-Socratics. These ancients were followed by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, not forgetting Thucydides, Sophocles, the historians and the dramatists, even the artists. Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics in both Greek and Roman varieties succeeded the immediately post-Greek classical world. We do not overlook Polybius and Plutarch, nor the Jews, Josephus and Philo. The Romans imitated the Greeks but they had their own priorities. Cicero, in his De Officiis, tells us that “moral philosophy” is the most important branch of philosophy, something quite different from the contemplative priorities of Plato and Aristotle. Tacitus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius tell us much the same thing; we cannot forget Virgil or Horace. They all remain quite worth reading.
The corpus of Greek and Roman thought is what we know as “classical philosophy.” Though ancient traditions of the gods and their dealings with men exist, something we find taken quite seriously in Plato, this classical philosophy is held to be the primary manifestation of what man, especially brilliant man, can know by his “unaided” reason. Classical philosophy characteristically retained a certain openness to a reality that it knew it did not fully comprehend. Socrates knew that he did not know, but he also knew that it was never right to do wrong. Plato made it possible for everyone to re-live the trial and death of the philosopher, Socrates, at the hands of the best existing city, Athens. Aristotle, meanwhile, calmly examined all that was to be known. Philosophy began not with ourselves, but with wonder, with our curiosity about why things are, why things are as they are.
Into these natural or philosophic traditions came the revelational corpus that we know from the Bible. The Bible presents us with a history, an account of a people who are said to be directly presented with an understanding of the divine order, of what God, man, and the world were conceived to be in that continuous narrative account of Israel, of Jesus, and of the Church. Both philosophy and revelation, in their own ways, addressed themselves to the whole, to all of what is. Incorporated into cultural life itself, revelation reflected the ways of life of the Jews and Christians and later, with the Koran, of Islam. At first, the early religious communities tried to live solely within the parameters of their respective revelation, though eventually they found that, if they were going to deal with them, they had to explain themselves to each other as well as to the philosophers and to other citizens around them. Augustine and Aquinas, among many others, are significant for the Christians as thinkers who forged a coherent reconciliation between reason and revelation. Neither denied the validity of one or the other.
The Jews and Islam evidently had more of a difficulty with philosophy than did Christianity, even though Maimonides, Averroes, and Avicenna faced these issues in their own ways. This intellectual obstacle of how revelation was to deal with reason was in part due to the fact that the way of life of the Jew and the Muslim had to do with conformity to a revealed Law. Living well meant living according to the Law, indeed according to the letter of the Law, hence the need for lawyers, not philosophers. The peculiarity of the New Law was that it did not prescribe in detail every action or thought, except to say that believers ought to be good and follow the general admonitions of Christ, who, unlike Socrates, was not usually conceived to be a philosopher. Christ, moreover, as Aquinas points out, recognized that external and political disorders arise originally from disorders of soul, from thought, something that Plato and Aristotle also understood
Moreover, Christ was considered to be true man and true God, one Person, two natures, divine and human, both distinct, both real. That is to say, the very understanding of who and what Christ was found expression not merely in scriptural but also in philosophic terms. In its own way, this effort of clarification was revolutionary because it took seriously the truth of the mind about the gods. The early Councils of the Church and the Patristic Fathers had no scruple, when necessary and made for clarity, in finding philosophic terms for Christian doctrines. The classic example is the use of the word “Trinity” to express the inner life of God, a term not found in Scripture. Implicitly, Christian thinkers recognized that revelation was directed to reason, perhaps to challenge it, perhaps to make it more itself. Conversely, they understood that error had consequences in the real world; it was not merely an amusing foible. This attitude again was a sign that thought, especially thought about God, was a claim on truth and a claim that truth was grounded in what is.
Christian revelation was not merely concerned with external obedience or public order, though it did not neglect these areas – things were to be “rendered” to Caesar; the Emperor was to be “obeyed” – but also it was concerned with the ordering of the soul and heart, with the correct definition of the truth about God, man, and the world. Christian revelation in particular seemed to maintain that right thinking, “orthodoxy,” was not only possible when it came to the divinity but that it was a proper perfection of the human knowing power as such to seek to know what it could of the Divinity. Moreover, right action, “ortho-praxis,” was itself usually dependent on orthodoxy. In short, Christian revelation took reason seriously even while it recognized that human reason was not itself God, though it was proper to call it, by comparison, as Aristotle did, “divine.”
We are accustomed, then, to depict classical philosophy as that knowledge that we can learn by the powers of reason operating solely by themselves. By the reflective openness of our intellect looking back on our own interior operations, themselves incited into act by reality, we can, with some effort, distinguish what belongs to our own powers and what arrives from outside of them, though not necessarily alien to them. The work of the philosopher, however lonely it may be, is to know what the human mind with its own resources can know, having first been stimulated by reality, by what is. In the beginning, the mind is only mind, a tabula rasa, as they say. But it always remains a mind open to all that is, so that its true functioning is to know what is not itself and to know itself only indirectly through knowing what is not itself. This power of knowing is what makes it all right to be a human being, to be oneself not a god but a finite being still open to all the things that return to us in knowledge. Plato says, in the Fifth Book of The Republic, that truth is to say of what is that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. No one has said it better, though Aquinas’ formulation, that truth is the conformity of mind and reality, is about as good and says essentially the same thing. And Aristotle held that the mind is capax omnium, capable of knowing all things. Such a mind potentially exists in each of us and constitutes the ground of our dignity.
The advantage of studying Plato and Aristotle, in this sense, why no real education is possible without them, is said to consist in demonstrating what the “unaided” human mind can learn by itself. “Aided” human reason comes with the stimulus of revelation, which revelation, nevertheless, is said to be addressed to rational man insofar as he is rational, that is, insofar as he has actively asked questions of himself and of the reality that stands before him, the reality, no less than himself, that he did not himself constitute. Thus, revelation, with its grounding in its own sources, is none the less interested in what man does know by his own powers and encourages him to know it. Revelation does not stand against reason, but rather it is in the line of the unity of the truth of all things, including divine things. Christianity explicitly rejects any “two truth” theory that would allow the truths of reason and the truths of revelation to stand in a contradictory relation to each other. It does not “save” revelation by denying reason. In fact, it is deeply suspicious of any “revelation” that contradicts reason, due consideration to the issue involved. When revelation is said to “contradict” reason, it usually turns out, on closer examination, that something of a more profound reasoning is involved than reason at first sight suspected.
Christianity is, to be sure, concerned with the man who has no professional or articulated philosophy, as it were, with the common man, with his salvation. But it is consciously and explicitly also concerned with man the philosopher. Christianity knows that there are many souls and not so many articulate philosophers. But it also knows that in things of the spirit, numbers are of less importance than quality of ideas or genuineness of insight. Christianity, in a sense, addresses the question of whether philosophy, even if it be a good thing, is enough, whether it is possible to “save” both the philosopher and the non-philosopher without denying the significance of the difference between them. Not everyone needs be a philosopher, even if we need philosophers for the good of our being what we are. It is not wrong to observe that some are more gifted than others; it is wrong to conclude that the less gifted cannot also think and are not destined to the Beatific Vision which is presented to us in initially intellectual terms. It is also wrong not to be aware that there are philosophers who are not worthy of the name of philosophy. Philosophical errors are possible and are dangerous.
This particular interest in philosophy seems to be what John Paul II was getting at in Fides et Ratio, in which he chided the Christian theologians and thinkers of recent decades for neglecting philosophy. He likewise questioned contemporary philosophers about the poor quality of their thinking, about their inability to get out of their own minds, as it were. Christianity in general was not hostile to what the philosophers could know, even though Tertullian asked, in a famous question, one echoed by Leo Strauss, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” Tertullian implied in fact that Athens was dangerous to Jerusalem, a position that turned out, in retrospect, to be something more characteristic of Jerusalem and Mecca than of Rome, though there were Jewish and Islamic philosophers who struggled with the challenge of the classic philosophers to their own revelation.
Likewise, we could find Christian thinkers who embraced philosophic systems, both ancient and modern, that, by their internal principles, could not manage to reconcile the given truths found in revelation – the Trinity, the Incarnation – with their own peculiar philosophic suppositions about reality. Cartesian and Kantian systems in general make the connection of reason and revelation mediated through the events of actual history to be most doubtful. This latter inability to connect mind and reality has ever been in Christian philosophic tradition a sign that something was aberrant with the philosophic system, not with philosophy as such, but with a peculiar system. Not all philosophic systems are equally true even if they claim to be genuinely philosophical. In this sense, revelation in its proper articulation is considered to serve as a guide for genuine philosophy even in the classical or natural order. This is why St. Thomas found Aristotle so compatible, not because he was Aristotle, but because of the truth of what he said. That the world is coherent is not only a doctrine presupposed by faith, but it is also the assumption of any philosophical quest.
II.
What is called “medieval philosophy” is a philosophy that is open to more than bare philosophy, if I can put it that way, to more than can be known to reason by itself. This position does not imply that there is anything wrong with philosophy provided it remains what it is, an openness to everything that is. Philosophy does not get itself into trouble if it admits that it does not know something. But it gets into enormous difficulty when it claims that the wholeness of reality is itself co-terminus with what it actually knows by its own methods. In other words, if it “reduces” the content of reality from what is to what it can know only by means of human reasoning, then reason itself is limited to certain humanly organized methods. No freshness of being can intrude on a mind unable to get outside of itself.
In a famous quip, Chesterton once remarked that, in some strange way, men who set out to be natural or purely philosophic somehow invariably end up being unnatural and un-philosophic. They come to deny that there is anything unnatural or un-philosophic. It is almost as if, from the beginning, men were not simply in a natural order, which is indeed the case. As St. Thomas says, in a memorable phrase, homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est (De Virtutibus Cardinalibus, 1). If this orientation to an end higher than is open to human nature by itself be so, as revelation indicates it is so, it would mean that every effort to limit oneself to what is merely human or natural would leave an emptiness in our restless souls. Indeed, more ominously, it would lead us to intellectual error and moral disorder, something that, in the Tenth Book of his Ethics, Aristotle himself seems at least to have suspected. The very metaphysical structure of our souls implies that we have an openness to all things. The intellect is open to what is. That is to say, the very direction of the intellect is somehow transcendent to any limited thing that the same intellect can present to itself as an object of its mind for its own satisfaction or curiosity.
Medieval philosophy, then, is that body of reflection that is aware that something from outside reason’s own limited confines is challengingly addressed to reason itself. But it does not know this quality of itself being-addressed in some Pelagian manner that would propose that we are the architects of our own destiny both as to its content and as to its acquisition. We do not only know what we make. Reason does not construct what is addressed to itself. Rather genuine philosophy knows that something is addressed to it by its own insufficiencies, insufficiencies that are themselves the products or results of the mind’s own legitimate searchings to explain what is. The very questions that any intellect must address to itself -- “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “Why is this thing not that thing?” -- cannot fail to indicate to our intellects that we do not cause in being either ourselves or what is not ourselves.
What-it-is-to-be-man, just as little as the product of two times two, is not then something we ourselves make or create, but something, after the manner of intellect, we discover as already in being. That is, self-reflective intellect knows certain questions that it has itself formulated that it cannot answer by itself, even when it has tried diligently to answer them, as it should. But it can understand that reason does pose questions to the human intellect that this same intellect does not answer with any adequacy even when it does come up with some sort of answer. What surprises human intellect is not so much that there is a claim in revelation to truth, but that the very questions that reason cannot seem to answer adequately do appear to have from revelation strangely plausible even if not absolutely certain answers. Faith, itself possessing its own philosophic articulation, remains necessary in the essential answers of revelation, answers that of their nature are grounded in the divine, not human, intellect. This unexpected congruity with reasons’s questions, however, is what makes revelation ever provoking to intellect, to philosophy. This curious relationship is what in fact causes philosophy to be more itself, more philosophy. The end of medieval philosophy occurs when the questions that revelation addresses to reason are no longer asked, answered, or even paid attention to. Medieval philosophy in this sense becomes not merely a question of historic time but of perennial philosophy that will always be present whenever the human mind thinks of what is and its relation to the whole. It is, of course, quite possible for the human intellect to stop seeking answers for valid questions. It does not follow from this voluntary cessation that the questions do not remain central to an understanding of what-it-is-to-be-man. It is quite possible, indeed, to choose not to consider this strange coherence that arises from the revelational answers to questions that reason can pose but which it cannot answer by itself. Revelation does not necessitate reason, but it does challenge it to be itself. Revelation likewise remains itself, free and beyond the powers of human intellect directly to fathom. But revelation does agitate reason, does make it look outside of itself, which is indeed the purpose of reality before reason as well as the purpose of revelation before reason. But the human being can and does at times will or will not to accept certain truths of what it is. It makes this choice not because there is not some guidance from revelation but because there is. That is to say, that most of our intellectual problems are moral problems. We do not want to know the truth because we see where it might lead us and what it might entail in our way of living. We “protect” ourselves from truth by looking away first from revelation then from reason. We find we must more and more choose a philosophic position that entails a world that presupposes no objective revelation or no coherent metaphysics.
III.
The two founders of modern philosophy are Machiavelli and Descartes. Both explicitly reject what has gone before them. Note that they do not so much “disprove” what went before but rather they “reject” it. They claim that they start anew. The central problem of modernity is in the will, not in the reason, except insofar as reason itself is “will” based or will controlled. As for newness, most of Machiavelli was already in Book I of The Republic of Plato, while the premises of scepticism, as it was already conceded in ancient philosophy, themselves demanded some non-skeptical truth. That is, if it is true that all things must be doubted, then one thing must not be doubted. It was Augustine, that most fascinating of men, who first said “fallor, ergo sum.” Both Machiavelli and Descartes affirm what appears to them to be a “new” method of considering reality.
Machiavelli rejects “ideal kingdoms” to concentrate on a “what men ‘do’ do.” He prescinds from the distinction of good and evil that had been found both in the philosophers and in revelation. He is interested in success not morality. Descartes was so hesitant about ever getting outside of his own mind that he began all things in doubt, not in wonder, as did Aristotle. As a result, he had to provide a philosophic argument of sorts, beginning with the famous “ontological” proof for the existence of God, to establish that the world really existed and existed as it appeared to do so in his own mind. He needed a proof for the existence of God to demonstrate how his own senses did not deceive him about the existence of the tree in front of his house. No theology has ever demanded so much and, at the same time, so little of human reason.
Modernity, as I call it, is the product of Machiavelli and Descartes, further spelled out in philosophers from Hobbes, to Locke, to Rousseau, to Kant, to Hegel, to Marx, to Nietzsche, and to Heidegger. The essence of modernity, and even of what is called “post-modernity,” lies in the claim that man is himself, both in morals and in metaphysics, “autonomous.” That is, all the rules of reality, including the rules or standards of his own being and acting, are to be found in his own reason, but in that reason insofar as it is not guided or ruled by anything from outside of itself. Ever since Occam and Hobbes, the will is supreme over reason. In nature, it came to be said in modernity, we cannot find any “order.” Especially, we cannot find any order or standard in ourselves for our acting, for acting for a purpose that we do not give ourselves. Therefore, we are “free.” Freedom is not the liberty to do what is right, since with no connection between nature and reason, there can be no criterion of right. Rather we have the freedom to declare what is right, whatever that right might be. Any order, whatever it be, will stem from us, not from nature or nature’s God.
We are thus beings that do not even presuppose what we are, for that would imply that what we are has some structure or basis to its being what it is. The result of this thesis again is that we are free, absolutely free. All our world is to be the result of a freedom that signifies no being, no order, that presupposes nothing but freedom. In the beginning was not the Word, nor even the Deed, but the Choice. Needless to say, we are not surprised that the classic definition of democracy was precisely this sort of freedom that allowed us to do what we want, whatever it is that we wanted to do. The social world was ruled by a maximization of groundless “freedom” that brooked no limits that came from nature. The purpose of our social being was to maximize whatever it was we wanted to do. There were to be, somehow, laws but no commandments. There were to be “rights” but no obligations. Hobbes, in this sense, remains a principle architect of modernity.
Perhaps some of the flavor of this modernity can be found in the following passage from Flannery O’Connor, a writer ever suspicious of modern things:
I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of
the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict
between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of
the times. It’s hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now. There are
some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out
dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately
possible or not.
That is to say, we already have a culture of secularized explanations or habits within our souls. We find it difficult even to imagine what a world with faith, a world in which faith addressed itself to a reason that could know what is, might be like. The best thing seems alien to us. We not only do not recognize it if it exists, but we consider it to be an aberration
The Sixteenth Stanza of Robert Browning’s poem, “Youth and Art,” reads as follows: Each life unfulfilled, you see; It hangs still; patchy and scrappy.
We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired, – been happy.
We have not, in other words, known what we are, only what we made ourselves to be over against what we are. Modernity’s claim of mastery of nature eventually came to include its mastery over human nature through science’s ability to imagine and reconstruct the human corpus and psyche itself. Man is what he “might” be, not what he is. Freedom was no longer limited freedom but autonomous freedom that found in nature no footprints but its own.
Socrates, in “The Apology,” spoke of the “unexamined life.” He said it was not worth living. That is to say, there were lives that were not worth living. But why should we “examine” our lives if there is no standard of what it is to be human? If our culture defines what is human not from what we ought to do but from what we ‘do’ do or what we might do with no limits on ourselves, from whence might we acquire standards with which we might criticize the way we live as inhuman? And if we cannot know anything, even ourselves, if the failure of modernity leads us not back to the nature and revelation we rejected in forming modernity but to an isolated intellectual cage out of which we cannot escape, then the end of modernity has led us to something worse than we might have expected, though where we have been led has a certain “logic” to it..
The final question I want to consider here is whether the culture of modernity can really adapt itself or be adapted to permit a Christian life or presence in its world? What modernity is, is a will centered autonomy that has no criterion but itself. This same will-thesis finds itself incapable of justifying any relation to others through any reference to nature or revelation except through a self-interest theory that as Nietzsche maintained is a position of pitiable weakness. Modernity and post-modernity really do not differ except, as Nietzsche also saw, for the reluctance to carry out of certain premises about what we can know to their logical conclusion. We can only “baptize” what is capable of being baptized. Certain ideas and certain habits must be understood as intellectual positions but they must firmly be rejected as ways of life.
What I want to suggest here is that the direction of modernity and post-modernity, taken as a whole, follows a logical progression because they refuse to allow themselves to be addressed by revelation. Or to put it more bluntly, such positions cannot be addressed by revelation because within their intellectual horizons, they allow no room for any intelligence from outside of themselves. What we see being played out in genetic studies, in moral life, in international politics and economics, is the visible result of ideas that were articulated because revelation was rejected as itself directed to reason. This rejection naturally forced reason to discover some alternative to truth. What was ultimately put forth was a theory that evaporated any reason in things, human or divine. What is being built is a counter-culture, as it were, a closed world in which the mind under the control of autonomous will systematically prevents any opening of evidence or reason that would allow the classic suspicion that revelation was in fact addressed to the reason found in things and especially in human things.
In conclusion, let me recall an old Peanuts. Charlie Brown is sitting slouched in his Bean Bag Chair watching TV. Sally comes up behind him to tell him, “I have to do a book report on Treasure Island – Do you know what it’s about?” Charlie looks up a bit to inform her, “It’s about pirates.” Looking at her notebook, Sally looks pleased with this sparse information. “That’s all I need to know,” she replies. Then she turns away, to a totally confused Charlie, to add, “I can fake the rest of it... (United Features, 1988). Perhaps it would not be too much of an exaggeration to think that modernity has “pirated” reality away from us. What we have left is a fake world, a world into which, every time we look, we see only ourselves, only our wills that could always be otherwise. The “newness” that our culture finds within itself is a newness that is faked or concocted because we do not want to consider the possibility that our reason could be saved if we would consider that revelation was indeed directed at its own legitimate but unanswered questions. The modern world is not the result of a truthful examination of the order of being but rather it is a continued effort to find alternatives that do not lead it to the truth of things, to the truth that is directed to and completed by revelation.
5) Published in Logos, 5 (Winter, 2002), 103-119. Originally presented as a Lecture to the Philosophy Club, Wheeling Jesuit University, February, 2001.
ON “THE PERFECT CROISSANT”: THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHIC LEARNING
“Visitor from Elea: ‘But if an important issue needs to be worked out well, then as everyone has long thought, you need to practice on unimportant, easier issues first. So that’s my advice to us now, Theaetetus, since we think it’s hard to hunt down and deal with the kind (essence), sophist, we ought to practice our method of hunting on something easier first – unless you can tell us about another way that’s somehow more promising.’ “Theaetetus: ‘I can’t.’” – Plato, The Sophist, 218cd.
“From the first I regarded Oxford as a place to be inhabited and enjoyed for itself, not as the preparation for anywhere else.... At Oxford I was reborn in full youth. My absurdities were those of exuberance and naïvety, not of spurious sophistication. I wanted to do everything and know everyone, [but] not with any ambition to insinuate myself into fashionable London or make influential friends who should prosper any future career.... My interests were as narrow as the ancient walls. I wanted to taste everything Oxford could offer and consume as much as I could hold.” – Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning (Boston: Little Brown, 1964),171.
“No spontaneous operation of intellectual relations protects the young philosopher against the risk of delivering his soul to error by choosing his teachers infelicitously.” – Yves Simon, A General Theory of Authority (University of Notre Dame Press, 1980),100.
I.
The perfect breakfast, it seems to me, is a freshly baked, genuine butter croissant with a cup of coffee or chocolate. But the perfect croissant is hard to come by, at least if we are not in France where it seems miraculously to reappear every morning. We have croissants at breakfast where I live. They are rather smallish, not very flaky, generally doughy, flat-tasting, though certainly not inedible. I have kept my eye open for the perfect croissant. Walter Kerr once said that we should never eat “bad” ice cream. We may have to eat bad bread, or even dried-out croissants, to stay alive. But ice cream and croissants are eaten primarily because they are tasty and delicious. There is nothing sybaritic or epicurean about this truth. It is simply an acknowledgment of the being of a thing.
We do not “need” either ice cream or croissants, yet the things we do not “need” are often symbolic of the best part of our nature. Leon Kass, in his book, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfection of Our Nature (U of Chicago, 1994), has spelled this principle out with some elegance. We are not only beings who feed or eat, but beings who dine together. Our bodies and lives are so attuned that they respond to our inner soul. We can make matter tasty, beautiful. And this making is perhaps our highest vocation in this world, as Plato taught us, when something that is, by being what it is, leads us to what is beautiful.
At the beginning of the Second Book of The Republic, we find a famous conversation between Socrates, Glaucon, and his brother Adeimantus about the praise of justice for its own sake. The two young men, Plato’s brothers, are highly commended by Socrates for being able to state the case against justice so well, but still they were not convinced by it. Thus they wanted to listen to the philosopher explain why a worthy life was a good even if one suffered for it or even if no reward resulted from it. What interests me here are the reasons that young Glaucon gives to Socrates about how he sees the need for what I call “philosophic learning.”
Glaucon begins the conversation: “Tell me, do you think there is a kind of good we welcome, not because we desire what comes from it, but because we welcome it for its own sake – joy, for example, and all the harmless pleasures that have no results beyond the joy of having them?” Socrates acknowledges the existence of such things. And Glaucon continues, “And is there a kind of good we like for its own sake and also for the sake of what comes from it – knowing, for example, and seeing and being healthy?” (357b-c). Joy, we note, is something for its own sake. There are indeed “pleasures that have no results beyond the joy of having them.” And joy is what we possess when we have what we love, when what we love is what is and its cause.
Several years ago, down on “N”Street just before Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, to continue this analogy, there was a small patisserie called “Au Croissant Chaud.” After some shopping around, I decided that the croissants at this little shop proved to be not only the best in Washington, but, surprisingly, the cheapest. The shop had tables outside in a pleasant patio on which to eat them in leisure. Even on a cold morning, it was worth doing. The patisserie was run by a family, either Spanish or French speaking, I never was quite sure. I was a frequent patron. The place was to croissants what the National Gallery is to art.
Much to my chagrin, one morning this shop closed. The place it occupied has since been engaged by four or five up-scale restaurants, none of which has ever made it. About six months after the closing of Au Croissant Chaud, someone mentioned that it had reopened down about a block farther on Wisconsin Avenue. Sure enough, there it was. But alas, before too much longer, some problem with the restaurant next door closed the place down again. I have shopped around subsequently for several years for the perfect croissant. As I have intimated, there is really not much sense in eating a croissant unless it is very good, though one should be careful of demanding such perfection that he misses in this life the fact that what is, is good, even if not perfect. The search for perfection does not necessarily exclude the less than perfect, a principle, if we think of it, that is the very charter of our own being in this world, of the possibility that we too in experiencing joy and delight begin to have intimations of what is, of what exists in light and radiance.
Not too long ago, moreover, in pursuit of this, to be sure, mad dream of the perfect croissant, I was out on Rockville Pike when I noticed a local La Madelaine, one of a chain of French bakeries in the area. Another can be found, alas with the same existential results, over on M Street. One morning, with great anticipation, I walked over to the one on Rockville Pike, near to where I had been staying at Georgetown Prep. I purchased one and a cup of coffee to be eaten outside. But much to my dismay, the properly flaky, visually perfect croissant did not taste very good. It seems not to have been made with butter, but I am not sure of the culinary problem.
I have tried the other French bakery chain in Washing, La Vie de France, with the same unhappy results, though again I ate them. In fact, I have been somewhat frustrated with the saga of less than great croissants. I begin to wonder if there is not revealed here a deeper problem of soul than we might at first sight realize. In seeking the perfect croissant, a worthy enterprise as it seems to me, I wonder what indeed am I looking for in all that I do? It is a question that ought to arise in the pursuit of any real good, I think, including the perfect croissant..
A couple of weeks ago on campus, I can across a young French girl who is in one of my classes. She was carrying a cake box. She told me that she found a new French patisserie on Wisconsin and Q Streets called Café Poupon. I had never noticed it. Evidently, they put up unsold cakes for sale at half-price at four PM every day. Naturally, a couple of days later, I hastened with great eagerness over to sample the product. Much to my delight, the lady behind the counter was the very one who used to run the old Au Croissant Chaud. However, the croissant I sampled was not just perfect. My heart was both delighted to find this place with real croissants and broken that what I ate was not the best.
Why am I beginning these thoughts on “philosophical learning” with this tale of my search for the “perfect croissant?” It is a very Platonic enterprise, of course. In the Gorgias, Plato conveniently compares oratory to the product of pastry-chefs, by extension to the baker of croissants. Plato is troubled that elegance of language or taste can deflect us from the truth or the cause of what is beautiful. We can indeed separate pleasure from the reality in which it exists and gives it its purpose. Yet, we know, that Socrates himself was the greatest of orators who sought to persuade us daily to seek what is good, what is beautiful, through the things that are. To find things that are “perfect,” it seems, we must begin with things less than perfect. Socrates is sometimes accused of being so absorbed by the perfect, by the best, that he shows a certain contempt for ordinary changing realities. But I think this accusation is not a correct reading of Socrates. Even in learning, he tells us, in The Sophist, to begin with easier things.
II.
Socrates always denied that he was a “teacher,” however much the fathers of Charmides and Theages in the dialogues named after them begged him to take charge of their sons, to teach them how to live. But if even Socrates, the philosopher, did not teach, from whom do we learn? Surely, he did not mean that there were no teachers, and if no teachers, no students, though this is what he implies in the Meno. The subject that I want to propose here is precisely that of “philosophic learning,” learning about the highest things, learning about the whole of what is. Surely nothing can be more important than such learning, whatever else is important. Learning is not merely a question of truth. It is also a question of choosing the truth when we begin to know it. Knowledge is, as Socrates said, one of those things that both cause joy and delight for its own sake but is also useful for other things.
There is a paradox here of more than passing significance. For it is possible for us to deny that the good is good or the beautiful is beautiful, even when it stands before us. Part of the reason we can make this denial is because what is finitely beautiful is not beauty itself, even when it is really beautiful. Even the perfect croissant points beyond itself, unsettles us. It too should be eaten and enjoyed, not just preserved in some bakery museum. The other reason that we can deny what is good or beautiful even when it is before us in its splendor is that we can still manage to direct our souls, our attention to some other lesser good or beauty. We can absorb ourselves in particular goods, real goods. We can refuse to examine ourselves. The “unexamined life that is not worth living,” to cite a famous phrase of Socrates in The Apology, can make us content with some real but disordered good that will eventually corrupt our souls because we choose not to follow to its end the finite beauty that initially attracts us. As Aristotle shows us in the First Book of his Ethics, that all the definitions of good what we come up with in our pursuit of happiness have real worth. Ironically, we can do nothing wrong unless we also at the same time do something right, but something “right” out of order. We fail to put something in the good that ought to be there. Evil is the “lack” of a good that ought to be there – as the famous definition goes.
What I want to suggest is that if we choose not to learn what is fundamental, we will indeed not learn it. Or, to put it another way, we can choose as our end, as our definition of happiness as it applies to us and defines all we deliberate and decide upon, something that will betray the best in us. As Aristotle put it, if we choose as our end anything but contemplation, anything but knowledge of what is, for its own sake, we will fail not merely ourselves, but one another. Indeed, we will misjudge our place in the cosmos as precisely the microcosmoi, the beings in whom something of everything exists. We are not gods. Nor are we beasts. We are precisely the mortals, the finite beings who need not exist, but none the less who do exist and who do act following our own particular kind of existence. When we choose what is good, we are the best of the animals, when we choose badly, we are the worst, again to recall Aristotle.
One of the charges directed against Socrates was that he “corrupted the youth.” He denied it. The youth who listened to him did so of their own accord, as a kind of amusement. Socrates, unlike modern professors, never took money for anything, especially teaching. The sophists did receive fees for teaching whether what was taught was true or not. For this effort, they are sometimes called the first university professors, the first humanists. The compliment is enigmatic. Aristotle tells us not to listen to those intellectuals who, being human, tell us to listen to only human and mortal things. What is true is simply free. It can bear no cost. Truth as such cannot be patented or copyrighted. Our highest conversations thus are not only free but of things we have in common, of things whose origin is not ourselves, even though directed to our minds that we might know them. No wonder Plato says that when we first come to know something, our immediate instinct is to hurry out to tell someone of it.
Moreover, Socrates humbly claimed that he only knew what he did not know, even though the “old accusers” at the beginning of The Apology charged that he made the weaker argument seem stronger. The philosopher, no doubt, perplexes the non-philosopher. The non-philosopher wants to drive him out of the city or to keep him strictly private. The philosopher, when too proud, moreover, is tempted to see this common man’s perplexity as a sign of his own success, his own power. But it is not so. Vision and clarity are his calling. The pure of heart will see God. The blind cannot lead the blind. The philosopher is not at home in existing cities even when he must live in them. But without him, cities know only themselves. They exclude the high culture that asks whether what they are is what they ought to be. The high culture, the city in speech, transcends all existing cities and judges them, without repudiating their need. This is the high vocation of philosophic learning, to plant the city in speech in each of our souls so that we can be free of what is not true, of what is not good. This vocation can happen even in the worst regime where evil must be mostly suffered. It can be ignored in the best regime, when pleasure is separated from that in which it exists in order.
The youth who were said to be corrupted by Socrates’ activities in Athens were not his pupils. They listened to him in the streets, to be sure, but mostly as a form of afternoon entertainment. They had nothing better to do. They were escaping the discipline of their families. They delighted in what was odd or infamous or provoking, whatever it was. Socrates, talking to important Athenians in pursuit of his Delphic vocation to know himself, was the best show in town. The sons went home after listening to Socrates examine their fathers, the businessman, the poet, and the lawyer.
The sons were eager to imitate the philosopher. They tried out their new-fangled skills on their fathers, the rulers of the city. This second-hand philosophy only infuriated the fathers and incited them against Socrates as one who corrupts the youth and, through them, the city. The youth who followed Socrates, if any did, undermined the existing city. It was probably this domestic fury between father and son more than anything else that was responsible for Socrates’ legal death, a death that posed, and still poses, the problem of truth to the city that does not like to hear it. Thus, Socrates chose to live privately, as long as he could. He knew he was not safe among those who held power but not truth. He also hoped that some who heard him would carry on his teaching because the fathers would kill the philosopher but not the sons.
III.
In one sense, no doubt, Socrates did “corrupt” the youth if the effort to learn the truth can be called a “corruption,” which it can be in a city founded on wants or passions. Socrates calls his city a “noble lie” because all who hear of it, besides the philosopher himself, will think it untrue. He followed his divine vocation to examine whether he was indeed, as the Oracle said, the wisest man in Greece, something he at first doubted. But, in the process, he revealed that the pillars of the polis, the poet, the lawyer, and the craftsman, did not know more than their own narrow specialties. The existing city could not, however, be passed on in the same form to the next generation if it lost confidence in the city’s own actual founding, a founding that differed from the principles of the city in speech. This doubting of the city’s worth was the effect of Socrates’ example. He founded another city that must be founded again and again in the souls of potential philosophers. The careful reading of Plato is the beginning of this new founding in any existing city. An education that does not end here, in the city in speech, is not worth having.
Socrates’ way of life made him appear odd, un-civic. He seemed like a fool or a madman. Existing cities, especially democracies, were always considerably less than perfect. They were the best of the worst regimes. They were also places of danger to the philosopher. To be sure, in a regime of unprincipled liberty, such as Athens, it was difficult, as I said, to tell the difference between a fool and a philosopher. The philosopher seemed silly, eccentric, crazy. Democratic freedom meant that there were no common principles of distinction. Liberty meant doing what one wanted, not what was right. Right and wrong had no objective distinction. Both fool and philosopher seemed equally quaint in the existing city since there was no standard or measure by which we could distinguish them one from another. In a disordered regime, the good man is abnormal; the fool seems wise. This is why democrats prefer what is average, even what is bizarre, to what is true. The fluctuating average becomes the norm of truth. Much evil is justified on the grounds that everyone lies, cheats, steals. This is the teaching of Machiavelli, a teaching already recognized as a corruption in the First Book of The Republic.
Socrates was safe in Athens only if he remained a private citizen. But because he was imitated by the youth, the potential philosophers, he was forced against his wishes into court, a setting unfamiliar to him, as he told the jurors of Athens. On the day before his trial, he had tried to escape from Meletus, the poet’s, charge of impiety by attempting to learn from Euthyphro how to be pious. But Euthyphro, who was himself impiously trying in the courts his own father for murder, did not seem either to know what piety was or how to teach it. When on the next day, the poet Meletus led the court against him, Socrates could honestly claim that he tried to learn what piety was in order to reject the claim that he was impious. Thus, Socrates was accused of impiety, of being an atheist, of not believing in the Gods of the City. In a very sophisticated argument, he denied the accusation. He believed in spirit. He knew where philosophy led, beyond matter, to immortality of the soul, to what is.
But Socrates’ philosophy did lead him to oppose some of the accounts in Homer and Hesiod about the scandalous deeds of some of the gods of Athens. The educator of Greece corrupted its youth when they read its noblest, most enchanting literature. Thus, if Homer charmed us who did not yet know the philosophic life, the most famous student of Socrates would have to find a way to charm us even more than Homer in order to counteract the effects of the poetry that educated Greece. This same poetry also corrupted it, Socrates thought. We must find a city in speech and reproduce it in our own souls if we are to find a charm beyond that of Homer, whose charm not even Socrates denied.
The problem of “philosophic learning,” as I call it, begins with our awareness that, to be ourselves, we are being called by something beyond ourselves. This is, as it were, the problem of the “perfect croissant” on the human level. And our capacity to be called out of ourselves begins with our sudden realization that we cannot fully explain ourselves to ourselves. The careful reading of the account of the young Plato on the death of his mentor is the first step in our effort to find a source that would explain ourselves when we are in some sense an enigma to ourselves. In any university, the reading of Plato is also a judge of that same university. Indeed, unless there is a reading of Plato, there is no university and it is best to escape from any institution that does not know this, does not live by it. In spite of what he sometimes implies, Plato was a also a poet. His charm, his oratory call us out of existing cities, out of existing academies.
IV.
On September 11, 2000, John Paul II received in audience in Rome the Rector, faculty, and students of the Jagiełłonian University in Kraków, his beloved school. In his address to these Polish compatriots, the Pope recalled the words he used in his visit to Kraków in 1997. “The duty of an academic institution,” the Holy Father, himself a master teacher, told his Polish friends, “is in a certain sense to give birth to souls for the sake of knowledge and wisdom, to shape minds and hearts. The task cannot be achieved other than through a generous service to the truth – revealing it and passing it on to others” (L’Osservatore Romano, October 4, 2000, 9). Academic institutions have duties, purpose. There are things to be passed on.
In this brief passage, we catch the words of Plato – to give birth in souls. We catch the spirit of Pascal that knowledge includes the heart. We are reminded that truth is the object or purpose of intellect. And we even see the words of St. Thomas, the contemplata tradere, that truth is to be pondered first in our own souls and then to be passed on to others. What is first contemplated is to be passed on. But we must first experience the joy of knowing itself in our own souls. If we ever have the exhilarating experience of truth in our souls, we cannot but seek to tell others of it, to pass it on.
We are not first to read these words in terms of “obligation,” though we cannot but be mindful of the end of the Gospels that command a going forth and a teaching of all nations. There is a superabundance to truth as to being. The first reaction we have to truth is simply a delight that what is, is. As Plato said, that truth is to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. The second reaction to truth is, as I have noted, the almost irresistible desire to tell someone else of it. It wants to flow out of us. It assumes that others seek it, that we belong to a kind that seeks to know. It implies that there is something into which we are all taken up, secured, made worthy.
The French historian Régine Pernoud recounts, with some amusement, a conference of French intellectuals devoted to the topic, “Were the Middle Ages Civilized?” She noted that this question seems to have been asked with little sense of humor or irony. These academics seemed incapable of seeing their own blindness. “The discussion (on the Middle Ages) took place in Paris, on the rue Madame,” Pernoud recalls. “One hopes,” she added,
for the moral comfort of the participants, that none of them, in order to return to his residence, had to pass by Notre-Dame de Paris. He might have felt a certain uneasiness. But no, let us reassure ourselves: an employed academic is, in any case, physically incapable of seeing what is not in conformity with the notions his brains exudes. Thus he would not in any way have seen Notre-Dame, even if his path took him to the Place du Parvis (Those Terrible Middle Ages [San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000], 12).
Even though I am, to use Pernoud’s ironic phrase, “an employed academic,” albeit with a vow of poverty, her words get to the heart of what I want to emphasize here, namely the peculiar blindness by which we do not see what is in fact there. We can actually walk in front of Notre Dame and wonder if the Middle Ages, which built Notre Dame, were civilized! The real question is whether we, with our question, are civilized? And most often, as Aristotle also had observed, the reason we do not see things, the reason we are blind to what is, is largely caused by our own theories, by our own choices on how we live.
What is at stake, we might ask ourselves, in the privilege of attending a university in our youth? Callicles, the smooth, dangerous politician in Plato’s Gorgias, said that he even enjoyed studying philosophy in college, but, for heaven’s sake, we put it away when we reach political power that cannot be impeded by philosophic musings with young scholars. Evelyn Waugh’s autobiography was aptly entitled A Little Learning, a title intended, without saying so, to recall from Alexander Pope, that “little learning is a dangerous thing.” Actually, “much learning” can be an even more dangerous thing. We already recalled how the little learning of the potential philosophers about Socrates led him into considerable danger. Waugh himself was delighted at his arrival at Oxford. He wanted to enjoy it for its own sake; he wanted to “do” everything, to “know” everything, yes, to “taste” everything. Yet, to do such things well, indeed to do them at all, we need to be taught. Not all philosophers are worthy. Any city knows that at the origins of its public disorders we find primarily the disordered souls of its own teachers and philosophers.
But it is not the job of the politician to confute the philosopher whose own soul is disordered, though it is his task to use his common sense to protect the citizens from the aberrations of the philosophers. Simon’s warning that nothing can protect the potential philosopher from giving himself to an errant academic is well taken. We are not to forget the primal vice of pride and how it relates to the most intelligent of the angels. The ultimate difference between the philosopher and the tyrant is not that one is more intelligent than the other. Rather it has to do with what good the one or the other chooses. And the root of all sin and disorder is the choice of oneself as the cause of being, as the cause of all the moral and intellectual distinctions. These are, I think, sobering words that do not allow us to be naive about our lot, about the drama into which we are born, about the city in which we live, especially if we do not also know of the city in speech, the Civitas Dei, that orders our souls.
Aristotle speaks in The Ethics of what happens when a politician is wholly absorbed in politics. He knows nothing of the pleasures of learning, of philosophy so that, in its spiritual emptiness, his own soul turns to the passions and pleasures of the world. We are wont to admit that politics is a full time occupation, a wholly absorbing profession. But it is a dangerous one, as Plato has often reminded us, when it is the only occupation we have, when we have only the existing city, not the city in speech, in our souls. The problem of “philosophical learning” lies here, I think.
V.
In Western literature we find a theme that associates life and drama. Indeed, it is often the drama that enables us to see or appreciate what life is about. In its ordinariness, we may easily fail to see the drama of life. This is why it is said that we truly live at a higher level when we contemplate life at a drama. This is a theme from Plato himself. Allan Bloom put it this way in his Shakespeare’s Politics: “What is essentially human is revealed in the extreme, and we understand ourselves better through what we might be. In a way, the spectators live more truly when they are watching a Shakespearean play than in their daily lives, which are so much determined by the accidents of time and place” (9). It is the opportunity to live “more truly” that defines us perhaps more than anything else, even when all lives have their worthiness.
When Sally was about one year old, her mother ordered Charlie Brown to walk her around the neighborhood in a stroller. As a result of his reluctant obedience, Charlie could not manage the baseball team. When he walked Sally over near the game, the team shouted out at him for abandoning them. They were quite annoyed. Sally, who was just beginning to talk, was taking this all in. She was a problem. Finally, near the end of the game, when the team still had a chance to win if Charlie could pinch hit, he decides to rush Sally back home, grab his glove and bat and return as a hero to save the team. He tells a perplexed Sally, “I’m sorry I can’t push you any more Sally but I have to go save the team from defeat.” We see him in the next scene rushing back to the field yelling, “Hang on, Team! Here comes your faithful manager!” The last scene shows baby Sally near her front steps pondering the mystery of why she, at one year old, has caused so many problems. She says to herself, “I had no idea that life would be filled with such drama!” This is the real point of our human lot, is it not? We really have no idea of the drama of our existence in time. Needless to say, when Charlie got back to the field and to the plate, he struck out, much to the derision of the very team his disobedience was trying to save (Let’s Face It, Charlie Brown, Fawcett, 1959).
We have no idea that our lives could be filled with such drama. Just because we seek the highest things, it does not follow that we do not pursue and enjoy other things. Aristotle had it about right: “Whatever someone regards as his being, or the end for which he chooses to be alive, that is the activity he wishes to pursue in his friend’s company. Hence some friends drink together, others play dice, while others do gymnastics and go hunting, or do philosophy. They spend their days together on whichever pursuit in life they like most, for since they want to live with their friends, they share the actions in which they find the common life” (1172a2-7). Some do philosophy together.
What, in conclusion, would be the worst thing we could imagine for ourselves? Socrates asks Adeimantus “Don’t you know that a true falsehood, if one may call it that, is hated by all gods and humans?” Adeimantus wonders what this might mean. “I mean that no one is willing to tell falsehoods to the most important part of himself about the most important things, but of all places he is the most afraid to have falsehood there.” Adeimantus still does not quite get it. “That is because you think I’m saying something deep,” Socrates replies. “I simply mean that to be false to one’s soul about the things that are, to be ignorant and to have and hold falsehood here, is what everyone would least of all accept, for everyone hates a falsehood in that place most of all” (382a-b).
Plato often ends things with a prayer. Let me cite the one at the end of the Phaedrus: “O dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him” (279c). This is where the pursuit of the perfect croissant leads, to a philosophic learning that, having inspired and guided us to be beautiful inside, incites us to make all things as beautiful as the being they bear allows.
All beauty is unsettling. We have, because of it, “restless hearts,” as that great African lover of Plato told us (Confessions, I, 1). In the Laws, the Athenian stranger tells us that the purpose of war is peace and order. The wise man is rich. None of us knew in advance that life could be filled with such drama. No one is willing to tell falsehoods to the most important part of himself about the most important things. Yet, the sophists tell us that they can teach us whatever we want to know, whether good or bad, without themselves being good or bad. Some friends drink together, others play dice, do gymnastics, go hunting. Still others do philosophy. Callicles said that we should put philosophy aside when we are young because politics is too serious for such adult playing. Socrates, the philosopher, was killed by Athens, the democracy, in 399 B.C. The problem of philosophic learning abides in our souls only if we build a city in speech there, where we do not want to lie to ourselves about what is.
On finishing the main argument of this reflection, I was in a dental office in Chevy Chase waiting to have a tooth filled. I looked at a magazines called Biography. Not much there but an article on F. Scott Fitzgerald. I next picked up the October 2000 issue of Gourmet, which someone had just put down. In thumbing through the pages, what do I see but an article on “great croissants,” how to tell them, how to make them. After I explained my interest, the lady in the dental office kindly gave me this magazine. In it I read, “Delicately crisp outside, light yet chewy inside, enough sugar to accentuate the butter’s sweetness, and enough salt to balance that sweetness. In a word, perfect” (224). Exactly. But the distance between the reading and the eating is infinite. The perfect croissant, the so much drama in life, Oxford as a place to be enjoyed for itself, not choosing our teachers infelicitously, no falsehood in the most important place in our souls, the prayer of Pan that we may be beautiful inside - such are the main steps in philosophical learning, in the discovery of all that is.
6) Published in Perspectives in Political Science, 30 (Spring, 2001), 29-32.
ON THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE OF “POLITICAL SCIENCE”
American universities look, at first sight, like a value-free, mega-collection of random departments and institutes that purport to divide up knowledge into manageable sub-units, none of which are necessarily related to the others. Divide et impera may no longer be a useful guide to the soldier but it is quite pertinent to the managers of universities. Contrary to the classical tradition, we can find no real hierarchy whereby we might propose one field or discipline as more important than another. No “canon” of books that all should know or read can be settled upon. All departments are, as it were, created equal. They revolve around themselves in different solar systems. Knowledge is so vast and complicated that barely sufficient time is left to fulfill requirements for this or that field. The knowledge of the “whole” has no “department” to defend its interests or delimit its requirements. Even philosophy and theology, the traditional strongholds of a knowledge of the whole, are specialized units concentrating on themselves. Indeed, we can wonder whether the pursuit of knowledge of the whole any longer exists in institutions of higher learning. It is not part of their job descriptions except on the administrative assumption that what is taught at the university, when added together, must be the whole even though no one directly intends it. What else would it be? Yet, few can see the huge areas, beginning with religion, that are left out of the whole.
All departments, moreover, compete for the same funds available to the university. Turf needs to be protected. Most disciplines like to appear as a “science,” even when, to recall Aristotle, their subject matter does not and cannot yield the certainty of mathematics. By this famous remark, Aristotle intended to protect us from the tyranny of numbers in areas wherein they do not apply to the subject matter. Within this guild-like academic system exist ranks and tenures with lots of adjuncts not competing for rank and tenure. Hiring and firing are functions of the departments themselves, though usually with some oversight from the administration, itself about as confused as the departments about what is the whole that the education business is about. Lawyers increasingly are called in to adjudicate academic disputes in terms of “rights.” Furthermore, with Internet, it is possible today to find what is being taught and even participate in some university program half way round the world. The local institution seems like a conduit for receiving what comes from someplace, any place else. The whole is the world but with no order.
We know there are famous universities, famous departments, famous journals that reflect what is considered to be “best” in this or that field of academia. Whether what is best by prestige or reputation is best in fact is a question that increasingly concerns many critics of universities. Yet internal frontiers between departments and fields are more and more fluid because the limits are more difficult to identify. The boundary stones that Plato spoke of in The Laws are regularly being stolen or moved in academia. English departments seem to be more and more sociology departments. History departments become activist. Scientists speak mindlessly of God. Theologians pronounce about justice as if that were the main revelation from eternity. History gets rewritten again and again with every new philosophic theory. Psychology sees its own face in everything it examines. Deconstruction deconstructs mainly itself. And philosophy actually seems to be realizing that it needs metaphysics, a knowledge of what is, a knowledge that it cannot accomplish unless it sufficiently recovers its epistemological soul to acknowledge the existence of things to be known, things whose very being it does not have to “postulate.” In lieu of this recovery, we have only “power,” not truth, as the purpose of both life and university.
The layman looking on these academic doings remains mostly bemused. Walter Goodman wrote a column in the New York Times (August 19, 2000) about the bewildering papers given at the American Sociological Convention in Washington. Goodman tells of dropping in on a panel entitled “Confronting Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Academia.” He did not find the first panelist, Ann Tickamyer of Ohio University, as “combative” as the panel’s title. Her
specialty of ‘spaciality,’ which I came to understand was the study of how the allotment of physical space is used by the powers that be to keep others in a subordinate condition, seemed a plausible undertaking, but Mrs. Tickamyer’s paper was so clogged with her craft’s jargon (“access to gender space”; “maxi- and micro- analysis”; “complex multi-rational”) that it left little breathing space. She was followed by Lionel Cantu, an assistant professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who kept announcing himself as “a pro-feminist gay Chicano.” The gist of his talk was that everyone ought to fight against his own demons of prejudice. Why not? But a drawn-out account by the next speaker, in praise of the way the ancient Iroquois resolved disputes, drove me from the room and thus deprived me of the final contribution.
When I finished this account of the meeting of the American Sociological Association, I had a feeling that the whole enterprise appeared idiotic and irrelevant. The entire world, not just Mr. Goodman, is being driven from academic rooms. When a common man stumbles into such venues, he has the eerie feeling that he has wandered off the face of the known planet. He suffers a complete loss of commonly understood words and principles.
One might hope that things in political science are better. This is the highest practical science as Aristotle called it, though not the highest science as such. It is the one science that can address all the virtues, that knows of common good and directs action to it. It knows of decision and deliberation, yes, of coercion and vice. The inner life of most academic departments, including political science departments, appears as a struggle for recognition and, yes, fame. The struggle is both against other departments within the university and against those organized forces outside the university that are most involved in the health of the respective discipline, especially accrediting organizations and professional organizations. Administrators want to know if this or that department is “recognized” among the top twenty or whatever of the field. Woe to them if not.
How is this top twenty (or fifty or hundred) decided? It is decided usually by an elaborate, arcane system of publishing credits, in terms of books, journals, and conference papers. Some Internet version of these publications will no doubt become part of the mix. The publishing houses are ranked. The journals are rated and weighted. Unless the school is controlled by a union more concerned with seniority than academic criteria, the monies that departments have available to them for each year’s salary increases are distributed, after allowance for teaching and service, by what is published and where. Prestige becomes the basis of academic success. It is not without reason that the sophists were long considered to be real founders of the university system. They were the ones who, for a fee, proposed to teach whatever it was that the student wished, whether it was true or not. This is why Plato remains pertinent to and an abiding critic of the modern university in which truth and its possibility are not the focus of attention.
This brings up the question of whether the prestige journals in a field are really worthy of their standing. Does anyone read them besides the ones found writing in them and a few members of the association? Do they have their own private agendas? Who controls the publication selection? This gets down to a question of the organization of national associations like the American Political Science Association, the American Economics Association, or the American Sociological Association. Of course, there are a bewildering number of associations and sub associations both within and independent of the national associations. Those in control of the associations or departments who have bought the going criterion want to prevent outside considerations or publications as pertinent to tenure or salary. The National Association of Scholars has sought to provide an alternate accrediting organization. It is tough going. Freedom of the press and organization, however, have made it possible for many journals and books to be published outside the control of the official organizations. A closed discipline or department, however, restricts its judgments to its own journals, refereed by its own members.
The New York Times (November 4, 2000) carried an account of the latest rumblings in the political science profession about the objectivity and worth of what is published in its journal, The American Political Science Review. Periodically over the last half century, recurrent questionings have been raised about the contents of the Review’s quarterly issues. For some time now, the articles have been heavily mathematical. Why is this so? The newer critics think it is because the American Political Science Association is controlled by those who think this “scientific” based political science provides the only or main character of its discipline. As a result, those who disagree with this position have to found and publish other journals that do not bear the controlled prestige that the Review seems to garner. The question of course is whether it “merits” any such special status. From time to time, critics will wonder whether any article in the Review has had any great impact either on policy or elections. Critics delight in pointing out that professional political science journals have absolutely no effect on actual politics. Often reviews with a single editor and a coherent policy will be much more forceful in the public realm than the committee judged and evaluated Review.
Most American universities have political science departments, though they often appear under different names. It would probably be fair to say that political science departments often serve as conduits to law schools. Whether this is a holy relationship is rarely discussed, though the legalization of our public and private life is certainly one of the most pervasive and perhaps dangerous things about our society. European universities often have had to import American type structures to have “political science” departments. On the other hand, political science departments are almost the only departments that have traditionally their own sub-section devoted to the philosophy of the field, to political philosophy. It is from this source through such thinkers as Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and a number of others, that serious consideration of the grounds of human life and reflection on it in its political forms have been found. With notable exceptions, political science departments have appeared to be more “sane” in academia largely, I think, because of this connection with philosophy.
However, there is no doubt that a positivist philosophical approach that stresses quantative analyses and numbers has ruled most branches of the field. The Review, in its own defense, maintains that the reason that three-quarters of the articles in the review bear the tell-tale mark of numbers is because that is what is sent to the Review for consideration. It is quite true that someone with a more philosophical bent would simply bypass the Review and send material to journals such as the Review of Politics, Interpretation, Political Theory, Perspectives in Political Science, or other journals of public opinion, philosophy, or theology wherein more serious considerations of the philosophical basis of political science can be more freely discussed. Academics who follow this latter path know that they must pay a certain price for this approach. We should not be surprised that truth and its pursuit often requires a more lonely path.
It must be said, however, that the Conventions of the American Political Science Association have been in recent years surprisingly open to sub-fields or adjunct associations that have presented programs at the annual convention of high philosophic caliber. The Voegelin Society presents perhaps the best known and attended philosophic discussion at the conference and one of the best in the country. The Claremont Institute also has a high caliber of papers. Groups like Christians in Political Science have good papers and present considerations that would otherwise be lacking from the program. At the last convention in Washington, I was struck walking through the massive numbers of conference papers for sale for a dollar by the frequency of papers that were of philosophic worth. I would add that the other journals within the overall American Political Science Association aegis, particularly the Journal of Politics, consistently have essays that seriously consider philosophic issues. I have attended a number of conventions of the Southwest Social Science Association which has a vigorous subsection devoted to issues of political philosophy. Looked at from this angle, the scene is by no means bleak.
One is thus hard pressed to decide where the problem lies. Were there a more sympathetic consideration at the department levels of philosophic articles no matter in what journal they might appear – something that seems only to be a question of intellectual honesty – it would be possible to downgrade the American Political Science Review as anything more than a journal devoted to a certain very narrow type of study within the discipline, the basis of which is itself dubious and in need of much more philosophic attention. Leo Strauss in his famous essay, “What Is Political Philosophy?”, remarked on the distinction between political philosophy, political science, political theory, political theology, and various other studies in government and administration. One really needs to add to this consideration the whole status of political sociology and sociology itself, the foundations of which are deeply rooted in modernity. Strauss’ question, I think, needs to be an abiding question in a journal such as The American Political Science Review. It does not have to have a Straussian formulation or conclusion but it does have to be asked again and again.
A philosophic question is not one that is answered once and for all. Rather it is a question that needs to be asked again and again. No doubt, not everyone will have the intelligence or interest in such questions, but without it, a discipline is always in danger of slipping off into realms in which any common man can judge, and judge rightly, to be absurd. Above all, political science needs continually to see itself in relation to the contemplative order, to what is. The highest of the practical sciences, as Aristotle called it, does a work that, when done correctly, points beyond itself. The discipline needs to know this characteristic of its own essence and to be constantly aware of its own higher orientation.
When we read in The Laws of Plato that human affairs are not of great seriousness, we must understand that this seeming flippancy is not intended to be a denigration of political things as such. Political science can indeed claim to be more than it is. This is the temptation of peculiarly modern political philosophy – examples of which no doubt are featured from time to time in The American Political Science Review, among other places. What we need is not fewer of such pieces, but a wider scope of discussion that brings in a much deeper realization of political philosophy and its relation to the discipline.
The recent critics of The American Political Science Review policies, in pointing out the difference between numbers based articles and more historical or philosophical articles, touch on more than they perhaps know about the state of the discipline. In 1943, Charles N. R. McCoy published a seminal essay in The American Political Science Review (V. 37, 626-41) entitled “The Place of Machiavelli in the History of Political Thought.” This essay was later included in McCoy’s Structure of Political Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963). I want to cite the following lines from this reflection:
The structure of political thought in the Greek-medieval tradition was built on the subordination of practical science to theoretic science and, within the sphere of practical science, on the subordination of art to prudence. The very essence of constitutional liberty was held to depend on the maintenance of these relations. The modern theory of politics began by reversing the order between prudence and art: It will seek a liberty that is proper not to prudence but to art, and it will define the good by a judgment proper to art – by conformity simply of what the prince actually produces with what he himself intends to produce. The opening phase of modern political thought avows an indifference to the morally good; it frees man from an obligation to a moral order founded on man’s given nature. But it does not yet think of creating a new morality (157),
Needless to say, it did soon enough come to think of precisely a “new” morality, one set in contradistinction to the morality that is found in the classical-medieval tradition.
The purpose of political philosophy within the range of a journal like The American Political Science Review and its official more regional reviews ought to be a continual examining of these reversals, of the consequences of these subtle shifts in an essentially intelligible deviation from classical positions. Needless to say, if such studies do not appear within the Review or within the halls of its conventions, then honest scholars must look elsewhere to pursue a task that is central to the discipline. What the discipline needs, what the Review needs, is the awareness of the place of politics in the order of things. One cannot legitimately expect a professional review itself to produce on command such considerations. They need to arise from the souls of those who reflect on political things. They need to be presented, to be considered even against the hostility that such philosophical and metaphysical considerations often receive in practical disciplines.
In a remarkable short essay entitled “The Purpose of Politics,” the late German philosopher Josef Pieper wrote:
All political activity, from practice of the ethical virtues to gaining the means of livelihood, serves something other than itself. And this other thing is not practical activity. It is having what is sought after while we rest content in the results of our active efforts. Precisely that is the meaning of the old adage that the vita activa is fulfilled in the vita contemplativa. To be sure the active life contains a felicity of its own; it lies, says Thomas, principally in the practice of prudence, in the perfect art of the conduct of life. But ultimate repose cannot be found in this kind of felicity. Vita activa est dispositio ad contemplativam, the ultimate meaning of the active life is to make possible the happiness of contemplation (Josef Pieper – an Anthology, Ignatius, 1981, 121).
This, after all, is what Plato meant about human life not being that serious. There are things more serious than political things, even though these have their own felicity and seriousness. Not to know these limits of politics is not to know what politics is.
The concerns about The American Political Science Review are, at bottom, concerns about the academic discipline of political science. I have no doubt that trying to “fix” something that is not broken is a bad idea. Moreover, I think with Aristotle that if someone thinks something is wrong, it does not follow that his proposed solution will not make things worse in spite of his best intentions. Compared to other academic fields much more directly affected by intellectual disorders of modern and post-modern thought, political science is not in such bad shape. We have great respect for Nietzsche, but we do not give him a pass. That is to say, political science is a field much affected by the “new morality” of modernity, but neither is it a field that has completely forgotten from whence it came and how we got to where we are. The vita activa, the political life, has a purpose. Its relative seriousness points beyond itself, to what, as Plato said, is ultimately serious. We do not think the discipline’s soul is completely lost. But, as the turbulence in the profession seems to indicate, it is not at home with itself because it pays too little attention to what, in itself, it is.
7) Published in Modern Age, 43 (Winter, 2001), 71-78.
ON THE MEASURE AND CONSERVATION OF HUMAN THINGS: Science, Philosophy, and the Cities of Man
“For the truth of knowledge is measured by the knowable object. For it is because a thing is so or is not so that a statement is known to be true or false, and not the reverse.” – Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book 5, l. 17, #1003.
“A people that were to honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, and murder would be unable, indeed, to subsist for very long.”
– Albert Einstein, “Religion and Science: Irreconcilable?,” June, 1948.
“I’ve come to the damndest watershed in my life – done what I wanted to do in the novel, with linguistics, children grown, sitting down here in the Louisiana autumn. Everything quiet. What now? It would be a good time to die, but on the other hand, I’d as soon not. It’s all very spooky. Life is much stranger than art....”
– Walker Percy to Shelby Foote, May 14, 1972.
I.
Human things are not divine things. Feuerbach says, brashly, that divine things are the product of human things. Plato and Aristotle describe human things as open to, but not identical with, divine things. They also intimate that it is human, as much as we can, to seek divine things. Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est. The man who sets out only to be human somehow becomes less than human. We ignore the highest things at our peril. Human things are finite, incomplete; none the less, they are real and worthy. They are worth keeping. Their very imperfection, indeed their perfection, implies something beyond themselves, some abiding unsettlement or restlessness, as Augustine reminds us. Though we have here no “lasting city,” we still found cities, preserve them, refashion them, sometimes destroy or abandon them. We are often, as Chesterton said, “homesick at home.” Still we first need homes that abide so that we might know what this curious homesickness might indicate about our human condition.
But human beings can do unworthy things, things both against human things and against divine things. To be unable, in principle, to choose and to do evil things, however, would necessitate a contrary incapacity to do gracious things. The drama of human existence would disappear if either of these peculiar capacities were lacking to us. We would, compared to what we are, be dull, bored beings. Our contentment would be like that of the animals, whereas our actual discontents point beyond us, to the gods. Rewards and punishments have their basis in human reality, in the consequences of exercised freedom.
The cities of men are set up to reflect the souls of men who compose them. If there can be disordered souls, there can be disordered cities. In fact, the maximum disorder in human things reflects itself most clearly and most dangerously in the worst regime. But the origin of this disorder is not in the city itself; it remains in the soul, in that part of the soul that can do “otherwise.” Reforms of cities, both for better and for worse, begin and end in reforms of souls. Much of modern political thought has been a deliberate effort to avoid, obscure, or deny this truth. Unless we conserve this same truth, however, we will not know what we are. Knowing what we are is the first thing we must keep. To love is to keep.
A city that is disordered, however, implies the existence, at least in speech, of a city that is not disordered. “Fraud,” a disorder, means that we recognize what is not fraud, that it need not have been, but is. The city that is completely ordered, the best regime, is the main “philosophic” concern of politics insofar as it reflects on its own experience, on its own unique activities. The exact location of the best regime is the true mystery of political things. Politics, by being politics, brings us to things that are not merely political, to things in the order of what is. The best regime of men, because it is rare, implies the best regime of the gods, the City of God. In revelation, God is, as it were, using Aristotle’s phrase, “a social and political being,” a Trinity. God is neither lonely nor in need either of the world or of us. “Will men be like gods?” has always been, since Genesis, a question formulated against God, a question that implied that men thought that they could make themselves better than God created or redeemed them. This claim to autonomy over what man is, in the tradition, has always been called “pride.” It means the claim that man is the cause of his own being and of all that is not his own being, including the gods.
In revelation, man is made in the “image” of this triune God. That is, he is not himself, by himself, a god. His relative perfection does not consist in becoming something else other than what he is, though what he is implies his responsibility for becoming this best. Otherwise, he would not be what he is, a being free enough either to reject or to attain what he is. Neither in the state of nature, nor in the household, nor in the polity, nor in the City of God is it “good” for man to be alone. Man comes to know what he is through reflecting on what he does. Agere sequitur esse. How we act follows from what we are. The being of man implies the good of man. His being is given, but not by himself; his goodness he must choose to bring about in himself. “Man does not make man to be man,” as Aristotle already knew, “but taking him from nature as man, makes him to be good man.”
II.
Machiavelli, in a famous passage, asked us to pay attention not to what men “ought” to do, but to what they “do” do. We are, he advised, to reject the ancient philosophers and to listen to the modern ones, to himself. He did not flinch at describing some rather terrible things that men do to each other. Doing such things, indeed, he thought, could be “useful.” He explicitly rejects Socrates’ standard that “it is never right to do wrong.” Machiavelli is said thereby to have introduced observation and accurate foundations into politics. In other words, he made politics “scientific,” as Hobbes was to attempt to do more systematically some century and a half later. Both thought that they reduced human things to the lowest possible denominator and, on this basis, constructed political things independently of moral things. The “improvement of man’s estate,” to use Bacon’s phrase, could now be contemplated as a product of our own making if we did not expect too much, if we “lowered our sights.” We could become more democratic by becoming less noble. We could do this in the name of modern “science.” Human things were to be modeled on non-human things so that among human things we could have the certitude of natural things. This “improvement” was to be achieved at great cost.
But, paradoxically, men and Princes who “honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, and even murder” not infrequently last for a longer time in power than even a scientific Einstein seems to anticipate. How is it, if these are disordered acts, that they last at all? Is time necessary that the results of our acts might become visible, even to us? Politics is the public space in which the results of our acts, good or bad, appear. Machiavelli’s Prince, to recall, was empowered with such “tools” as lies, defamation, fraud, and murder precisely so that he might be “successful,” so he and his new political regime would “last.” He was “liberated” from the restrictions of what we “ought” to do, from the bonds of virtue, so that he might be successful in staying in power. If this new Prince took the “measure” of men, it was so that he might measure and manipulate them for his own purposes. The Prince was not “measured” by anything but his own criteria. He was not only a new Prince; he was a “new man,” an unmeasured, unlimited being. Man was “for himself.” Science, when applied to politics, eliminated what politics was about because the methods of science were not proportionate to the subject matter of political things.
Can we find and remove the “causes” for such disorders as lying, defamation, fraud, and murder, assuming we agree that they are disorders? Revelation was aware of the perplexity of these matters under the rubric of “the Fall.” It implied that both politicians and scientists could themselves manifest these disorders; that is to say, there was no political or “scientific” cure for them – which did not necessarily mean, frequent mistake, that there was no cure at all. Could there be a reality whose activities are not subject to scientific method, which sees only what such method allows it to see? “Reductionism” means, briefly, to identify all reality with what scientific methods allow to be considered. If the method does not reach something, it assumed not to exist. This is a radical narrowing of reality. Culture, religion, philosophy, in some sense, mean the preservation both of science and, more especially, of what science cannot reach by its own peculiar methods.
Those who ‘lie, defame, commit fraud, and murder” do, moreover, give us reasons for their acts. Their reasons are designed to make such acts seem noble, necessary, worthy, justified. This explication would not be necessary if such acts were simply what they are, if they did not call attention in their very being to their opposites, to truth, honor, honesty, and the dignity of life. These same Princes who practice these newer politics likewise complain if these deviant methods are used against themselves, even if they think “all men do them.” Doesn’t this reaction seem odd? Does the denial of a standard indicate the existence of a standard? Machiavelli’s Prince, in his own terms, might be “successful” for a time, even a long time, among virtuous Princes. But a Machiavellian Prince among Machiavellian Princes – what advantage does he have?
Ought we then to conserve not only the record of our noble deeds but also the record of our
heinous ones - monuments to both kings and tyrants? Or is it possible, as C. S. Lewis intimated
in a remarkable little book, a book largely about science and literature, to “abolish” man?
When we have done all we set out to do, why, in Walker Percy’s words, is it a good time
to “die”? Is there a finite completion to life due to us, a “four score years and ten,” as Scripture
implied? Cicero also seems to think so in his famous essay “On Old Age.” Is death itself, then,
something that we should “conserve?” Or is death’s elimination, just like altering the processes
of begetting and birth, a proper object of science? Would it be an improvement if scientists
replaced this “four score years and ten” man with a four hundred year old man? Is extended length
of time an improvement on everlasting life in the revelational sense? And why is life “stranger than
art?” We distinguish art and life, yet Aquinas remarks that living things, indeed all things, are the
products of the divine “art.” They all betray the classic questions: “Why is there something, not
nothing?” “Why is this thing not that thing?” Things do not “design” themselves, though many
things are subject to man’s re-furbishing powers. Michael Behe points out that the human eye, for
example, is itself so intricate, so complex that it could not simply have happened or resulted from
slow, statistical forces.
Art is a human thing, the relation between what we want to make and what we do make. If art or fiction were stranger than life, where would such art or fiction come from? Among us, art seems to come after life; among things, art seems to come first. They are what they are, not of themselves. Knowledge does not measure knowledge. Existing things measure knowledge. Truth is, as Plato said, “to say of what is, that it is, of what is not, that it is not.” And what measures things? Especially, what measures human things? Can human beings, as Einstein, the scientist, seemed to think, do things that are not human? If they “must” do them, or if they are as good as their opposites, what do we have to complain about, or even talk about? Our complaints imply a standard, a rule. Our talking implies an effort to distinguish among things. We seek to know, knowing we do not know.
III.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, perhaps the greatest of the modern books that distinguish science and politics, Burke comments on those, like Empedocles among the ancients and Buffon among the moderns, who want to use geometry and mathematics as principles of politics. “When these state surveyors came to take a view of their work of measurement,” Burke writes,
they soon found that in politics the most fallacious of all things was geometrical
demonstration. They had then recourse to another basis (or rather buttress) to support the
building, which tottered on that false foundation. It was evident that the goodness of the
soil, the number of the people, their wealth, and the largeness of their contribution made
such infinite variation between square and square as to render mensuration a ridiculous
standard of power in the commonwealth, and equality in geometry the most unequal of all
measures in the distribution of men.
This is why Aristotle had already told us that we should not expect more certitude of a science than the subject matter of that science could yield. Yet, because human things cannot accurately be measured by mathematical or other scientific criteria, it does not necessarily follow that human things have no proper measure of their own.
Human things, the things that came forth from reason and will, are as such true only “for the most part.” Why is this?” It is because of the variety of circumstance and condition in human things, because there are many different ways to do almost anything good or bad. No two human acts, either of good or evil, are exactly the same. Yet, they come to be by human agency. Thus, there is an area or aspect of reality that is unique to human living, that could not exist without it. It exists because human beings exist, the reality of things that proceed from human knowledge and will. The practical sciences, as Aristotle called them, investigate the reality of things that need not be, the things that can be “otherwise,” things that proceed from human acting and causing. If these things could, at any moment, have been otherwise, we cannot study them as if they were things that would always betray the same properties and activities. We cannot exactly anticipate ahead of time what they will be. The variety of human things, including political things, thus, is more complicated than the diversities of natural and cosmic things. But once human acts have been put into reality, it always remains true that they exist in this way, not that way.
What kind of a good is science? Science, Aristotle says, is a perfection of our minds, of our knowing. But it is the knowing not of ourselves but of what is not ourselves. We know ourselves only in knowing what is not ourselves. We seek to know that things are, how things are, why they are as they are. The modern development of science, however, as Leo Strauss perceptively observed, came up against one curious obstacle.
After some time it appeared that the conquest of nature requires the conquest of human
nature and hence in the first place the questioning of the unchangeability of human nature:
an unchangeable human nature might set limits to progress. Accordingly the natural needs
of men could no longer direct the conquest of nature; the direction had to come from reason
as distinguished from nature, from the rational Ought as distinguished from the neutral Is.
This remarkable passage sets the agenda for Lewis’ “abolition” of man. It may be that the unchangeableness of human nature is not a “necessary” thing that cannot be otherwise but a moral thing that we make otherwise at our peril, at the cost of what we are.. We can do, it is possible to do what we ought not to do. If we do, the cost of our so doing is to live with our choices, with the world made by ourselves.
The “natural needs of men” meant that they could learn what they are, even if they did not make themselves, by observing in themselves what they naturally need and strive for. If, however, what man is turns out to be itself an indifferent object of science, itself absent of any norm for its being the way it is, then man no longer is measured by the being he is given. The “Is” of man’s nature is not “neutral,” as Strauss intimates. For it implies that man does have a natural measure that is not simply the product of his own “Ought” now released from nature and dependent solely on his own constructive, or artistic, “reason.” Henceforth, the “reconstruction” of human nature in the name of progress will be in terms of, ironically, “human rights,” themselves presupposed to nothing but what the autonomous intellect, individual or political, seeks to put in place. The “rights” of man are divorced from the “being” of man and turn upon it. Human nature is no longer itself a “measure,” even though we can compare what science now proposes when it is no longer blocked by an “unchangeable human nature,” with human nature as it manifested itself in history. We can know, in the name of progress, that we have not improved fundamental things.
IV.
There is an analysis of modern conservatism, though not the only one, that makes it merely
a more cautious version of modern liberalism; neither the one nor the other is based on any
“unchanging” norms.
“We cling to permanent things, the norms of our being,” Russell Kirk once observed,
“because all other grounds are quicksand.”
J. M. Bochenski once gave a vivid illustration about the relationship between the “laws” of the mind and the “laws” existing in things, and more especially about the fact that the universal laws are related to concrete things. In the world, he says,
laws are really valid. Let us take the following example. When an engineer plans a bridge,
he relies on a great number of physical laws. Now, if one would assume, as Hume does,
that all of these laws are only habits of mankind, or more precisely of this engineer, then
one must ask how it is possible that a bridge which is correctly planned according to proper
laws will stand solid, whereas one whose planning the engineer has made mistakes will fall
apart. How can human habits be decisive for such masses of concrete and iron? It seems
as if the laws are only secondarily in the mind of the engineer. Primarily they are valid for
the world, for iron and concrete, totally independent of whether anyone knows something
about them or not.
If the laws of engineering are derived and known from reality, no less so are the laws of human nature. The primary difference is that the iron and cement has no choice but to be what it is when correctly placed in a bridge. Human beings have to put into effect the laws of their own being. They are like a bridge which knows how to build itself, and a pari, how not to build itself. If they make a mistake, the bridge won’t stand. If we reject our being, we do not cease to be, but we do cease to be well.
In his essay, What Is Philosophy?, Martin Heidegger cites the following passage from Plato:
“Plato says (Theatet, 155d): ‘For this is especially the pathos [emotion] of a philosopher, to be
astonished. For there is no other beginning of philosophia than this.’”
V.
“Attempts are often made to convince people that we have reached the twilight of the age of certainty in the knowledge of truth, and that we are irrevocably condemned to the total absence of meaning, the provisional nature of all knowledge, and to permanent instability and relativity,” John Paul II remarked in an address to Rectors of Polish Universities.
In this situation, it appears imperative to reaffirm a basic confidence in human reason and
its capacity to know the truth, including absolute and definitive truth. Man is capable of
elaborating a uniform and organic conception of knowledge. The fragmentation of
knowledge destroys man’s inner unity. Man aspires to the fullness of knowledge, since he
is a being who by his very nature seeks the truth and cannot live without it. Contemporary
scholarship, and especially present day philosophy, each in its own sphere, needs to
rediscover that sapiential dimension which consists in the search for the definitive and
overall meaning of human existence.
What is implied here is that we need not, on the basis of evidence, accept the movements and philosophies that end the 20th century as definitive of the human condition. Man does have an inner unity. He can develop a coherent set of principles that do explain reality. The meaning of his own existence need not be completely obscure to such a degree that he can know nothing of himself or of the world.
One of the burdens of classical political philosophy was to convince the busy politician that there was reason to let the philosopher philosophize, that even though he might be, like Socrates, a gadfly, if not a nuisance and a disturber of the peace, his life and activity were important to the polity itself. What the classical politician was not so aware of, and this is the situation of the century we enter, is not the corrupt politician but the philosopher who rejects what is. Or to put it in another way, it is the philosopher who has corrupted the politician and encouraged him to put into effect ideas that involve the radical reconstruction of man contrary any good that is inherent in his being.
The modern political tyrant, like Callicles and Alcibiades among the ancients, is apt to praise the philosophy of his youth. He is likely to have things going for him, personally and politically. The 20th century has been peculiar because its worst tyrants were often themselves philosophers. The combination politician and philosopher came to exist in a most unfortunate manner. Is there anything more dangerous than this? It would seem so. What would be worse would be politicians, busy about their own ways, attuned to the philosophers who themselves deny any possibility of knowing truth, of knowing what we are, of knowing anything but what we make, including our polities.
And yet, in conclusion, we ought not forget that in classical thought, to know evil things
is not to be evil. That is to say, as Eric Voegelin remarked, there is a certain salutary good in
seeing that the ideologies developed in the early modern period and carried into effect in the 20th
century have reached their intellectual limits.
In Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, written at the close of the 19th Century, we read: “When
the anarchist, as the mouth piece of the declining strata of society, demands with a fine
imagination, what is ‘right,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equal rights,’ he is merely under the pressure of his own
uncultured state, which cannot comprehend the real reason for his suffering – what it is that he is
poor in: life. A causal instinct asserts itself in him: it must be somebody’s fault that he is in a bad
way.”
8) James V. Schall, S. J., Georgetown University, Presented as a lecture to the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, Washington, DC, 24 January 2002. To be published in the Gregorianun, 2002.
WHY IS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY DIFFERENT?
“The political science that was created by Plato and Aristotle was established in opposition to the opinions held by the intellectuals of their time, by the sophists. And this conflict with the intellectuals, the revolt against the intellectuals, from which emerged our science, is monumentally commemorated to this day in the political dialogues of Plato’s early and middle years. From its origins the science of politics is a militant enterprise, a defense of truth both political and practical. It is a defense of true knowledge about human existence in society against the untrue opinions dispensed by intellectuals; and it is a defense of true human being against the corruption of man perpetrated by the intellectuals.”
– Eric Voegelin, “Political Science and the Intellectuals.”
“In his indignation at the extravagance of Plato, and his sense of the significance of facts, he (Aristotle) became, against his will, the prophetic exponent of a limited and regenerated democracy. But the Politics, which, to the world of living men, is the most valuable of his works, acquired no influence on antiquity, and it was never quoted before the time of Cicero. Again it disappeared for many centuries; it was unknown to the Arabian commentators, and in Western Europe it was first brought to light by St. Thomas Aquinas, at the very time when an infusion of popular elements was modifying feudalism, and it helped to emancipate political philosophy from despotic theories and to confirm it in the ways of freedom.”
– Lord Acton, “Review of Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe.”
I.
Why we might ask, in the words of Lord Acton, does “political philosophy” need to be
“emancipated” from “despotic theories?” Are not “despotic theories,” a subject familiar to both
classical and modern authors, an aspect of “political philosophy” itself? And why, in the words of
Eric Voegelin, does “true human being” need to be defended “against the corruption of man
perpetrated by the intellectuals?” Are “intellectuals” more dangerous than politicians?
What has proved to be peculiarly dangerous about the modern world, especially the recent twentieth century, is that not a few of these latter “philosophers” and “intellectuals” have become active politicians. These philosopher-politicians have proved to be considerably more dangerous than the older concept of a tyrant, who was no doubt a brutal man, no doubt, but one with no particular philosophical pretensions. The philosopher-politician is bent, like the philosopher, on universalizing his intellectual vision no matter what. By contrast, speaking of the “world of living men,” Acton called Aristotle’s Politics “the most valuable of his works,” for it was a book that moderated politics and distinguished it from metaphysics without denying the validity of either. Both politics and metaphysics had an ordered place in the understanding of all that is. Philosophy and politics both go wrong when they have no fixed place or theory within which to locate themselves. As Aristotle put it, “political expertise does not create human beings but makes use of them after receiving them from nature” (1257b22-23). The origin of human beings as such is not political, even though man is by nature a political animal.
A politics without a metaphysics, however, soon becomes itself a substitute metaphysics, something that Acton no doubt saw coming from the “extravagance of Plato.” But to give Plato his due against all those ancients and moderns who see him as the origin of ideology, it was he who saw in its classic form in the Gorgias the dangers to the philosopher coming from a popular, intelligent, handsome young politician who himself contemptuously refuses to engage in philosophic discourse and thereby refuses to have his ideas put to the test of intelligence.
Political philosophy at its best is a dialogue with the politicians about the worth and validity of things that are not political, of things that are “not Caesar’s,” to use the scriptural phrase for it. It is the politicians who order the deaths of Socrates and Christ, though it is generally the theoretician, as Machiavelli sensed, who prepare the minds of both princes and potential philosophers to be able to carry out such orders. Political philosophy must consider the aberrations of the actual politicians as well as the reasons they give for these aberrations. Political philosophy must also be aware of the disorders of soul possible to philosophers themselves, something about which politicians can also know.
At first sight, this background, steeped in intellectual considerations from Western
philosophy, does not even touch the whole Islamic world, so much in our attention. In this world,
the state, unless it imitates Western notions, as few do, is identified with the religion and serves as
its instrument. Voegelin, in fact, saw Islam as but an aspect of a broader movement in political
philosophy that strove by force to put into effect the image of the world and man that it had
conceived in theory. “Islam was primarily an ecumenic religion and only secondarily an empire,”
Voegelin wrote in the Fourth Volume of his Order and History. “Hence it reveals in its extreme
form the danger which beset all of the religions of the Ecumenic Age, the danger of impairing their
universality by letting their ecumenic mission slide over into the acquisition of world-immanent,
pragmatic power over a multitude of men which, however numerous, could never be mankind past,
present, and future.”
In other words, one cannot avoid the question of the truth of a theory or explanation of the
world, whether that theory be from religion or philosophy, from ideology or intellectual system.
And the instrument of this explanation cannot be yet another “theory” that holds that there is no
truth. We cannot forget that there were metaphysicians in Islam. They tried to reconcile the
absolute ungrounded will of Allah to which must all submit with some rational order in things.
One can wonder with Stanley Jaki whether the theoretic impossibility of making this reconciliation
is not at the roots of our present political turmoil.
II.
“How is political philosophy different?” we ask And “what difference does its difference make?” On hearing such questions asked, what first thing comes to mind is: “different from what?” Let me first address the second question: what difference does it make? We are to call things that are by their right names. That identifying, that calling the right names is the first and, in some sense, the most important theoretical act we can perform. It stands before all action, the truth of which, that is, the truth of action or in action, is itself known, affirmed, and judged. This putting the stamp of truth on action is what the virtue of prudence (phronesis) means.
“Political philosophy” is not, however, a “thing” in the sense that it is not a substance
having its own independent being. Rather it is an activity of the mind in its actually knowing
something not itself. What it knows is not exclusively of its own construction. That is, it does not
just know itself and what it causes to be from itself, which latter position is essentially what the
modern project or modernity is about.
Thus, the first step is a negative one. It is to grant that political philosophy is not the whole of philosophy itself; it is not theology, nor is it even political science or political or legal theory. It is not sociology or economics; nor is it a physical science or based on its methodology. It is not a branch of logic or psychology or anthropology. Though it has some articulated relation to all of these disciplines, they are not what it is. Phrases such as “the economics of politics,” or the “sociology of politics,” or the “psychology of politics,” or even the “biology” or “genetics” or “theology” of politics, may have some contribution to add, but, contrary to what is usually meant by such phrases, they do not explain what specifically political philosophy is “really” about in itself.
Initially, about political philosophy or anything else, there is something to be said for getting the question it answers stated correctly. We do not always know if our questions can be answered, but that is no reason not to have the proper questions. The questions that political philosophy poses to itself arise out of “politics” and “ethics,” that is, out of the experience of human living. They do not begin with some pre-existing theory, say of contract or state of nature or modern physics or linguistics, some “science” that stands between the knower and what is known. The possibility that some legitimate questions cannot be humanly answered is not necessarily a reason for not asking them. It is not a question of despair nor for thinking that their difficulty of answer is itself a bad thing. Aristotle told us in a famous passage in his Ethics, we must “strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it is small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything” (1177b34-78a1).
In an old Peanuts cartoon, Linus runs up to Lucy with triumphant news, “Look, Lucy, I tied
my own shoes.” He instinctively knows that she figured that he would never learn how to tie
them. Lucy bends down to have a closer look at this unexpected feat. She exclaims, “So you did
... but you got ‘em on the wrong feet.” They both stand up straight with frowns on their faces,
staring at the wrong-footed shoes. Linus replies, petulantly, “Waddya mean, the wrong feet?” In
the last scene, to a defiant Lucy glaring at him, Linus shouts, “THESE are my feet!”
III.
In the introduction to his famous essay,”What Is Political Philosophy?,” Leo Strauss began
his lecture with these solemn words: “It is a great honor, and at the same time a challenge to accept
a task of particular difficulty, to be asked to speak about political philosophy in Jerusalem. In this
city, and in this land, the theme of political philosophy – ‘the city of righteousness, the faithful
city’ – has been taken more seriously than anywhere else on earth.”
In a sense, Strauss is almost equally as shocking as Tertullian. Strauss implies that the
“theme” of political philosophy, as he calls it, is identified with the “city of righteousness.” We
are surprised to hear this clearly Old Testament theme, this Augustinian theme, identified with
precisely “political philosophy.” At first sight, we would not expect a pious Jew, even if he also
be a philosopher, to make such a comparison. The things of God descend, after the manner of an
unexpected gift. Man does not command the divinity. Strauss himself, in contra-distinction with
Christian thinkers, was loathe to posit too much, if any, relationship between reason and
revelation.
St. Augustine made this connection between Jerusalem and Athens more easily but he made it as a Christian, for whom the Word was made flesh, something, as he tells us in his Confessions that he “did not read in the Platonists” (Bk. VII, c. 9). Augustine had no trouble in calling his major work, The City of God, a phrase from the Psalms, but one that also clearly associates him with the project of Plato’s Republic, his city in speech that always seemed to be searching for a more grounded home. And St. Thomas made the connection between Athens and Jerusalem also but as Christian who read Aristotle for whom the body was a constituent part of what it is to be a human being and whose God was not a lonely one. “Thought thinking itself” did, however, serve to illuminate the inner life of the Trinity, the Father, the Word, the Spirit..
Strauss wants to know how much we can know of this “faithful city” by our own powers.
Implicitly, at least, he is rejecting, or at least avoiding, a consideration of how much we can learn
of it, even philosophically, with revelation.
Eric Voegelin, also recalling Plato and Aristotle, remarked that “the science of politics” was “militant.” It was engaged in war against “untrue opinions” of “intellectuals,” sophists. “True human being” needed defense against the constructs of the intellectuals. Intellectuals “perpetrated” something that was not the truth about men in society. Clearly, “intellectuals” were not equivalent to political philosophers. Voegelin identified intellectuals with the ancient sophists against whom Plato wrote. These were the speakers who came to our town and, for a fee, could tells how to achieve what we wanted in our lives or in our regime. Themselves, they took no stand on such issues. They were neutral, “value free,” as we have come to say following Max Weber.
Even Lord Acton in the last century said that Thomas Aquinas “emancipated” political philosophy from “despotic theories” and “confirmed it in the ways of freedom,” evidently, along with “a true knowledge of human existence in society,” its real vocation. Aristotle had said, however, that “it would be absurd for someone to think that political science or intelligence is the most excellent science, when the best thing in the universe is not man” (1141a20-21). Emancipation of political philosophy from “despotic theories” and a confirmation in “the ways of freedom”indicate why political science is not the “most excellent science.” The ways of freedom lead not to “freedom” as such but to what is best in man. The despotic theories claim a metaphysical power for politics, the power to change the very nature of what it is to be a human being.
If political science is not the “highest science,” it remains, nevertheless, the highest practical science, something worthy in itself. If man is not the best thing in the universe, he is still a good and worthy thing as such. The implication follows that if we know as much as we can about this political being and its political activities, we will reach the outlines of the “city of righteousness,” the city of God. We will understand that, though we be political animals, we are also rational animals, animals who laugh. The political life is generally necessary to know and practice the virtues. But virtue, while practiced for its own sake, leads to what is able to be seen because of virtue. The one thing the unvirtuous cannot see is what is beyond virtue but not apart from it. And the virtuous or political life is a worthy life.
IV.
Classical political philosophy, in addition to Aristotle’s discussion of wit and humor in Book Four of his Ethics, could be amusing. Take the question of whether philosophy itself was “useless.” Of course, there are two meanings to the word “useless” – one would be that the thing was worth nothing at all, the other that something is beyond the criterion of “use” or utility. The example that Aristotle uses in Book One of the Politics has to do with Thales of Miletus. It seems this good man was chided for his poverty and general frumpiness. In a spirit of light vengeance, Thales decided to show the locals that philosophy was not useless after all. He would meet his critics on their own ground.
Because of his knowledge of astronomy, Thales figured that it would be a good season for olives and grapes. So in the off season, he cornered the market on the presses need to crush olives and grapes. When the season sure enough turned in a bountiful crop, the local growers suddenly found out that they had to pay a premium to Thales in order to get their produce crushed. Thales made a tidy sum and the locals realized that the philosopher was not poor because he had to be but because he wanted to be. He was busy about other, higher things and could not be bothered with useful things like business and cornering the market in other affairs to make a fortune. The conclusion evidently was that philosophy itself was beyond use by choice and not necessity (1259a1-25).
The city was a place of merchants and farmers, but these did not compose the essence of the city. On the other hand, even if we had the rulers and the ruled in a legitimate constitution, a citizenry leading virtuous lives, we still did not have philosophy. Philosophy only existed if we had philosophers. And politicians had the power to kill the philosophers, so it was necessary that the rulers knew the worth of philosophy, even while not themselves having time for philosophy. Philosophers did not have their own civil defense league to protect themselves.
Aristotle remarked in the Rhetoric, however, “it is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs” (1355b1-3). But as the trials of Christ and Socrates showed, the effort to defend the philosopher against the politicians does not always succeed. But it is the first task of political philosopher, as Plato’s Gorgias makes clear, at least to formulate an argument that would convince the politician not to kill the philosopher. But once it is agreed that the philosopher might live, he has to be free to philosophize. And one of his first efforts must be to understand the limits of the city so that what can become clear on the horizon is a city that is not, as it were, a polis that comes from man the political animal who is neither a god nor a beast.
Aristotle called political science an “architectonic” science (1094a7-17). This term meant that the polity might well be able to call, say, a mathematician into military service because it needed his skills. But it did not mean that the politician had the power to decide what mathematics was. For the good of the polis, the science had to remain what it was, even though the mathematician was serving the good of the polity in the employment of his knowledge. If one asks whether a priest or a philosopher might also be called upon to serve the public good, the traditional answer to this question was affirmative. Implicitly this meant that what priest or a philosopher did remained what they were defined to be by the nature of his office or profession. The “common good” included that priests be priests and philosophers be philosophers. But the politician was not to be himself unintelligent or unaware of unworthy priests or philosophers.
Political philosophy, then, is distinct in two ways: it is a defense of the cause or need of philosopher before the politician who himself is aware of, though not especially proficient in, philosophical things. It is also a defense of virtue in the city as a prerequisite for a philosophy that is able to look to and state the truth of things. A city must know of itself that it is not despotic. It must know that the human good is itself a real good that must be chosen and habituated in customs and laws. Finally, it must know that the things beyond politics are worthy things, of more ultimate moment than the polis itself, however necessary it may be. The philosopher knows that most human lives are not themselves devoted to philosophy, even though they may be aware of and indeed interested in philosophy. Yet, it seems unjust that those who are not in practice philosophers do not have a hope of achieving the higher ends of which philosophy makes us aware in an acute fashion. Revelation, in fact, addresses itself not merely to virtue but to happiness and to contemplation, to a way to the highest good not just for philosophers but to everyone. Revelation articulates a more clear and defined end than even the philosopher could envision by his own powers
After Thales proved he could make a minor fortune cornering the olive and wine presses, he returned to philosophy, to the pursuit of the highest things. When Socrates was executed, he reminded Crito to offer a cock to Asclepias, the god of healing, from whence he passed to the Isles of the Blessed to speak with Homer and Rhadamnathus and the other philosophers. In preparing to die, in dying, he was healed. When Christ died, He did speak to a politician, a Roman governor, but not to a philosopher. He did speak to ordinary thieves. One blasphemed Him. Christ remained silent. The other acknowledged that he himself was justly executed and asked to be remembered in His Kingdom. The city that killed Christ and the outlines of the city in speech converge. Political philosophy is different because it can, if it will, consider these cities – Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, the city in speech and the Righteous City, the City of God. If it will not make such considerations, then, in all likelihood it falls back on Lord Acton’s “despotic theories,” theories that do not know the “ways of freedom,” nor the true being of man, but the corruption of the intellectuals.
“Thought,” Aristotle said, “moves nothing; what moves us is thought aimed at some goal and concerned with action” (1139a36-37). The difference of political philosophy is that it is genuinely concerned with the thought that “moves nothing” as well as the thought concerned with action that leads to our end. Political philosophy is different because its own questions lead it to the concern about the content of the end, this end most enigmatically described as the “city of righteousness,” now not seen merely as either the highest of the social sciences or the handmaid of theology, but as the true understanding of that which is, however it be known to us, provided that we have asked the right questions and have heard answers to these questions as asked.
When the subject of “leisure” appears in The Politics, we are suddenly aware that the most important things take place not in constructing or even running the polity, but in living in it. What are the serious occupations of leisure, what things are to be done simply because they are true or beautiful? Plato’s answer to this question was “singing, dancing, and sacrificing” (803). Aristotle’s answer is philosophy (1279b11-15) and, perhaps, music. Political philosophy exists so that the politician, who can prevent these things, can also come to see that he best let them be what they are. The way of the politician and the way of the philosopher are not the same, but they do depend on each other if we are to be both open to the whole and aware that we cannot, by our own powers, attain it.
9) Presented as a Lecture to a conference sponsored by Christians in Political Science, Calvin College. Published in Reason, Revelation, and Human Affairs, Edited by M. Guerra (Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, 2000.)
WORSHIP AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
“What mankind has so far considered seriously have not even been realities but mere imaginings – more strictly speaking, lies prompted by the bad instincts of sick natures that were harmful in the most profound sense – all these concepts, ‘God,’ ‘soul,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘sin,’ ‘beyond,’ ‘truth,’ ‘eternal life.’ – But the greatness of human nature, its ‘divinity,’ was sought in them. – All the problems of politics, of social organization, and of education have been falsified through and through because one mistook the most harmful men for great men....”
– Nietzsche, “Why Am I So Clever?” Ecce Homo, #10.
I.
Is it possible to discover that what is really “new” is something that we have already known about, but perhaps just did not notice? And can what is “really new” be totally devoid of grounding in what is? I ask these questions, in the beginning, because of a striking remark that Eric Voegelin made in Montreal in 1980. Voegelin’s words, in fact, point to an intellectual cul-de-sac, to a dead-end into which he held that modern thought had driven itself -- driven itself, for granted the premises of modern thought, there would be no one else but itself to drive it anywhere. The essential issue can be briefly stated: why has philosophy not been able to think itself out of its own theoretical problems? Why has the optimism of the Enlightenment ended with the skepticism of post-modernism? Voegelin’s comments thus seem particularly appropriate for the end of the second and beginning of the third Millennium.
“We can observe, for the last two hundred years, that every possible locale where one could misplace the ground (of being) has been exhausted,” Voegelin pointed out.
This expresses itself in the fact that we have, since the great ideologists of the middle and
late nineteenth century, since Comte, Marx, John Stuart Mill, Bakunin (and so on), no new
ideologist. All ideologies belong, in their origin, before that period; there are no new
ideologies in the twentieth century. Even if one could find a new wrinkle in them, it
wouldn’t be interesting because the matter has been more or less exhausted emotionally.
We have had it.
The twentieth century, in its turn, was resigned in its pride to explore all the relatively insignificant
ideological “locales” and “wrinkles” because the great theses had already been largely expounded
by the time it began. We do seem to have encountered the boredom of the “relatively
insignificant.”. The mind exhausted itself pursuing one humanly-grounded explanation after
another, now a “locale,” now a “wrinkle,” each of which contained some truth and had a curious
logical connection with the others.
Without knowing where else to turn to resolve problems presented by these ideologies and
their “wrinkles,” we, the public, to use Voegelin’s graphic expression, “have had it.” And “what
is it that is ‘exhausted’?” we ask. It is the modern hypothesis, the effort exclusively to explain
ourselves to ourselves by ourselves with no need of anything but ourselves. It is the “modern
project,” to use Strauss’ term, that exhausts us.
II.
One hundred years ago, the philosopher who, almost with a certain sad disappointment,
most mocked our public and religious explanations of reality, who most chided us for not seeing
what we had chosen to become, was, of course, Nietzsche. He is still with us, still shocking us.
The most “harmful men,” in Nietzsche’s view, are those who speak of such “concepts” as “God,”
“soul,” “virtue,” “sin,” “beyond,” “truth,” and “eternal life.” These very words recall Machiavelli’s
Fifteenth Chapter of The Prince, wherein he speaks derisively of the “imaginary kingdoms” of the
ancient philosophers and theologians.
For Nietzsche, as for Plato, the actual disorder of politics was itself reflective of a disorder
of soul. Nietzsche never forgave Socrates, just after he took the hemlock, for having asked Crito
to offer a cock in sacrifice to the god of healing, as if in dying he could be cured. In dying,
Nietzsche thought, Socrates revealed his sickness, not his strength.
Nietzsche wrote these things in a book called Ecce Homo. This title, to recall, contains the ironic Latin words of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, when, convinced that He was not guilty, he exposed Christ to the screaming crowds in his vain attempt to gain their sympathy and free Christ instead of Barabbas (John, 19, 6). Thus, there is a new kind of man we have been “beholding” in the last three hundred years. He is first rationalist man, then man of iron will, the man who has the courage to make his own laws for himself. But we have “had it” with him too; we are exhausted. But do we have a place to turn that is not another self-constructed reality that, on trial, proves yet again its inadequacy? What are we missing? Are we culpable for missing it?
III.
The occasion, or perhaps the inspiration, for these reflections comes from the subtitle of
Catherine Pickstock’s book, AfterWriting.
On first coming across After Writing, we would not be surprised, I think, if this particular
subtitle read, “The Liturgical Consummation of Theology.” That subtitle would not shock us or
pique our interest. In that form, it would speak of a presumably normal topic of theological
training and study. Rites would be where they were “supposed” to be, in theology, not in
philosophy. We could, presumably without penalty, ignore them. It would cause no further interest
or, as it were, raised eyebrows. We are not prepared to “hear” or “sing” the liturgy as a worthy
philosophic exercise, to reflect on what it might mean to “worship,” though we do recall that the
“ancient city” was not complete without its civic worship.
Moreover, what is bothersome in that subtitle is not merely the word “philosophy,” but also
the word “consummation.” Consummation implies that some connection exists between liturgy
and philosophy.
To juxtapose “worship” and “political philosophy” is no doubt deliberately provocative, if not downright rash. Already in Plato, we are aware of a certain “divine madness” or “enthusiasm” that lies just below or just above the surface of the political life, almost as if something is waiting to burst forth. “The Deity is the truly active source from which something happens to man,” Josef Pieper writes in his commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus, a dialogue central to the Pickstock book:
For this very reason we cannot speak simply of madness or frenzy without further qualifying
the words. If the word enthusiasm were not so debased in English, it would in fact most
fittingly describe what Plato intended, and indeed he himself uses it in the sense of “being
filled with god.” In the middle of the Phaedrus, he speaks of a man thus possessed by
mania. “The multitude regard him as being out of his wits, for they know not that he is full
of a god [enthousiazon].
These words imply that it is quite possible to call things that have higher purpose “insane” or “mad” not because there is no point to them but because we refuse to accept them or we are not given understanding -- the problem of grace. Is it possible that the relative incompleteness of human things is intended? Deliberately challenging? On the philosophical and political levels, it is well to recall that in a classical democracy, the fool and the philosopher are indistinguishable because there is no principle of truth in the regime. This lack of ability to distinguish was why Socrates could live for seventy years in Athens. To most, he appeared odd, a fool. Will grace and revelation appear to reason as madness or mania? Does that mean that they contradict reason or do they stimulate it to be more reason?
Plato also tells us that, comparatively speaking, compared to divine things, that is, human things are not particularly important (417c; 804b). Aristotle similarly admonishes us in the Tenth Book of his Ethics not to listen to those who tell us to devote our lives to “human” things, the highest of which are economic and political things. We are rather to strain ourselves to know, even if it be little, the highest things, the truths of the contemplative life, the things that cannot be otherwise (1177b30-78a2). If human affairs are not really “serious,” not really important, what is? What are the things beyond politics to which we ought to spend our lives, even if what we learn about them is very little? Plato says in his Laws that we should spend out lives not in politics but in “singing, dancing, and sacrificing” (803e). If we smile at this proposal, is it because we are moderns? Singing, dancing, and sacrificing would seem to indicate that we need something worthy of such activities.
In the Fifth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, moreover, Peter and John are forbidden to preach by local political authorities. They respond by asking, not entirely rhetorically, whether they should “obey God or men?” (Acts, 5:29). They knew what Socrates already knew; namely, that the men in power could kill them if they wished. But they also knew that death was not the worst evil. Obedience to God may well result in death at the hands of men, political men, even as, in this case, of religious men who were also political men. Yet if violent death and its fear are, as Hobbes was later to maintain, the worst evils, then the politician could control all ideas, religious and philosophical, that opposed him, because he did have the power of death with its consequent Machiavellian freedom, the freedom to use either evil or good means, to achieve his purposes.
Even Pontius Pilate, anticipating Hobbes, said ominously to Christ at His trial, “Surely you know that I have the authority to release you, and I have the authority to crucify you?” (John 19:10). There is every indication that Christ did know this. Notice that Christ did not piously reply to Pilate, “all capital punishment is wrong.” Rather He said, that “you would have no authority over me were it not given to you by God.” Plato, Aristotle, and Luke in Acts are in agreement that the polity does not itself define the highest things, even though it has legitimate authority when used properly in human affairs. Christ does not deny that Pilate, the Roman governor, has authority. When the threat of death by the state causes us to change our minds, the state rules all things through ruling our minds. When we die affirming our beliefs, however, the state is limited to what it is in the very act of claiming to be more than it is.
IV.
“The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to
be approved of, he judges ‘what harms me is harmful in itself’, he knows himself to be that which
in general first accords honor to things, he creates values.”
“Rights” and “values” are modern, not ancient or medieval, words. They are rooted in this
idea that we can “create” them literally from “nothing.”. Rights come from Hobbes. Values come
from Max Weber.
Man thus is not measured; he measures, even himself. When he examines reality, he finds only himself. His scientific methods allow him to see only what such methods, constructed by himself, allow him to see. On defining himself by declaring his “rights” and his “values,” he constructs a polity that excludes all but himself. Nietzsche was right to see the weakness of a polity built on the collective will of weak men willing only themselves. Nietzsche was not wrong to wonder about “greatness.” Man is not only to live, but to live “well,” as Aristotle said. Since man does not ground his own being, it seems strange, if not impossible, that he could give greatness to himself even when he does great deeds and speaks great words.
It is my thesis here that Voegelin is right. We have had presented to us, in effect, all the intellectual “wrinkles.” The twentieth century did not produce anything new. Reason will not by itself find its way out of what will has chosen to construct for itself. Is there a conceivable alternative? Recently, a student sent me on e-mail the following definitions of justice, mercy, and grace. I do not know where he found them, but they are, when read together, both insightful and amusing. In a sense, they collectively make the point that I wish to propose in these reflections about worship and political philosophy; namely, that the highest things may not come to us by our own reasonings and our own makings, but they still may come to us in another form if and only if we choose to accept them. Political philosophy, in reflecting on political things, naturally comes to queries, to questions that it cannot resolve. That is to say, its very being and status requires it to acknowledge an openness that it cannot close by its own efforts. Why after all did the best existing states kill Socrates and Christ?
Justice, so the explanation went, is when “we get what we deserve.” Mercy, on the other
hand, is when “we don’t get what we do deserve.” And grace is when we unexpectedly do “get
what we don’t deserve.” All in all, these are pretty sound definitions. We live in a time when the
churches seem to be primarily interested in “justice,” not grace. At times, they seem to think it
their primary function to make the state work better by its own means. And, as Augustine showed,
grace does have this effect.
What I am concerned about here, then, is in fact the Second Commandment – “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before me.” Are the “strange gods” that we have before us – a letter in the Washington Times recently affirmed that “secular humanism” was also a “religion” – related to the “liturgical consummation of philosophy?” If we start from within the world, within philosophy, it is indeed quite possible that we will arrive, at best, at a “first mover.” This step is not to be minimized, of course. But if there is a proper way to “worship” God, it seems quite clear that lack of this worship would send the members of any existing polity off into myriads of directions, into ever new “locales,” seeking the reasons why their explanations are insufficient or even corrupting. Thus, I do not propose beginning from reason to see what kind of answers that it can come up with, though there is nothing wrong with this beginning. Rather I propose, at least as an non-investigated alternative, beginning from proper worship as found in revelation to explain why it is that personal and public lives are disordered to the extent that they lack its presence.
Political philosophy, needless to say, has, on the face of it, little to do with mercy and grace.
It’s realm is justice - legal, distributive, and rectificatory, as Aristotle described the various kinds
of justice. Rarely do political things seem to cross these higher notions, though perhaps it happens
more frequently than we might guess. Revelation itself admonishes us to be at least just, a fact that
itself makes us wonder about how these two are related. Just why are some things found both in
reason and revelation?
V.
What has particularly intrigued me is the notion that modern ideology is the result of an
effort to explain things in a manner other than that set down in reason and revelation. When in
modernity revelation ceased to play an intimate, active role, we have seen arise the situation that
Voegelin described, that is, a gradual, increasing exhaustion of reasons that would ground our
“being.” Voegelin, like Nietzsche, actually thought that the reason for the rise of ideological,
rationalist explanations of reality was, in fact, the practical loss of faith of Christians in their own
understanding of the world order.
But the human will is only creative in the sense of art, not of reality itself. What is, including the human will itself, is not the product of its own making. Human action is action having been first acted upon. Even our knowledge, to be active, depends in the first instance on something that is not ourselves. We do not first think, then discover reality; we first see things, then we begin to think. This awareness leads naturally to the question of the relation of theoretical and practical intellect. It questions the primacy of practical intellect that resulted when the will knew no limitations other than its own values, choices, or rights. Morality, how we ought to act, cannot begin with our wills but with our understanding of how things are apart from our will, with theoretical intellect. This is not to deny the possibility of our willing not to see.
In order to understand where we are, would it be possible to re-propose political philosophy
in such a manner that the “queen of the social sciences” (political philosophy) and the “queen of
the sciences” (theology) be approached from the side of the latter? Here, I do not propose an
artificial “faith” on the part of the unbeliever, but I do propose an intelligent understanding of what
is proposed in revelation, if nothing else as an intellectual curiosity that seems to have some
relation to issues not found satisfactorily answered in reason. The question that I want to propose
is whether political philosophy has sought autonomy for itself, has sought to elevate itself as the
queen of the social sciences, and ultimately of the sciences themselves, because it, unwittingly
perhaps, provided an alternate object of worship of sorts, when the true object of worship was
either unknown or rejected? I take seriously, in other words, Augustine’s “city of man” because
his “city of God” contains so many answers that ought not to be there solely on the basis of
accident.
How does one even go about posing this question in the modern intellectual world so that it will be intelligible and not simply ridiculous? No doubt, Catherine Pickstock’s acute analysis of the classic Tridentine Mass of the Roman Rite provides an immediate occasion for this consideration. Her approach is through a minute analysis of the post-modern philosophers whose theories of language, objectivity, and interpretation have locked them not merely into themselves but into a kind of vast unknowability about themselves and reality. They have sought a kind of assurance of freedom in professing the inability of the mind to know things and what other minds might think. It is not merely that in knowing themselves they know something of reality. Rather, since they cannot know themselves or others, they cannot know reality.
We have here not merely the dead end of modernity, but the dead end itself. I have the impression that this dead end was reached, a dead end that included the fall of communism, because of a refusal to return back to the original sources that were rejected in the formation of modernity. There is no place, no “locale” to which we can turn if we follow the logic of the premises on which the modern mind was built. The argument is not whether this dead end exists, nor whether it is the result of a logical progression of modern thought from modernity to post modernity through the great constructs of political ideology. It is whether there is an alternative, even if that alternative does not come directly from reason.
The Holy Father has recently drawn our attention to philosophy and reason, Fides et Ratio. Those who know St. Thomas are familiar with the idea of grace building on nature, of reason not contradicting faith and faith not destroying reason. This implies a certain intrinsic connection between reason and faith. It is important to state this relationship properly. We cannot conclude to certain truths about God as given to us in revelation on the basis of our reason alone. Otherwise we would be gods ourselves, in fact the great temptation of modernity. But it is possible to attempt to understand the order of things revealed and to ask whether they relate in any fashion to what we know in reason. It is possible to become more “philosophical” because we seek better to understand what is revealed. We do not in principle exclude what makes some sense even if it does not come from reason.
Lucy lies on her back, her head propped up against the piano while Schroeder is playing
Beethoven. She muses out loud, “if you really liked me, you would give me presents.” To this,
Schroeder rises up on his piano bench with hauteur, “if you really liked me, you wouldn’t expect
any presents.” In the third scene, he returns to playing the piano while she is on her side with a
quizzical look. Finally, with Schroeder indifferently playing, she reflects, “Either way, I end up
not getting any presents.”
No state, consisting as it does of a multiplicity of citizens bound together in some defined relationship, is a proper subject or object of worship. Only individual persons, properly speaking, worship. If they worship themselves, we call it properly pride, superbia. The being of human beings is good, but it is not itself worthy of worship. Human beings also, normally, worship together – the singing, the dancing, and the sacrificing. In the abstract, many varied rites might be proposed as ways to properly worship God. The question that the history of classic, medieval, and modern philosophy presents is whether the central act of worship proposed in revelation is so fundamental that it “consummates” philosophy, that is, resolves its unanswered questions in a fashion that the coherence of reason and revelation is, if not necessary, is certainly intelligible. But this intelligibility must always carry the proviso that it would not have been arrived at unless the impetus of revelation had not been somehow addressed to it.
VI.
Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, in a remarkable address to Italian bishops, recounts a thousand-year old story, probably apocryphal, of certain Russian envoys from Kiev who were sent by Prince
Vladimir in search of a proper religion for their kingdom. As they probably did not know of
Buddhism, Hinduism, or China, with Protestants not yet around, they examined Islam in Bulgaria,
Judaism, and Catholics among the Germans.
The Byzantine liturgy, Ratzinger pointed out, is not primarily “missionary”; it is not
directed to non-believers. Its roots were entirely “within the faith.” What goes on is the
“acclamation of faith.” The liturgy presupposes “an ‘initiation,’ only someone who has entered into
the mystery with his life can participate in it....” “The Byzantine liturgy,” Ratzinger goes on, “was
not a way of teaching doctrine and was not intended to be. It was not a display of the Christian
faith in a way acceptable or attractive to onlookers. What impressed onlookers about the liturgy
was precisely its utter lack of an ulterior purpose, the fact that it was celebrated for God and not for
spectators, that its sole intent was to be before God and for God....
In this sense, worship has rather much to do with political philosophy We are little prepared, I admit, to grant the fact that already existing among us, with origins in revelation, not directly in philosophy, though with certain intimations from it, a proper way to worship God is established. We are loathe to admit, furthermore, that the neglect, corruption, or unknownness of this way has consequences even in the political order through the restless souls of men unable or unwilling to find a proper object of their striving in any locale or wrinkle. Aristotle constantly refers to the theoretic mind in its seeking of things “for their own sakes.” Such are the very words that Ratzinger uses when explaining the reaction of the Russian officials to beholding the liturgy of Byzantium. It utterly lacked “an ulterior purpose” beyond its own doing. It is the Second Commandment; the “I am who am” of Exodus.
Worship, no doubt, presupposes doctrine and right living, but that is not its own purpose. It looks outward from its depth in inwardness, not to the city, but through it. Why is this such an important point? Are we not to worry about the later rigidity of the Byzantine state and church, about the widespread rejection of the Mass as the central human act of worship? Has not the Roman rite suddenly gone over to the very missionary and social concerns that Ratzinger warned about, so that the Mass no longer causes this awe that he and Pickstock understood? Much of the Protestant world gave up some or all of this full liturgy at the Reformation. The rest of the world barely heard of it, if it did hear of it at all. Thus, the proposition that the existence of a mode of worship that derives from revelation and is intended to celebrate the unbloody Sacrifice of the Cross as the central act of worship will seem if not un-ecumenical, at least impractical.
VII.
To conclude, I want to inquire whether, once the outline of the act of worship is set down in revelation, whether the reason why modernity has been in such turmoil is because it sought and could not find an alternative to it? It exhausted the “locales” and all the “wrinkles” that might propose something else. The orthodox position, no doubt, at least in so far as it has not itself imitated this same modernity, is that no alternative is to be found. A “reason” exists for this mode of worship that goes to the very heart of the sort of beings we are created to be, supernatural, not natural, from the beginning. “God,” “soul,” “truth,” “eternal life” -- Nietzsche’s “lies” – are the ground of our being.
What is proposed here is not proposed defiantly, but rather sadly, with a sense of loss at what might be, of what ought to be. If one examines the vast effort that the current Holy Father has given to conversation with other branches of Christianity, with other religions, with philosophers, with anyone really, it is clear that the spirit of the endeavor is honestly to see what truths are held in common, whether many or few. With regard to those in which there is difference, we must to continue to see the other’s point of view. Likewise, this same consideration accepts the principle that faith is a free gift. If one does not have the “gift” of faith, why on earth talk about it except to those who have it? Why would worship have universal significance? Those who reject the faith or who never have had heard of it remain human beings and members of some existing polity. It is true that the faith is to be preached to all nations, as if to suggest that there is something about it that is pertinent to all nations whatever it is they now hold as the structural principle of their living together as this or that nation, their “foundation myth,” to recall Plato.
This reflection on worship and political philosophy thus brings us back to the question of “the liturgical consummation of philosophy.” Catherine Pickstock does not say “the liturgical consummation of political philosophy” because she understands that it is not “the state,” though it is the political philosopher and the politician, that can worship. If the order of polity is a reflection of the order of our souls, as the classical writers taught us, we can suspect that the completion or “consummation” of philosophy comes about when a proper object of worship is “given” to us with a proper indication of how it is we are to worship. Once this is in existence, all other idols, including the state when we make it an idol, will fail. We, who are readers of Plato, cannot be too surprised at this.
At the end of his discussion of “classical philosophy” in “What is Political Philosophy?”,
Leo Strauss warns us not to be charmed either by mathematical certainty or by the “humble awe”
engendered by “meditating on the human soul and its experiences.” Philosophy must mate
“courage and moderation” to resist these charms. Sometimes philosophy seems to produce very
little, like Sisyphus and his burden, its achievements and goal are very different. Out of frustration,
philosophy can appear “ugly,” though Strauss seems to admit, unlike the analogy with Sisyphus,
that something of the “goal” is seen. Philosophy must be “sustained, accompanied, and elevated
by eros.” It is, he concludes, in an evocative phrase, “graced by nature’s grace.”
Does indeed “nature” have a “grace?” In nature has a “grace,” is it still grace? And what might a philosophy be that is precisely “elevated” by “eros,” the noble Platonic word? Strauss, at the same time, seemingly both denies and intimates more than he implies. The envoys were, perhaps, more perceptive, or at least, more awe-struck, not by meditating on their own souls, but by the worship in Santa Sofia. The “mating” of courage and moderation may well require, not the “lowering.” but the raising of our sights.
If philosophy is “consumed” in liturgy, then, it does not mean that philosophy ceases to be philosophy. It means that it is all the more important that philosophy remain itself. Nietzsche’s “imaginings” and “lies” are precisely what we most need, as even he intimated in his disappointment at those who really do not believe. Nor does it mean that the city ceases to the city. It does mean that we are open to gifts that compete what we are, that we do not look to the city for what it cannot do, however tempted it always seems to be to propose itself as an object of worship. It does mean that our natural limits are not in vain. It does mean that, as philosophers and political philosophers, we can recognize that answers are posed in revelation to questions we legitimately ponder but are unable to resolve in our own contemplations. “The Deity is the truly active source from which something happens to man.” Justice means getting what we deserve. Mercy means not getting something we do deserve. Grace means getting something that we don’t deserve. Grace upon grace.
10) Published in The Review of Politics, 62 (Winter, 2000), 49-76.
FIDES ET RATIO: APPROACHES TO A ROMAN CATHOLIC POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
“Philosophy could be employed, not indeed as a principle allowing one to pass judgment on the truth or falsity of Revelation, but as a tool with which to probe its meaning and counter any attack that might be leveled against it in the name of reason.”
– Ernest Fortin, 1996.
“Revelation clearly proposes certain truths which might never have been discovered by reason unaided, although they are not of themselves inaccessible to reason. Among these truths is the notion of a free and personal God who is the Creator of the world, a truth which has been so crucial for the development of philosophical thinking, especially the philosophy of being. There is also the reality of sin, as it appears in the light of faith, which helps to shape an adequate philosophical formulation of the problem of evil. The notion of the person as a spiritual being is another of faith’s specific contributions: the Christian proclamation of human dignity, equality and freedom has undoubtedly influenced modern philosophic thought. In more recent times, there has been the discovery that history as event – so central to Christian revelation – is important for philosophy as well.”
– John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 1998, #76.
“The emperor of the visible empire, ‘sol invictus,’ the invincible sun, has as his opponent and successor the vicar of the invisible empire, ‘servus servorum Dei,’ the servant of the servants of God..... We never understand more than the half of things when we neglect the science of Rome.”
– Pierre Manent, The City of Man, 1998.
I. At first sight, “among the heathen,” so to speak, if not also among believers themselves, the
very idea of a “Roman Catholic political philosophy” is rather quaint, if not actually shocking.
But not just anything that calls itself “reason” is reasonable. We must add, if it is not a tautology, “true reason.” Thus, when some philosopher, implicitly or explicitly, denies, say, the principle of contradiction, we do not, as Aristotle said, have to believe him, even less, agree with him. We just have to watch what he does to see that implicitly he upholds in practice this basic principle. He invariably opens the door before he walks through it; he assumes that it cannot be there and not there at the same time and in the same place. And yes, we have to trust our senses when we see him open the door.
Philosophy and theology are both legitimate; both can establish their foundations. The
intelligible content of each is comprehensible to the other. But they are not related to one another
as reason to unreason respectively. Revelation is a grounded claim to truth, not to irrationality.
Things can be beyond the power of particularly human reason to know without necessarily being
beyond reason as such. We are the lowest, not the highest of the intellectual beings.
Human reason does not “explain” everything. It is “philo-sophy,” the friendship with or love, not the cause, of wisdom. It therefore remains open to what it does not yet know, even, with Socrates, knowing that it does not know. “It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize” (982b13). And they began this effort, Aristotle notices, only “when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured” (982b23-24). The most important things are beyond comfort and necessity. Both faith and authority in revelation rest not on themselves but on someone who does know, who does see, who does hear.
By any objective analysis, revelation appears to be much more conscious of reason than
most philosophical reason is of revelation, though there is always Plato to caution us here.
Philosophy has to be proper philosophy to hear revelation. Revelation, rather frequently, has to
defend philosophy itself. “Christian doctrine is primarily concerned with offering salvation, not
with interpreting reality or human existence,” Josef Pieper has written. “But it implies as well
certain fundamental teachings on specifically philosophical matters -- the world and existence as
such.”
This possibility of philosophy denying itself is no doubt at the origin of St. Paul’s famous
impatience with the philosophers: “Where is your wise man now, your man of learning, your own
subtle debater – limited, all of them, to this passing age? God has made the wisdom of this world
look foolish” (1 Corinthians, 1:20). Much of modern philosophy – which surely considers itself
as “the wisdom of this world” – can best be understood as the intellectual and logical consequences
of this choice of denying to itself, frequently indeed “foolishly,” some basic element of the proper
“range of reason,” to use Jacques Maritain’s phrase.
The Bible, to be sure, is not immediately a “political” or “philosophic” tract. It is primarily
an account of a way, indeed the way, of salvation. Yet, for philosophers, if they set their mind to
it, the Bible is neither incoherent nor unintelligible; it is not lacking in its own philosophical
profundity.
Philosophers and believers, moreover, must, like everyone else, live in cities in this world,
even when they call Augustine’s “City of God” their true home. They are both aware that we “have
here no lasting city.” The New Testament in particular has very little to do, directly, with politics.
In fact, it frankly acknowledges that the things of Caesar and the things of God are not the same
(Matthew, 22:22-23). Almost for the first time, we have here a revelational source affirming the
validity of the state in its, the state’s, own terms. The things of Caesar, however, still need to be
explicated philosophically to show why it is “natural” that man is a “political animal.”
When Paul told Christians to be “obedient to the Emperor” (Romans, 13:1-7), the Emperor was Nero, a tyrant, as Tacitus graphically tells us in his Annals.. Paul was not, however, approving tyranny, nor denying its obvious possibility or dangers. Nor was he an advanced Nietzschean who saw in “turning the other cheek” a sure sign of political ineptness and betrayal of worldly power. He was rather pointing out, something already found in Aristotle, that man was by nature a political animal, but one who often revealed his own inability, or better, unwillingness to rule himself. Interestingly, revelation seems to have more to do with our inability or unwillingness to live the virtues than with our more successful efforts to define them. “I would rather feel compunction than know how to define it,” as Thomas à Kempis remarked in a famous phrase in the Imitation of Christ. Therefore, at times, indeed often, Paul acknowledged that the ruler also possess “the sword ... to punish wrong-doing.”
Aristotle indicated much the same thing at the end of his Ethics when he spoke of the transition to The Politics (1179b31-80a4) about the need of law and coercion. Neither philosophy nor politics, however, could quite explain why this abiding wrong-doing, this “wickedness,” as Aristotle called it (1263b23), persisted in all human polities. This very perplexity was something to which revelation addressed itself in the account of the Fall. There, the problem of human disorder is located not in things nor in human faculties as such but in the operation of the will, and therefore in personal choice (Genesis, 3:1-24). The Philosopher, as Aquinas called him, did notice, without revelation, that human nature was in a kind of “bondage” (982b29). Philosophy had questions it could not quite answer. This “unansweredness,” as it were, was theoretically bothersome. It caused many a good philosopher to wonder if the world was not created “in vain,” with no purpose or meaning, hardly a consoling alternative. Paradoxically, it was revelation’s odd answer to this enigma that charged the universe, particularly the human universe to which all else seemed ordained, with risk, drama, uncertainty, and, yes, the possibility of love and glory. Such things are only possible if our choices make some ultimate difference, if we really do choose between right and wrong.
II.
Evidently, there should no more be Roman Catholic politics than there should be Roman
Catholic physics, however much the methods and subject matter of politics and physics, and, yes,
theology, might differ. “It is the mark of an educated man,” Aristotle tells us, “to look for precision
in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish
to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific
proofs” (1094b25-27). Yet, perhaps it makes a difference what our philosophy is, what our
understanding of the world is before we even can have either physics or politics.
“Although the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels have little to say about the proper attitude for Christians to adopt toward the social order and the state,” Herbert Deane has written,
certain fundamental principles are clearly established. On a number of occasions, Jesus warned His disciples against thinking of His kingdom as an earthly kingdom, to be
established by a revolt of the Jews against Roman rule and maintained by ordinary political
instruments.... Jesus not only insisted that His kingdom was not of this world and so
discouraged his followers from thinking of Him as a Messiah who would be the temporal
ruler of the Jewish people, but He also endeavored to draw His followers’ attention away
from interest in worldly matters such as the attainment of wealth or power over other men.
Roman Catholic political philosophy would, thus, agree that the ultimate destiny of each human being is not located in politics, something also found in its own way in Plato and Aristotle.
Roman Catholic political philosophy would also recognize that in leaving politics relatively
free, Christianity implied that the political order had its own worth and, indeed, its own dangers.
It accepted, in other words, the teaching in Genesis that nature, including angelic and human nature,
was good in its fundamental being. The origin of evil -- the lack of something that ought to be
present -- was neither in God nor in nature as such. It was in a good and free faculty that could
cause things to be otherwise -- in brief, in the human free will. Hannah Arendt is right to call out
attention to the fact that Augustine is the “first philosopher of the will.”
Roman Catholic political philosophy will thus always be heavily “will” oriented, even when it understands that the will is a spiritual faculty only “determined” by the good known in intellect. It is not, in the modern sense, “pro-choice” -- pro-whatever is chosen just because it is chosen. But it is pro-will, pro-free-will. When evil is chosen, it always must at the same time exist some good, some good generally placed out of the order of truth by the power of will. It is because of this remaining good that Roman Catholic political philosophy must retain the capacity for change or conversion in all human things. It cannot ultimately for this reason be a dogmatic pessimism or optimism. It is realist without being Machiavellian or utopian, without denying the dire conditions that do happen or undervaluing the good that does occur in this world’s regimes.
The early Christians were primarily city dwellers, though some of the more pious ones
began to flee the city’s corruption into the desert. Cities, if left to themselves, could and did
become morally unliveable. A certain “exodus,” individual or collective, always remained a
possibility to Christians from their Jewish origins. The founding of America itself, with its Old
Testament overtones among the Puritans, is not unrelated to this sentiment. The city was, however,
the scene within which the positive things that Christians were commanded to do – forgive, love,
serve their neighbor, keep the commandments – were to be visibly carried out in a real, not abstract,
world. The dictates of faith and charity were expected to bear fruit in the world -- the Good
Samaritan was also a real citizen. The accusation that Christians abandoned the world was never
really based on an understanding of the demands made of its own members. This is why Christian
metaphysics has always insisted on defending the reality, the ontological reality, of the world itself.
Augustine could thus argue that Christians were good citizens, good soldiers even. The city was
also the arena wherein Christians found themselves, in their own way, in the predicament of
Socrates. They were tried by the state for telling the truth and living as they were commanded --
something as well true in the century just closed as in the first century.
Thus, we can ask again “what is Roman Catholic political philosophy?” It is obviously not simply “political theology,” a description of just what Scripture may say about political things, however important this may be. Nor is it an effort to compete with, say, Aristotle or political science about its own subject matter. Indeed, if anything, it claims Aristotle as its own, even knowing his non-Christian origins and certain problems connected with him. Fides et Ratio, the 1998 Encyclical of John Paul II, is not itself, as was, say, his Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) or his Centesimus Annus (1991), directly social or political in content or inspiration. We would not call Fides et Ratio a tractate in political philosophy, however pertinent it may be to political philosophy in its own way. Indeed, it is the peculiarity and strength of Roman Catholicism that it does not, following Scripture, have a specific political program or philosophy, something explicitly reaffirmed in Fides et Ratio (#49). Politics, as it were, is not one of the things revealed in Scripture, but it is not taken less seriously for all that. If we are to know political things, we must largely rely on reason and experience. It is necessary to read the philosophers and consult the constitutions, to know how peoples succeed and fail in history. No doubt, certain scriptural passages and teachings can and should have political meaning. Christians were supposed to live in this world, “quietly,” if they could, as “sojourners and wayfarers” (1 Peter, 2:11).
The fact that Scripture does not contain a systematic political teaching modeled on The Republic of Plato or The Politics of Aristotle -- or even Hobbes or Locke or Rousseau, who in fact spend a good deal of time on Scripture – does not imply that there is something lacking in revelation. It rather indicates that much is to be learned from Plato and Aristotle, from the philosophers, even for the sake of Scripture. For revelation to be revelation, philosophy must be philosophy -- good philosophy. Surely this is the central thesis of Fides et Ratio. Scripture may not even imply that there is something lacking in politics, unless perhaps politics claims, as it can, something more than it is in itself. Christ says to Pilate, “you would have no authority over me at all were it not given to you by my Father” (John, 19:11) That is, the Roman governor has authority, but neither he nor his polity invented what authority is.
The first step in politics is to think of its form, that is, its of limits, of what makes it to be
politics and not something else. A politics that conceives itself to have no limits is the main rival
to revelation in any age, including our own, a view, ironically, already found in Scripture itself.
III.
Fides et Ratio barely speaks of what would ordinarily be called political things. It speaks of philosophical things, of what is revealed, of how and why there is a relation between the one and other. Theology, in the Christian sense, does not begin with reason, though it presupposed the perambua fidei, the principles we need even to recognize that something is addressed to us. It begins with what is revealed. But it soon discovers that to understand and render in intelligible order what is revealed, it needs to turn to issues of human knowing, human experience, to philosophy. “The chief purpose of theology is to provide an understanding of revelation and the content of faith” (#93). What is characteristic of Roman Catholicism is this “understanding,” this effort to make clear and available in a coherent whole what is revealed in the myriads of narratives in Scripture. It does not see this elaboration as a violation of the explicit words of Scripture, which it must respect as given. It sees it as an obligation to illuminate the intelligibility that is found there. And this endeavor does not imply that somehow God was rather sloppy in not revealing Himself in a concise form that would not require so much human theological and rational effort. Rather it suggests that we are intended to use our minds even in revelation, or better, we are to use them better because of revelation. If there is any objection to Roman Catholicism in its reflections on the meaning and place of political things, it cannot be on the ground that it does not take reason seriously and intend that reason, because of revelation, be more of itself, more reason.
If, as Strauss, among others, often stress, philosophy is a “knowledge of the whole,” a
knowledge rooted in the capacity of human reason, this same reason cannot arbitrarily exclude what
is both understandable and claiming intelligible content, particularly when revelation has turned
to philosophy precisely to explain more fully what is revealed.
Roman Catholic political philosophy, thus, does not think, whatever the distinction of faith
and reason, that the subjects of political life (i.e., individual citizens) and those who receive
revelation live in different worlds. The “knowledge of the created universe” is also “the object of
divine revelation.” We must take the knowledge of the whole seriously. “It may well be,” Josef
Pieper has remarked, “that at the end of history the only people who will examine and ponder the
root of all things and the meaning of existence, e.g. the specific object of philosophical speculation
– will be those who see with the eyes of faith.”
Contrary to what we might expect, Fides et Ratio is not primarily concerned to relate philosophy to revelation. No doubt it does this, but its main purpose is to address itself to philosophy and its modern condition. Indeed, it argues that it is in the strongest possible interest of revelation for its own integrity that philosophy be itself. “It is an illusion to think that faith, tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition. By the same token, reason which is unrelated to an adult faith is not prompted to turn its gaze to the newness and radicality of being” (#48). “Weak reasoning” is not an ally of revelation. Revelation thus does not hesitate to engage the philosophic mind and examine its own proposed validity. This might annoy philosophers who want to claim the exclusive turf of reason for themselves. But they cannot maintain this position if the object of the mind is not itself but what is, all that is. Philosophy cannot pretend or prove that revelation does not exist and exist as something also directed at itself. Christianity takes the condition of the philosophic mind seriously because it sees clearly that its own truths depend for their integrity on the validity of a philosophy that can know, and know what is. That is, revelation defends both the mind’s own introspective powers and the fact that those powers do not simply turn on themselves but reach the world, reality, and can speak or judge the truth of things.
“To believe it possible to know a universally valid truth is in no way to encourage intolerance; on the contrary, it is the essential condition for sincere and authentic dialogue between persons” (#92) The notion that tolerance is the first principle of political philosophy and not a practical principle for engagement in the highest things is itself a product of philosophic modernity. This tolerance must, at the risk of fanaticism, deny, it is said, the possibility of “universally valid truth.” In other words, the very claim of “universally valid truth” is said to be fanatic, and thus not worthy of examination. This position is itself the product of philosophy that must be examined for its philosophical integrity. It takes no genius to comprehend that if the principle of absolute tolerance is true it is, by its own definition, false. The Pope draws out the consequence of this contradiction, namely, that it is itself intolerant to refuse to examine a philosophy that claims to be true. Moreover, there are conditions in which this examination can and should take place – in “sincere and authentic dialogue between persons” – that is, the very opposite of fanaticism or intolerance. This is something already found in Plato, of course. That widespread discussion of reason and revelation is not taking place, on the grounds that revelation has nothing to talk about or no opening to reason, is already, as it seems to Christians, a sign of unacknowledged fanaticism. The condition of the polity is itself the result of ideas proceeding from the lowering of the sights of virtue on which modernity was originally built. Clearly, classical political philosophy pointed to and in a sense brought human beings to friendship which itself depended on “the sincere and authentic dialogue among persons.” Roman Catholic political philosophy cannot be unaware that the link between reason and revelation is most graphically attested to by St. Thomas’ use of amicitia as the natural analogate for caritas. That is to say, tolerance at its best is a condition of manners and friendliness that enables the highest things to exist in conversation.
“The Word of God is addressed to all people, in every age and in every part of the world; and the human being is by nature a philosopher” (#64). Interestingly enough, the Pope’s strongest words in criticism of the failure to study philosophy in the modern words are not directed at the professors but at theologians. “I cannot fail to note with surprise and displeasure that this lack of interest in the study of philosophy is shared by not a few theologians” #60.
“Earlier Series”:
1) From Modern Age, 40 (Winter, 1998), 33-43.
TRUTH AS A DEMOCRATIC PROJECT
"Without truth there must be a dissolution of society. As it is, there is so little truth, that we are almost afraid to trust our ears; but how should we be, if falsehood were multiplied ten times? Society is held together by communication and information; and I remember this remark of Sir Thomas Brown's, 'Do the devils lie? No; for then Hell could not subsist.'" -- Samuel Johnson, 1778.
"Res autem non dicitur vera nisi secundum quod est intellectui adaequata; unde per posterius invenitur verum in rebus, per prius autem in intellectu." -- Thomas Aquinas, 1256.
I. During the Presidential Campaign of 1996, in California, President Clinton said that democracy is "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" (October 18, 1996). Clinton recalled that this phrase was in the Constitution. When later reminded that it was not in that famous document, he corrected himself to say that it was in the Declaration of Independence. As it turns out, of course, this oft-repeated passage, the validity of which, no doubt, does not depend on who said it or where, is found in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address of 1863, wherein the hope was expressed, in time of civil war, that this democratic form of rule shall not perish from this earth.
The question is at least worth asking, however, about whether the democratic form of rule, for all its historic hope and importance, can become a dangerous form of rule through its own instruments and processes? The classical writers thought democracy was most dangerous because, in addition to neglecting the standards of virtue, it was also most susceptible to being taken over by a tyrant, who would constitute the worst evil or regime to which political affairs could tend. The question, in other words, is whether we must include, in any discussion of democracy, either as a regime or as a general philosophy of life, not merely the origin, purpose, and instrument of rule, that is, the people, but also the element of truth about its understanding of what man is. The last question to be asked, then, is not, "Was this law democratically enacted," but, having been democratically enacted, "Was this law invalid on other grounds; does it promote or destroy the objective good of man?" Truth is defined as the conformity of what is, of what is right, with our minds. We are not free if we do not ask this latter question about the truth of our deeds and actions, if we do not know what is and whether we according to its exigencies.
"The word democracy, as it is used by modern peoples," the French philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote during World War II, recalling more accurately the same famous phrase from American political history,
has a wider meaning than in the classical treatises on the science of government. It
designates first and foremost a general philosophy of human and political life and a state
of mind. This philosophy and this state of mind do not exclude a priori any of the
"regimes" or "forms of government" which were recognized as legitimate by classical
tradition.... The dynamics of democratic thought leads, as though to its most natural form
of realization, to the system of government of the same name, which consists, in the words
of Abraham Lincoln, in "government of the people, by the people, for the people."
Awareness that the term, democracy, can have several meanings, not all good, that must be sorted out requires careful attention.
Maritain took for granted that the term "democracy" used as a "general philosophy of human and political life and a state of mind" is usually a noble term in modern usage, though he was aware, as was Sir Thomas Brown in the case of the rule of devils, that a certain ambiguity can remain if a people's "general philosophy of human and political life" is itself disordered. That "the people" are always good and virtuous can, in experience and in theory, be legitimately doubted. And it is not enough wittily to respond that democracy is the worst form of government, except in comparison to all others. Ultimately, order and disorder are located in individual human souls, not in human regimes reflective of these same souls.
If, in other words, democracy is but another form of the answer to the classical question of "What is the best regime", it must tell us how it has derived the content of the word "best" with regard to the various forms of regime available to us. Democracy cannot merely be a word for the process by which citizens reach decisions. It must have some criterion by which it can judge the moral worth of the content of its own decisions. Without this latter judgment, we can give no reason why democracy might not also be the worst regime, might not also include a depth of disorder that not even the classical authors contemplated. There is, in fact, an order to the worst regime, which is why it is called worst, why it is intelligible in terms of political philosophy as precisely the worst.
Thus, if we look carefully at this famous definition of Lincoln, we see that it reflects several, but not all, of the elements in St. Thomas' noted definition of law -- "An ordination of reason, by the proper authority, for the common good, and promulgated" (I-II, 90, 4). Both definitions, that of Lincoln and that of Aquinas, touch on the notion of the end or purpose of authority, its final cause, that is, the common good, the people; both locate law's immediate origins in legitimate government, in its popular mode of operation. The people are its immediate efficient cause. Promulgation touches the material cause, the people's intelligently receiving and living by the law. But, again, given modern theoretic presuppositions about the autonomous human will, its complete independence from any natural or divine law, no good reason can be given on this basis of procedure or end, about just why a so-called "democratic tyranny" could not validly be deduced from Lincoln's phrase in a way that it could not be associated with St. Thomas' definition.
Lincoln did not mention, as Aquinas did, that reason, not will, was the heart of rule, even though this "reason" still had to be grounded in what is and chosen to be put into effect. Lincoln had no stated "formal" cause that would distinguish anything substantial about the content of any law or legal system. Thomas, however, specifically rejected the famous Roman Law dictum that "Whatever pleases the prince, is the law" (I-II, 90, 1, ad 3). The democratic rule of modernity, by contrast, in courts, legislatures, and executives, has come to mean, in effect, that "Whatever the people will, is the law." If democratically enacted, following proper procedures, there is no such thing as an "unjust law". All laws become "just" laws simply because they are laws. To maintain that a law is precisely "unjust", we must have a notion of justice that is not totally identified with what is willed, even willed democratically.
We might still, in fairness, argue that Lincoln presupposed the distinction between just and unjust laws, otherwise there would have been no moral point to the Civil War. But as the definition stands, it could justify a very terrible sort of regime, a kind of regime that seems to be more and more on the horizon for presumably free societies, societies free to do what the people "want", whatever it is they want. In other words, we could have a presumably democratic society faithful to democratic structure in every way but lacking in any understanding of the truth that already lies in human nature as it has come to be in existence apart from any specifically human will. To the question, 'What caused the human being to be a human being in the first place?", the unavoidable answer is that it was not political man himself. It was caused by whatever it was that caused man to be man in nature. Democracy, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, implies, but does not explicitly state, that what the people want is, by that very fact, just and right, that what is wanted by the people is true to their being and to the order of the world.
The most pressing question that democracy must ask itself in the Twenty-first Century is not, then, "What is liberty?", but rather, not forgetting that first question and its history, the perplexing question, with its literary origin in a First Century A. D. Roman Governor, "What is truth?" If there is a theory of truth that stands contrary to the theory of self-sufficient democracy, then either democracy must achieve its own autonomy by denying the existence of any independent nature on which truth is based or some democratically willed laws must be seen to be unjust, must be seen to be against what is good for man, even if enacted by a democratic majority. In this latter case when democratically enacted laws are themselves seen to embody injustice, democracy will presuppose a truth about human nature and life that it did not itself formulate and cause in the first place.
II.
When we look in Aristotle, no doubt, we are, or pretend to be, scandalized by the discovery that for him "democracy" had a pejorative connotation. It represented the best of the three worst regimes. Its rule was not for a "common good" but for the good of the ruling principle, which was the will of the morally undisciplined majority. Democracy's end or defining purpose was not honor or wisdom or virtue, but "liberty" or freedom. At first sight, to be sure, this purpose seems to us to be praiseworthy, exactly what we want for a democracy. "Give me liberty or give me death!" But the meaning that Aristotle gave to this idea of democratic liberty was not complimentary, though it was realistic. He did not think that democracy was the absolutely worst regime, to be sure, but he saw in it defects of such a serious nature that they would militate against true human good, against "a general philosophy of human and political life," to use Maritain's phrase.
Socrates himself taught that death is sometimes to be preferred to the liberty of the democracy in which we live. And the point at which it is to be preferred is precisely where political will, democratically achieved, conflicts with truth. Socrates knew that the only reason he lived as a philosopher for as long as he did in democratic Athens, some seventy years, was because he remained a private citizen. He implied that there always remains a certain incompatibility between philosophy and politics, between truth and undisciplined opinion and habits. His motto, as it were, was not "Give me liberty or give me death," but rather "Give me truth or give me death." If liberty simply meant not dying, all Socrates had to do was to cease being a philosopher in search of truth. He would have continued to live but at the cost of denying what he was.
The liberty of Socrates depended on his search for truth. There appeared to be two kinds of liberty, the liberty to do what we want, whatever it is we want, and the liberty to do what we ought. What we ought to do depended, in turn, on what was true about us, about what it is we were. In Socrates, as well as later with Christ, these two liberties fatefully clashed. Socrates' real freedom, his freedom to witness to the truth, was not jeopardized by the politicians and citizens who choose, in a democratic trial, to kill him for not ceasing to seek the truth. He refused to give up his truth in exchange for his life. Thereby, in dying at the hands of the state, he preserved the truth in a way that he could not have accomplish by choosing to live at the cost of denying the truth. His death taught us that there must be a certain correspondence between how we think and how we live, a correspondence that does not derive its truth from how we live, but from how we ought to live.
A democratic regime, the rule of many by the many, is one that is so structured in its constitution that it fosters a kind of freedom that neither knows nor wants to know truth or limits. It implies a kind of random liberty guided by no serious purpose other than desire. The liberties found in democratic regimes in the classical sense are those deriving from a lack of order and internal discipline in the souls of the citizens who seek to do what they "want", not what it is right or noble for them to do. Statecraft is soulcraft; that is, the structure of the state is designed to reinforce the structure of the soul's choices about how it decides to live. Indeed, the very notion that there is, in objective reality, something that can be described as right, true, or noble seems to contemporary opinion to be itself somehow "anti-democratic". We are reluctant to conceive of a liberty that implies discipline, especially self-discipline, a liberty that requires truth, not will.
The first principle of modern democracy has come to be not liberty or truth but "tolerance", something very different from either. Tolerance, as a speculative position, means not just the practical agreement to allow certain arguments to go on in relative peace, but the dogmatic position that no truth can be possible in any sense, that truth as such is, in theory and practice, impossible. The only sin in modern democracy based on this view seems to be "intolerance". The first victim of this very theory is, paradoxically, truth itself. If what is, is, then all things are not possible. As democratic politicians and citizens, we may want all things to be possible to us because we do not want to admit that any truth can limit our wills and hence our political actions or ways of living. The democrat of this persuasion can be intolerant of only one thing, that is, the philosophic argument that there is truth. The autonomous wills presupposed in this sort of democratic theory of absolute tolerance must embrace in principle what is implicitly self-contradictory: the theoretic position that it is true that there is no truth. The modern democratic man lives uneasily on this paradox, if it is a paradox.
The great and fundamental passage in Scripture that has been, more than any other, understood in our civilization to establish the proper relation of freedom and truth is, however, that which reads: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John, 8:32). Here, reason, revelation, and liberty are joined, not opposed. Truth is not hostile to liberty, but provides its essential condition and foundation. Can one be a democrat and, at the same time, a non-skeptical seeker of the truth? This is our question. How does knowing the truth make us free? Why am I not "freer", as it were, if there is no truth and hence no danger that I might be wrong or in error, no obligation to right myself?
The answer is, of course, that liberty follows upon truth; it does not constitute it. If I know as a fact, say, because I put it there, that there is poison in this apple, I am still free to throw it away, eat it, or give it to someone else to eat. I am technically free to tell someone else there is poison in this fruit. Also I can lie and say it is simply a ripe apple. But knowing this truth, that there is poison in the apple, and still choosing to eat the apple -- caveat our Mother Eve -- I am not free to continue to live. The liberty that the truth gives me, in this case, is the liberty to stay alive, or, for that matter, the liberty to die.
My liberty thus depends both on the truth of what is and on my knowing this truth. If the apple contains the poison, but there is in my theory no possibility of any objective truth in things, then I cannot know for sure whether there is any difference between a good and a poisoned apple. On the hypothesis of theoretic skepticism, not even the reports of science will help me. The fact is, that I cannot live as my theory implicitly demands that I live, not knowing the truth of anything. The logical conclusion from the view that there is no truth, would, in practical terms, be to eat no apple at all, assuming that I did not want to die, or, even if I did, of not knowing how to do so because I cannot be sure of what in fact might cause my death..
If, however, I choose to die, implying that I do know what poison does, then the poisoned apple is quite as good as Socrates' hemlock, which he himself ironically took as an oblation to the God of healing. The problem remains, none the less, that if there is no truth, I cannot know whether the apple is or is not poisoned and no one can tell me, one way or another, about the fact; hence, I really cannot act. Socrates, however, was not a skeptic. He knew the hemlock he was ordered by the state to consume would kill him. So did his good jailor who instructed him in its usage and all the citizens of Athens. That is why they gave it to him to drink. His freedom consisted in his philosophy, in his not knowing whether death was the worst of evils, as the power of the state seemed to imply. His freedom was in his knowing that doing something wrong was an evil. It was not to be done even at the threat of death. Denying the power of death as the greatest evil, he denied the power of the state over truth.
The democratic regime, however, is formed in its institutions and way of proceeding so that it fosters this erratic choice of its citizens. The democratic regime in the classics was designed to let any choice exist, irrespective of any truth that might limit it. Merely to recall this principle is to remind ourselves of how close our current democratic practice is to classical theory. The question of what is the true life of man does not arise in such a democratic regime because that would imply that some standard of life worth living needs to be identified and upheld by the regime itself. Classical democracy was hostile both to the notion of what is good and of what is true, except in the sense of what is good or true for me, of what is good or true as defined by me. Yet, what is good or true depends on what is, even for me.
Many modern men are vaguely aware of this background to the notion of democracy. Indeed, democracy, even in the early modern era, still had about it the notion of the turbulent rule of the demos, the mob, the rule of those who have no interior rule of soul. In all classic discussions of the differences of regimes, then, even into early modern times, democracy was associated with a dangerous form of rule. Indeed, in Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle, democracy often proved to be the seed ground for the tyrant, so that tyrannical regimes most often arose from the moral failures of democratic freedom. Democracy and tyranny were seen to be intimately related.
To be sure, Athens was a democracy and was praised by Pericles for its liberty and style. Yet, this praise came within the context of the very war that ruined Athens for ever. The man most accredited with destroying the democracy of Athens was Alcibiades, the handsome young man who was said by Plato and Thuydides to have loved the people the most, who took his standards from what he perceived that they wanted. American founding fathers for the most part shared this distrust of democracy and preferred the Roman idea of republic to that of democracy.
III. Western public opinion in the modern ear, however, has come to believe that truth is the cause of fanaticism, itself the most terrible of the disorders of soul, so it is said. Only a "fanatic" can maintain that something is true. Liberty is opposed to ideology, which, in turn, is a product of liberty. Ideology itself is based on the idea that there is no truth, so that we are free to choose our own "truth" and impose it on the world to make it better. If there is no truth over against which we might judge the ideologies, then we cannot judge too harshly those ideologies who seek to project on the social world their vision of order. The wars of the modern era have come to be wars of contrasting visions of purely man-made orders. Their cruelty does not arise from barbarism, but from intellectual sophistication. After all, if there is, in principle, no truth to which the human intellect is open, why is it so wrong for one erroneous vision to try to replaced another erroneous vision? Where there is no truth, there is no compromise, or no need to compromise. But compromise is not the definition of truth. Truth itself can be compromised. As Sir Thomas Brown remarked, in Johnson's recollection, the devils do not war against one another. Even the house of Satan has a certain standards, one of which is that it stands for its own order. That is, in some definite sense, there is an order of good as well as an order of evil.
"Without truth, there must be a dissolution of society," Samuel Johnson said. Perhaps it might be worth the trouble to wonder why this great Englishman might have pronounced this startling sentence? It is immediately evident that if no one ever told the truth about anything, we simply could not communicate. If someone tells me, aside from joking, that my hat is on backwards, when, after my checking, it isn't, I begin to lose confidence in my ability to discourse with this person. If everyone tells me it is on backwards, when it isn't, I begin to lose confidence even in my own senses. Yet, the truth is that it is on straight. The problem is even more complicated if we tell a baseball catcher, and hence all the modern adolescents who imitate him, that his hat is on backwards. We have oaths to assure us that, at least in some circumstances, we will tell the truth. We justly condemn liars and know that they cause great damage to exchange of goods and to reputation. There is an old sentimental song that begins, "Be sure it's true when you say 'I love you,' for it's a sin to tell a lie...." Somehow, on recalling this line, we are sure that the song has it right, for in matters of love, lying to one another, however common, is indeed the greatest and most destructive of sins, for it corrupts the most intimate of communications.
Moreover, there are two sorts of truth, called in classical literature, theoretical and practical truth. The distinction is important. A speculative or theoretical truth is, as St. Thomas says, "the conformity between mind and reality." We tell the truth when we say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. Ultimately, all of our actions, what we put into existence, depend upon our willingness and ability to state the truth of things. We act, presupposing that we know and what we know. Moreover, the very highest of our human powers is simply the power we have to know the truth. This is the faculty of intellect towards which all other faculties and institutions are ultimately aimed. It is also our highest pleasure, the delight in knowing the truth of all that is. It is indeed our destiny.
We cannot fry an egg, for instance, unless we know what an egg is, probably unless we know what a chicken or a duck is. The primitive man who first came upon an egg, we can imagine, did not immediately put it in his beer or on his frying pan until he figured out what it was. We are not free to drink a cup of coffee if we do not know what coffee is. If we think that arsenic is coffee, we are in trouble, even though it is good that arsenic is arsenic and coffee coffee. But whether we ought to eat an egg or drink a cup of coffee, these are practical truths depending on our relationships to ourselves or others. If our doctor, again assuming he knows what he is talking about and is telling us the truth, assures us that eating an egg will give us mumps, we are in a different position than if he tells us that it will make us big and strong. In both cases, we remain free to eat or not eat the egg. And if the egg we eat is stolen from our neighbor's chicken house, we are in an even more perplexing practical situation.
Practical truth does not refer directly to what is but initially to what it is that comes into existence through our own human causality or power. Practical truth depends on the quality of our theoretical truth, including the theoretical truth about what sort of beings we ourselves are. In so far as we do not know what it is to be a man, we cannot know what it is that a man ought to do with those powers he is given in nature, powers he did not give himself. Practical truth, however, is still truth but it looks at truth in the process of something's coming to be. When St. Thomas spoke of truth being found in things and being found in intellect, he had this background in mind. The truth that is found in things, including natural things, means that in being what they are, their existence as this thing or that is fixed. A turkey is not a tree. Moreover, there is intelligibility in things by which we call them what they are, because they have a formal cause that makes them a this rather than a that. My mind is said to be true when what I know and say is in conformity with what actually exists and about which I am consciously knowing. My being changes when I know something other than myself. I become more than myself because I have a mind that knows something else that is not me. Indeed, my mind is capable of knowing all things, of all that is. This capacity of my know is what makes me different from other beings in the universe.
But once I know things, I can also do things, make things. This capacity that I have to do or to make asks a related but rather different question to truth. And it is in this area of practical truth that politics and ethics exist. Let us suppose that I choose to do or make something. Everything that any human being does or makes is absolutely different from every other action in the history of the world. In this sense, the realm of things that are put into the world by human choice to do something or make something constitutes a distinct reality subject to different conditions than other things that already exist but not through human causality. The realm of art or craft refers to those artifacts that are put into existence as the result of human making, paintings, bicycles, hammers. The realm of prudence refers to those actions of my own whereby I change myself.
Artistic truth asks whether what is made is that which the maker intended to make, whether what he conceived in his mind before making came to be as he wanted it to be when it finally existed in reality. Ethical and political truth differs from artistic truth, not in the sense that it is not a result of human putting into existence something that was not previously there, but in the sense that the object of doing is the man himself in one or other of his aspects or capacities. Practical truth asks the initial question about what it is that I am putting into the world by my own deeds and actions. My actions are true not only when my actions correspond with what I want to do, but with what I ought to do.
This effort to establish practical truth in my actions means that there can be a conflict between what I want to do and what I ought to do. This sort of conflict can exist on the personal level and on the political level, on the level of human persons acting together. If we argue that the right thing to do is merely what we want to do, with no comparison of that to what we ought to do, it means that we are using an artistic criterion for a moral or ethical action. This is, indeed, the source of Machiavellianism in politics. A good craftsman can be bad man in his personal or political actions. If the only criterion that we allow for our ethical or political actions is what we want to do, the conformity between our idea of what we want to do and what we in fact do, then whatever we do is right. Obviously, this conclusion cannot be correct. Moral and political actions that we put into the world take their ethical criterion from some understanding of what we ought to do, even if we do not do what we ought to do.
What does practical truth have to do with the democratic project? What is wrong with a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, no matter what it is, in the end, that a people "want" or choose to do? Or, to put it differently, are there things that ought not to be chosen, even if they are popularly "wanted"? The Declaration of Independence says that men have a right to life, liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. Do the words, "life", "liberty", or "happiness" mean anything in themselves? Or, is their meaning itself political and defined only by positive, that is, human-made, democratic law, as seems now to be the case? Strictly speaking, if the "truth" of a positive law is merely its proper procedural formulation and passage, no matter what its content, then we can have no such thing as an unjust or immoral law. A legislature or other law-making body could pass intellectually contradictory laws both of which would be correct and moral if nothing but the statement of the law is law.
IV. In his Encyclical on truth, Veritatis Splendor (1993), John Paul II wrote about the need of liberty to be settled in truth.
Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values. This is the direction of doctrines which have lost the sense of transcendence or which are explicitly atheistic. The individual conscience is accorded the status of a supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil. To the affirmation that one has a duty to follow one's conscience is unduly added the affirmation that one's moral judgment is true merely by the fact that it has its origin in the conscience. But in this way, the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity, and "being at peace with oneself," so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment (#32).
This is a description of the moral philosophy that largely governs our democratic times. The source of "values" is "freedom", which has no other criterion than itself. What results is that no truth can be called upon over against the newer virtues, now elevated to the highest positions. These virtues are sincerity, authenticity, and "being at peace with oneself," virtues with no intrinsic content These criteria are wholly subjective. To claim that there is a truth over against them strikes at the basic prejudice of modern thought, namely, that nothing that is can be over against the individual conscience and freedom.
To save democracy from subjectivism, truth must become a democratic project. The greatest of crimes can be enacted in the name of sincerity, authenticity, and "being at peace with oneself." Each of these criteria looks to one's own estimate of oneself. The classical notion of conscience was that of an ultimate judgment of reason about the objective goodness or badness of each of our acts or deeds. But this judgment was not conceived to be merely the fact that it was our last judgment before we acted, hence the one that determined the morality of the act. It was rather the judgment that compared what we proposed to do with what we ought to do. The criterion of morality was not simply what we choose to do because that is what we choose, but what the good man would do in these particular circumstances. The criterion was never subjective, hence it was not merely a projection of our own uninhibited "values", itself a subjective word, onto the world. This meant that the deed was good by virtue of an artistic, not prudential, judgment of moral things, that is, namely, that what we did was what indeed we intended to do, no matter what it was.
Is truth, then, anti-democratic, or is there no democracy with no truth? If we understand democracy in the Greek sense, already contained within its concept is a criterion of deviation from the law, from the common good. Aristotle held that most regimes were in fact disordered, usually either oligarchies or democracies. He did not maintain that it would ever be otherwise, though there could be a few cities with genuine virtue as their criterion of rule. Modernity sought to refute Aristotle on this point, by lowering the sights of what we could expect of human nature, so that we could call, with some ambiguity, more regimes "democratic" because we did not expect as much of human nature as Aristotle did. Or else we could propose that we could so increase the material conditions of man that we could erase or minimize the supposedly basic reasons about why men did not choose virtue. This modern assumption implicitly held that it was material goods as such that caused virtue and not moral choice and discipline, even though Aristotle and Aquinas both recognized a certain amount of goods were indeed needed for a minimum of virtue.
The fact is, however, that the worst regimes are not rooted in a paucity of material goods. The worst regimes are the result of reason gone wrong under the guidance of will, particularly the result of the intelligentsia gone wrong. If we can assume that in modern democracies, with their higher levels of education and prosperity, this same principle holds, we might conclude that without truth, modern democracies are the most dangerous forms of regime that have ever been theoretically considered. This position would not deny the thesis of Maritain that one meaning of democracy, hopefully its best meaning, is that general form of understanding and principle that undergirds all good regimes because it is the principle of all true human living rooted in reason, nature, and revelation.
However much we may want to save the word "democracy" to describe the "best regime" and to insist that, because of the development of technology and the general accumulation of knowledge that we have a better chance of bringing this regime into existence, the fact remains that the best regime exists in speech, not in reality, not even in democratic reality. The only possible location for the best regime is the City of God, in St. Augustine's sense. This realization means that all actual regimes, including the democratic ones, will be imperfect regimes in which the pursuit of truth remains a critical project for the validity of the lives lived in them. It has been said that Socrates lived for seventy years in a democratic regime, a relatively long time. He lived there because a democratic regime cannot tell the difference between a fool and a philosopher. Only when it was forced to decide between the fools and the philosopher, did it choose to kill the philosopher. Modern democracies, it is said, do not do anything so rash as to kill philosophers. What they do is deny truth any status in public so that all philosophers who do not subscribe to this political skepticism must be considered fools whose opinions bear no relation to reality, to a reality that has, in itself, no intrinsic form or cause other than unguided will.
Modern democracy has become the graveyard of philosophers because it has denied truth any legitimate place within its structure. This is why the natural order of good is being replaced within them. In a regime in which truth is declared to be politically dangerous, the philosopher who seeks the truth has no public or private space. He appears to be a fool or a madman when he affirms that there is an order in things including human things. On the hypothesis that there is no order, truth will appear as a threat to the constitution because it claims that there is a criterion by which we can distinguish what we do and what we ought to do.
The democratic project proposed itself as a political movement whereby the potential in man could be brought to actuality and that, in bringing the multiplicity of talents to reality, the regime would be richer, more complete. Intelligence as such tends first not free but to truth, to what is. In itself, intelligence has no choice but to affirm of reality that it is what it is. Human beings are free because their intelligence, in knowing things, in knowing what is, can select what they will do or not do in the pursuit of their end. In choosing what we do, we define ourselves. We are given our first nature, the nature that causes us to be men and not turtles. But we choose our second nature, the pattern of choices and habits whereby we are called good men or bad men. A democracy that is indifferent in practice or in principle to these choices whereby we are in fact good or bad will ever be a classical democracy. But there can be a form of democracy worse than that conceived by Aristotle and the classics. That would be a form of rule of relatively intelligent citizens deliberately choosing that there is no order, no good, no truth for them. It is possible for a whole people, or most of a whole people, to choose against the good, to deny its obligation to what is true. This is the threat of our time and indeed is the nature of our time.
The democratic project must now include, with freedom, truth, the truth of what we are and what we ought to be. It is quite true that we need a regime that fosters and allows us to seek and to know the truth, a regime of liberty. Nothing can impose the truth except itself, except what is. The freedom to allow reality to confront our intellects with what is is most precious. The witness to truth must be a free witness. But the validity of truth does not principally arise from the fact that it is seen in freedom, but that it is seen as what is. If we understand democracy as the best regime, we must understand that it includes the notion that what we choose is also what is true, what is in conformity with the reality of things, including ourselves, that we did not make to be what they are. "Without truth," to recall Samuel Johnson once again in conclusion, "there must be a dissolution of society."
2) From The World & I, 8 (March, 1993), 398-417. DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION On the Existence and Non-Existence of Nations
A nation, he (Marcus Antoninus the Orator) went on to say, does not exist at all, or at the very least finds itself in an extremely poor moral situation, unless it is furnished with a lot of things like religious and educational institutions, and qualities such as justice and endurance and moderation. -- Cicero, On the Orator, I, 19, 85. The deepest spiritual root of Western democracy is to be found neither in the blood brotherhood of warrior tribesmen nor in the civic privileges of the city state, but in the spiritual reversal of values which caused men to honour poverty and suffering and to see in the poor man the image of Christ Himself. -- Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942), p. 22.
I.
Each human being is a political being and more than a political being. His ultimate meaning is not exhausted by the meaning of his civil life. This higher, transcendent purpose limits the state, every state. In the order of principle, religion is more important than democracy. This principle does not deny that democracy is important, but it does affirm that if democracy is not in fact compatible with true religion, then it is democracy, not religion that must be tempered. Democracy is not itself a self-evident truth, but its validity must be argued to, made clear on rational grounds. Our dealings with God are more important than our relationships to one another in any civil society. The civil society is not and should not be thought of as an alternative to God.
Thus, it seems likely that if our relation to God is not proper and valid, our relationships with one another will be most likely to be skewered. Soulcraft and statecraft are intimately related, as Plato taught in the second book of The Republic. If democracy is to be made the test of the validity of religion, this criterion can only mean that democracy itself claims the status not merely of politics but also of religion. That is to say, on these grounds, democracy is not democracy, a question of the right ordering of the civil society. It is a doctrine that itself claims to be the criterion of what it is to be religious. Democracy can itself become idolatry. Before one can be a "democrat," one must first know the purpose of the human will. A multiplicity of empty wills does not constitute a democracy rightly founded.
Ever since the time of the Roman Empire and St. Augustine, moreover, historians and philosophers have been pondering the rise and fall of the nations, including democracies, their existence, their vigor, and their disappearance. Thinkers look for signs and portents of decay or degeneracy that result from the way life is habitually lived in the nations. They even seek a "science" of decay or decline. This analysis becomes especially difficult because, in point of fact, corrupt regimes can live on for quite some time.
We know, in any case, that no stable constitutional order, good or bad, lasts very long in terms of historical time. All regimes change, as Plato acknowledged near the end of The Republic, speaking of even the best regime in speech. The United States, whose founding bears some almost providential claim to historical uniqueness, appears to be fortunate and relatively isolated in its geography. It occupies but a small part of the world's surface and constitutes a tiny fraction of its population. Today this country is almost the oldest of the continuously organized nations; it is by no means certain of itself, of its inner moral stature.
We wonder, moreover, if that relatively enduring national longevity is due to virtue, to accident, to shrewd institutional arrangement? Perhaps the very principles of the founding are becoming a judgment on our actions and on the evolution of our institutions. No one can fail to notice what we have done to our much celebrated "right to life" of the Declaration of Independence. We replace the "right to life" with the "right to choose," as if it makes no difference or as one is the logical expression of the other. We replace a noun with a verb. And we are beginning to lengthen our list of objects of this choice, from incipient human lives, to aging human lives, to "defective" human lives.
A verb like "choose," consequently, always has to have an object. It is not an object of itself. We do not "choose" to have the power of choosing. Rather we understand that we simply have such a power. It is given to us, our free will, as an essential element in our make-up, whatever it is that causes us to exist as human beings in the first place. In the case in which we most often hear of "the right to choose" spoken today, the object of choice is always the existence of a living human life already begun in the normal way all humans have always begin. A good national founding then may be one thing; a faithful living according to this good founding is another. Good foundings do not necessitate good endings. We must always choose to be good. It never just happens.
Many, and not just the pro-life cassandras who sense a momentous rejection of the principles of life has just taken place on a national scale, profess to see signs of civilizational crumbling about us everywhere from sea to shining sea. Other societies, like France or Britain or China, that have lasted much longer than America's two to four hundred years, nevertheless, have changed their regime often, sometimes most radically, as in the case of the French Revolution and the Chinese Marxists. The Greek philosophers maintained that when a regime changed its root principles of purpose and organization, it was no longer the same nation. Again many wonder if this changing of fundamental principles is not what we are now involved in. We are in the process of becoming a people quite different from our founders.
II.
The most difficult -- and often the most personally dangerous -- of philosophic exercises in politics, moreover, consists in accurately describing, in terms of moral insight about purpose and aptness of institutional organization to achieve it, just what a regime is. Few peoples will allow themselves to be called accurately what they have come to be. All existing regimes today want to be called "democracies" or "republics," no matter what they actually are in terms of their actions.
Pride, as St. Augustine knew, remained the great political problem, the great vice, the great self-deception. Pride meant admitting of no standard of truth but our own, the standard we construct from our own intellectual or moral resources. But even to be able to engage in such an exercise of stating what we are come to be, we must have standards of worth and outlines of crime that are not simply arbitrary, not simply what we define with no grounding in reality. We must have some agreement that mankind is locked in a universal discourse about what it is and what it ought to do, a discourse that exempts no one and no nation from its rigors, a discourse that excludes no source of order and truth even if it be revealed by God.
The question often arises in this context, moreover, about whether at any given time there is a providential order to the sequence and relative power of nations. "Our intellectual striving aims at realising the conviction," Hegel wrote early in his Philosophy of History, "that what was intended by eternal wisdom, is actually accomplished in the domain of existent, active Spirit, as well as in that of mere Nature." Such words remain awesome. "For the history of the world is the world's court of justice," Hegel also majestically affirmed at the end of Philosophy of Right. That is to say, what happens is what is right, a proposition of the greatest perplexity since so much that is not right in fact happens.
No wonder Nietzsche, in his almost blasphemous, Ecce Homo, would say that "The whole of history is the refutation by experiment of the principle of the so-called 'world-order'." That is to say, the history of the world is not a court of justice, after all. Much that went on there, as Plato understood in the last book of The Republic, was not just at all. If there be a judge, it is not the historical record that justifies itself nor the world that bears this record. Both the propositions that the world is determined to be what happens in it and that the world has no meaning seem equally unsatisfactory. We think we have a right to know why the world is as it is, yet we know that we do not know. We do not easily comprehend why the good suffer and the wicked seem to triumph. We know we do not dissolve this dilemma by denying any distinction between good and evil. Hence, men often try to impose their order rather than face the fact that they do not know the mysteries that do happen in the history of the world.
Thus, on this point, Nietzsche would seem to be on the side of the angels. Neither the evolving Spirit nor the dialectic world-order of Hegel was the providential sequence about the purpose of man and world found in revelation. When the transcendent order of the nations is apparently and delicately hinted at, as in the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, when the whole world was "at peace," under Augustus Caesar, there was a providential reason why one political power was preeminent at a given time. But the reason had little to do with the political power itself. At the time, the Roman authorities did not know anything at all extraordinary had happened. God seems to claim a higher freedom that would allow Him to accomplish His purposes in any civil polity were He to choose to do so. In the Old Testament, the nations that fought with Israel seemed to be themselves unwittingly instruments of a providence of which they were not aware.
III.
Are the hundred and eighty or so national political units we see in the organized world today then merely a congeries of accidental arrangements with no more meaning than the patterns in which dead leaves fall on the streets in the Autumn? Is the history of the sequence of the nations in the peak of their power also their "judgment," as Hegel postulated? Or perhaps God deals with the nations not as themselves unique but as aspects of their religion, of Islam, of the Hindu states, of the Protestant states, of the ideological states.
Did the world-historic struggle with the Marxist states, furthermore, to cite only the most recent example, mean nothing but passing chance? Was it a happy ending or a lucky break? Why was religion, particularly the Mother of God, Fatima, and the Holy Father, so apparently involved in it, as if what was happening was not solely under human guidance, as if what was happening was not happening by some determinist, dialectic necessity? The sudden collapse of Marxism was predicted by no social science, the methods of which do not seem adequate to detect all that goes on in the spiritual world.
At the end of their amusing 1066 and All That, William Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman brooded over which was the "Top nation" in the context of World War I, "the Great War," as it was known at the time. To the two Englishmen, it began to look pretty much like America had replaced Britain for this dubious honor. Sellar and Yeatman wrote in their final satirical excursus entitled, not "The War to End All Wars," but "The Peace to End Peace":
Though there were several battles in the War, none were so terrible or costly as the
Peace ... which was caused by the only memorable American statesmen, President
Wilson and Col. House, who insisted on a lot of Points, including, 1. that England
should be allowed to pay for the War ...; 2. that the world should be made safe for
democracy i.e. anyone except pillion-riders, pedestrians, foreigners, natives,
capitalists, communists, Jews, riffs, R.A.F.S., gun-men, policemen, peasants,
pheasants, Chinese, etc.; 3. that there should be a great many more countries: this
was a Bad Thing as it was the cause of increased geography....
This delightful, yet incisive passage is followed by a final, very short Chapter LXII, entitled "A Bad Thing." This is the brief entry in its exact literalness: "America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a."
No wonder after World War I, the Great War, the most popular intellectual book, perhaps after All's Quiet on the Western Front, became Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlands, the decline of the West. And fifty years after World War II, some, like Francis Fukuyama, who also spoke of history coming "to a.", to an end, in a rather persuasive thesis heavily influenced by Hegel, maintain that democracy and capitalism have conquered over want and tyranny. Socialism as a way to these laudable ends simply will not work. Now the real and more dangerous threat to our successful culture is boredom. We have nothing much of a serious purpose to propose to ourselves any more. "Wine, women, and song" is no longer a kind of Epicurean philosophic parody, but an agenda, literally all that is left with any possibility of inspiring us. But the results of such a philosophy have never been exactly happy ones and remain sadly evident all around us. Unfortunately, we know this dire consequence also in our cities and in our lives.
This same boredom that worried Fukuyama was frequently seen as one of the intrinsic causes of the internal decline of Rome, an event that has since become the model and motivation for all thinking on the subject of the fate of empires and successful regimes. Indeed, even corruption itself becomes boring. Comparisons abound. The boredom that leads to or follows from corruption, furthermore, was itself defined in terms of a moral order that distinguished good from bad. Knowing what this order was from the prophets or the philosophers or from normal experience of living, decline and vice consisted in not living according to the moral law, in not being open to the virtues. St. Augustine had even argued that the Romans had understood and known about such virtues in their philosophic writings but did not themselves practice them.
Thus, Cicero said to Brutus at Tusculum, at the very beginning of Book Five of the Disputations, that "to live a happy life the only thing we need is moral goodness."
"What is evil" the Emperor Marcus Aurelius asked himself at the beginning of the Seventh Book of his Meditations.
A thing you have seen times out of number.... For everywhere, above and below, you will find nothing but the selfsame things; they fill the pages of all history, ancient, modern, and contemporary; and they fill our cities and homes today. There is no such thing as novelty; all is as trite as it is transitory.
We catch here not only the boredom, but a kind of resignation before evil, an almost Hegelian subsumption of it into the normal pattern of things about which we can do nothing.
Ancient Israel, on the other hand, which remains something of a paradigm here, was chosen not because of its virtues, but because it was the least nation and Yahweh loved it. Its books maintained that the well-being of its life had something to do with its observance of the Law of Yahweh. It was punished by other neighboring nations by military defeat when it failed to live according to the Commandments. Evidently, it was not that the nation's prosperity causes its spiritual contentment, but that spiritual worthiness causes it to be protected by Yahweh in whom alone is any contentment. The question was not whether Yahweh was safe for Israel, but whether Israel obeyed Yahweh.
In the Roman Empire, on the Cross, we relearn the lesson of Socrates, that the best man is killed by the best existing city. A wicked and adulterous nation were said to receive no sign but the sign of Jonah. The Good Thief acknowledges that he suffers justly for his crimes, but he cannot understand the suffering of Someone who has done no crime. Is it possible that individuals and nations suffer for crimes of others? Is it possible, even more mysteriously, that this suffering can be undertaken voluntarily and that without it, no "novelty," to use Marcus Aurelius' word, nothing new will occur?
It was Sophocles who said that "man learns by suffering." The Cross proposed the question of whether God could suffer and why? Surely not for Himself. Among the last words we hear from the Roman Governor who finally approved Christ's Crucifixion, the man ultimately and legally in charge, were "What is truth?" Must empire be indifferent to truth? And when it is, must God suffer? The suffering of God must have to do with a truth the civil order does not want to know. And what might this truth be? That every state is responsible for something besides itself, even in its being itself, even in its own freely chosen judgments.
IV.
Are there successors to Israel among the nations? Certainly the Pilgrim founders of the United States, diligent readers of the Hebrew Bible that they were, thought they too were chosen to found a New Order, a New Land flowing with milk and honey. Is this simply mythology? Or does it make no difference, humanly or divinely, to what polity we might belong? Is there any relation between a nation's soul and its destiny? Could not the Puritans have accomplished the same spiritual deeds at home in England or Holland?
Do the good win and the evil lose? But we know that the opposite more often happens, at least if we are willing even to acknowledged that there be a distinction between good and evil and that this distinction can also be applied to the nations. Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche maintained that turning the other cheek was a formula for political disaster. A nation's strength, they suggested, depended on its leaders being free to use evil means when necessary, to be free of the moral law to accomplish the political law. Only armed prophets succeed. Many of our kind are particularly fond of this doctrine, of this sort of liberty.
V.
Readers of St. Paul, who himself lived in the early stages of the same Roman Empire, moreover, are increasingly uncomfortable with his description of the local situation of his time, of his "multi-cultural" environment.
The more they called themselves philosophers, the more stupid they grew, until they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for a worthless imitation, for the image of mortal man, of birds, of quadrupeds and reptiles. That is why God left them to their filthy enjoyments and the practices with which they dishonour their own bodies, since they have given up divine truth for a lie and have worshipped and served creatures instead of the creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen That is why God has abandoned them to degrading passions: why their women have turned from natural intercourse to unnatural practice and why their menfolk have given up natural intercourse to be consumed with passion for each other, men doing shameless things with men.... In other words, since they refused to see it was rational to acknowledge God, God has left them to their own irrational ideas and to their monstrous behaviour. And so they are steeped in all sorts of depravity, rottenness, greed and malice, and addicted to envy, murder, wrangling, treachery and spite. Libellers, slanderers, enemies of God, rude, arrogant and boastful, enterprising in sin, rebellious to parents, without brains, honour, love or pity. They know what God's verdict is: that those who behave like this deserve to die -- and yet they do it; and what is worse, encourage others to do the same (Romans, 1:22-32).
Needless to say, it is practically unconstitutional and definitely not polite to cite such a passage in the United States today.
If this position in St. Paul founded our culture, then, in current cultural terms, we must change the passage to protect what we actually do and are. We begin to worship not men and animals, but species and earth, more sophisticated notions of the same sort of thing St. Paul wrote about. In the philosophic roots of the animal rights and the environmental movements, there is a desire to overturn the relation of individual man to his species, and of the relation of man to the dominion over the earth that was articulated in Genesis. Indeed, there seems to be a desire to change the very nature of man and woman.
Most of the things St. Paul chastises, in fact, seem to have suddenly become, in a most extraordinary feat of intellectual sophistry, "natural rights." We are engaged both in education and in the media to change St. Paul's words of horror and scandal to those of compassion and acceptance. St. Paul is said to be the origin of intolerance and heartlessness for specifying these things. The argument is no longer whether these things happen on a wide scale in our society. No one can doubt this. Nor does anyone deny that some of the consequences of such activities have reached epidemic proportions, even though the problem is said to be primarily the fault of the scientists and medical profession and especially government for not finding cures.
What is at issue, at bottom, is how we name what is going on. Whether we affirm of what is good, that is good, and of what is bad, that it is bad, depends on whether we are to follow a political definition of good and evil or one rooted in nature and revelation. The blood of the Cross was said to be our salvation, and now we fear our very blood is contaminated so that the only blood we can trust is our own and even this depends on our virtue. We do not want to call what we do by its real name. At the foundations of our civilization, we read in The Republic, "Doesn't knowledge depend on what is, to know of what is that it is and how it is?" This is the civilizational principle by which we ultimately stand or are condemned, even if we last in time.
Under the guise of rights and liberty, we are engaged in a public discourse, more and more backed by coercion and public opinion, that permits us to speak only that good that conforms with the political definition of what is good, and of that evil with the political definition of what is evil. The old sins were well listed by St. Paul and the Commandments. The new sins, racism, sexism, and other forms of group isms, explicitly call what St. Paul said to be wrong to be right. The only personal sins are class sins. We are a society of victims, not personal sinners. We have not only a "right" to be wrong, but to insist that our wrongs are "rights." To call them anything else is contrary to the civil good or law. Calling things by their real names becomes verbal harassment, punishable by law or disdain, or both.
What is important is not whether such things as St. Paul described go on. Some degree of this sort of deviant activity, no longer described as anything other than as "natural," has always occurred, and our moral or religious understanding of human nature has never led us to think otherwise. When such actions were recognized in their natural moral categories, they could properly be called errors, or sins, or moral disorders. They could and should be called what they were, both in speech and in the law. The actual deviations in this framework did not uphold disorder. Reform and penitence could be called for because the disorders were seen for what they were in one's own nature and life. But with our "rights" talk, with our "compassion," we are no longer able to call things by their proper names. Either such things are done because of some genetic or psychological necessity, and therefore, are not culpable, or they are said to be "rights" to be chosen and supported by quotas, recruitments, subventions, protections, and promotions by the state, precisely in their activities.
VI.
What is new today, and what is perhaps therefore more momentous for civil society, is that the differences of understanding and judgment about these issues can no longer be posed as constituting the difference between politics and church, between religion and democracy. We find on every side elements and leaders of religion that identify themselves with what the democracy "chooses," so that in fact little if any distinction exists between religion and democracy. Scripture is searched to come up with exactly what the democracy comes up with. Put this way, one could argue that the crisis of this civilization consists not in the "separation of church and state" but the collapse of their historic and theoretic differences. The state is not being absorbed into religion but religion into the popular will of the state. Religion has little to say to the polity except in terms of approval. Rather it is found all to often speaking most harshly mostly to those who still maintain its own classical distinctions and practices, those found in St. Paul and the Commandments.
The subject of whether religion is compatible with democracy or not requires, initially, a clarification. First of all, there are many religions. Their similarities and differences are questions of great interest and importance. The religions are not the same, and their differences not insignificant. The question of what truth is contained in each religion is one that cannot be avoided nor ought it to be avoided. No more important issue exists in the world today than the question of the truth of the religions and of the philosophies that substitute for it.
Not only is it important to think rightly about God, but, it is becoming more clear, that some intrinsic connection exists between the good of civil society and the right thinking about God by its members. This position has nothing to do with prejudice or with lack of respect for the opinions and beliefs of others. Rather it is the only way we can really respect the views and opinions of others, that is, to take them seriously as claims to be true. One of the unfortunate results of democratic theory with respect to the highest things is that it has obscured the importance of the truth of the various religious and philosophical explanations of the meaning of God, world, and man. A civil society that tolerates religions -- and not all do -- and their differences need not be one that has to deny the differences that in fact do exist and the difference they make.
Thus, what is the best society or situation in which such differences can be reasonably
discussed can be a quite delicate one. Certainly wars of religion are not edifying spectacles. On
the other hand, they testify to the fact that something serious is at issue. Thomas Sowell's remark
that "if you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept
barbarism" remains valid.
Democracy has come to be a word used to identify the best actual political regime. Democracy originally among the Greeks meant the rule of the many for the good of the many, but not for the good of all. For this reason, it was considered a bad regime. It had the advantage of enabling many to participate in judging and legislating, but its end was said to be "liberty." It was this end that caused the most problems. For liberty meant not just law, nor rightly choosing the good, but it meant choosing whatever one wanted, presupposed to no norm, divine or natural, about what one ought to want.
The democratic regime thus was not only a description of the rule of the many, but more essentially it was a rule according to the choice of the citizens no matter what the citizens might choose. The democratic regime professed indifference to questions of the validity of choices. It only served these choices. It is at this point that the classical theory of democracy has reunited with the contemporary notion of democracy as one in which the purpose of popular rule is to facilitate and foster the choices of the many no matter what they are. What is true and what is democratically chosen are identified. This is by definition the best regime and there can be no other. "To make the world safe for democracy," to use that venerable expression, has come to mean that the democratic regime can allow for no theory of choice, religious or natural, that would recognize some standard of right acting for human beings other than the choice itself.
VII. Neither Roman nor American founders used the word democracy to describe their regime. They preferred the word republic though often the two words are used as if they were interchangeable. The word republic clearly distinguished between the public thing (res publica) and the private thing. Family and philosophical things were private things, not in the sense that they were unimportant, but in the sense that their reality was something different from what was done in public. Without the family or without the things devoted to God, the state could not be itself. When the state tried to be or substitute for God or the family, it became itself incompetent and disordered.
Cicero also spoke of a civil religion. This phrase, at first sight to us unacceptable, made a specific point. The civil religion was what the city did for its gods. Liturgy meant the public worship of the gods of the city. Every city recognized that it needed a common agreement about the gods it would worship. The Roman "Pantheon" was a place that collected all the gods of the many peoples conquered by Rome so that all could live under the same gods. The idea was, in fact, a noble one as far as it went. Essentially it meant that so long as the cities conquered by the Romans lived peacefully under Roman rule, each city could retain its gods and their peculiar liturgy. Effectively, it means not that the gods were higher than the city, but that they were subject to the city. What needed to be formulated, something the American republican founders attempted to do, would be a regime in which the importance and primacy of the gods was not subject to the laws of the state. What was needed was a religion that did not think its primary task was this worldly but whose effect was to teach human beings about right living no matter what the regime.
But civil religion also had the task of supplying what general explanation about the order of the world and man's place in it that most people could not understand by themselves. Religion supplied a mythological, unscientific understanding -- the descriptions of its poets or prophets -- of what was to be done that would due for most people who did not have the time or the intelligence to be philosophers. In a sense, both philosophy and polity would understand the need to do and hold certain things but the manner of understanding these things would differ in profundity and clarity. In this sense, the classical notion of civil religion was a political device to prevent the wars of religion while at the same time providing a place of privacy and seriousness for the ultimate questions to be confronted and resolved. The American founders in their dealings with religion tried to develop a constitutional arrangement that would protect both religion and polity in their proper spheres without denying the mutual influence each had and ought to have on the other.
The question of democracy and religion today has become one of more than passing importance. In much of the secular world, those who have become upholders of an absolutist understanding of democracy see religion or metaphysics as a threat to any social order. Holding as a first principle that nothing is true, all religion, especially Christianity, is fanatical because it maintains not only that something is true by virtue of natural philosophy but that revelation is compatible with this natural reasoning, including reasoning about politics in its proper limitations. This claim implicitly is seen to mean that the democratic processes of liberty, seen as having no criterion of value or truth but itself, are to be themselves judged. This claim to judgment is what is accused of being "fanatical," with the result that no religion not agreeing with the higher authority of the democratic process in the area of truth is compatible with the regime.
The seriousness of the religious question is reinforced, in one sense, by the freedom that is typical of democracy when democracy becomes itself the theoretical criterion of truth. Socrates had maintained that he had to lead a private life in democratic Athens because his ideas would lead him to death, that is, to execution by the state, were he to pursue them in public by teaching or speaking. Within the history of political philosophy lies this intrinsic conflict between politics and philosophy, a conflict itself also intrinsic to the trial and death of Christ.
Socrates, since he did not know whether death was evil, therefore chose to die rather than to do the wrong that the state required of him. The state's actions against him, moreover, were entirely legal and proper. Democracy was at work. Once the philosopher does not fear death, however, the state has no power over him. The state, since it has the power of coercion, can enforce conformity to its laws but only among those people who fear death as the greatest evil. But if death is not to be feared, then the power of the state is radically lessened. The history of martyrdom teaches the same lessons.
VIII.
On Easter Sunday, April 19, 1778, James Boswell went to the services at St. Paul's in London. After this, he dropped in to see Samuel Johnson. Boswell "expressed a wish to have the arguments for Christianity always in readiness, that my religious faith might be as firm and clear as any proposition whatever, so that I need not be under the least uneasiness, when it should be attacked." To this worthy wish, Samuel Johnson responded in a surprising fashion:
Sir, you cannot answer all objections. You have demonstration for a First Cause:
you see he must be good as well as powerful, because there is nothing to make him
otherwise, and goodness of itself is preferable. Yet you have against this, what is
very certain, the unhappiness of human life. This, however, gives us reason to hope
for a future state of compensation, that there may be a perfect system. But of that
we were not sure, till we had a positive revelation.
The question such a passage still forces us to consider is whether, should such a positive revelation been given, there is civilizational danger in refusing it or rejecting it? The likelihood of a conflict between religion and democracy at its deepest level lies here, not merely in the rejection of revelation but in rejecting those philosophical principles and standards that might enable us to recognize the possibility of what Johnson called "a positive revelation."
The central issue about democracy and religion, in conclusion, is which comes first, democracy or religion? It might be argued that what has happened in the history of American politics (and other regimes have followed this model) is that a theory of tolerance and democracy, a methodology about their functioning, has substituted for or replaced the content or natural law of what human beings are. The mechanism in place becomes itself the content of value and action. It is one that judges what is right by what is chosen.
IX.
After the election of President Clinton, in a reflection directly related to our topic of the relation of democracy and religion, Charles Krauthammer, a generally responsible and careful observer, wrote:
The great abortion debate is over. With the courts overturning a Guam law
criminalizing abortion and with the election of a down-the-line pro-choice
President, November 1992 marks the end of the 20 year abortion wars.... One can
reasonably declare a great national debate over when all three independently
(s)elected branches of government come to the same position.... The moral of the
story is that democracy works. In a democracy, the law comes to reflect the people's
basic mores.
The conclusion of this position, which clarifies the problem with democracy, is that the choice of the people and the law that reflects this choice now rules. The phrase "democracy works," however, may not mean that democracy is right. In fact it may mean that the working is precisely against the right.
Krauthammer himself perceptively noted the embarrassment of "pro-choice" people actually to name what they choose -- "the reluctance of many to speak the name of the procedure they are defending." The law from now on, however, is going to enforce and finance the continued and more liberal pattern of killing the unborn and obscuring from ourselves what is done. "Democracy works" means at least this result. Paradoxically, "democracy works" means that it does not work, that something intrinsic to the way we understand it is at odds with what we ought to do. Far from religion and democracy living in articulate harmony as the classic medieval and American thinkers had proposed, we live in a world in which the truth of religion or even reason is decided in practice by agreement with the three branches of government. This leaves us not with religion or reason but history to teach us the consequences. We are back to the question of the decline of state in the record of their actions, even those democratically conceived and carried out. We are back with the problem that the legal execution of Socrates by democratic processes leaves us with, namely, a corruption of soul on the part of citizens and its leaders impedes their recognition of what is right and worthy. The civil disorder is ultimately a personal disorder.
One needs to reflect on this abidingly embarrassing fact that institutional disorder is itself ultimately caused by and borne by personal disorder. We democratically choose to accept as legal the abortion of already begun human lives. We decide not to argue about it any more in our polity. Scientifically what are aborted are and can be nothing else but actual human lives begun as every human life begins. The issue is not and never has been "religious." In fact, this issue is now the primary place where science and religion are in agreement with each other, against the polity. It thereby reverses the status of the religion and science controversy of the early modern era.
This issue then is the most current and poignant illustration of the problem with democracy. It is possible, in the Rousseauist tradition, for a whole people -- and not just the American people, the British in many ways enlightened our paths in this unhappy practice -- by proper democratic methods, using all three branches of government, to choose what is not right and cannot be made right by the method which justifies the claim to rightness. Again, "democracy works" means that it is not working. There is some intrinsic fault in the system, a fault that is probably related to Johnson's point about revelation and to Plato's point that the order of personal soul is ultimately what enables us, even in a democracy, to understand and do what is right.
X.
Josef Cardinal Ratzinger was inducted into the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on November 6, 1992. Ratzinger, though a German, is a long-time and acute student of French culture and philosophy. He took the place in the French Academy of the Russian scientist Andrej Sakharov. Ratzinger took the occasion of his induction into the Academy to speak of democracy and religion. The essential question, Ratzinger thought, was "how can the free world assume its moral responsibility?" This question becomes especially anguished in the light of a democracy choosing to make legal what is not morally responsible. Uncannily, this is precisely the very problem that the question of the rise and decline of states presents in our era and the problem with the nature of democracy.
Ratzinger reflected on how difficult it is to see how democracy, which rests on the principle
of majority rule, can, without introducing dogmatism which is foreign to it, maintain moral values
which are not recognized by the majority"
In this sense, there is a "public mission of the Christian churches in the world today." Ratzinger's conclusion was not wholly unlike that of Krauthammer who remarked that "antiabortion activists should redirect their energies to try to change the climate (of opinion) of the country." Ratzinger himself concluded:
It is in conformity with the nature of the Church that she be separate from the State
and that her faith not be imposed by the State, but rest on freely acquired
convictions.... It also belongs to the Church to know she is responsible for
everything and that she cannot limit herself to herself. She must, with the liberty
that is proper to her, address herself to the liberty of all, in such a way that the moral
forces of history remain the forces of the present and that this evidence of the values
without which common freedom is not possible arises ever anew.
To the notion that "democracy works" and works legally when it works to eliminate so many members of our kind, there must be counterposed the notion that "the moral forces of history remain forces of the present."
Freedom is not possible, consequently, without certain principles. When democracy chooses to reject these principles, the question of the worth, the rise and decline of nations, becomes pertinent and pressing. It has long been the contention of religion that mankind is called to something beyond itself, to the life of God in fact. Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est. The "purely human" life, the life in which only humanly conceived and established principles are allowed to be constructed in the state, is what is proposed as the alternative to the principles of reason and revelation to which men are by virtue of their calling and intelligence ordained. What happens historically when this higher vocation is rejected in practice is not the appearance of an exalted human alternative, but the reappearance of those forms of life and deed described by St. Paul and Aristotle as alternatives to right living. Plato, in the end, had remarked that the worst tyranny was not to do the worst deeds, but to do the worst deeds -- by objective standards -- and to have them praised as good. This living and praising are what democracy and religion are dealing with as we see democracy "working" to substitute its standards for what is.
The 20th Century has produced, to conclude, by virtue of certain philosophic and political principles, the very worst regimes of history. But these regimes have been products of philosophical politicians imposing their ideas on the world with the aid of force and controlled propaganda. The present question posed by religion and democracy is more subtle, more frightening. It is whether, contrary to all the assumptions of democratic theory in the modern era, free and tolerant democracies will continue to choose principles lethal to human life and dignity and insist on calling them good and noble, rights and liberties?
3) From The Review of Metaphysics, L (September, 1996), 121-41.
FRIENDSHIP AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
They (the statesmen and lawgivers of old) shouldn't have legislated great ruling offices, or unmixed authority; they should have considered something like the following: that a city should be free and prudent and a friend to itself, and that the lawgiver should give his laws with a view to these things. -- Plato, The Laws, 693b.
Friendship seems too to hold states together, and lawgivers to care more for it than for justice; for unanimity seems to be something like friendship, and this they aim at most of all, and expel faction as their worst enemy; and when men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality. -- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a22-28.
I. When "friendship and political philosophy" was first proposed as a topic to present for a
social science conference (Southwest Social Science Association, Dallas, 1995), some evident
concern arose about just where such a consideration might fit into the academic structure of such
disciplines, or indeed whether it had a place at all? The problem was graciously, if not curiously,
solved by placing the paper on a panel entitled, "Love, Friendship, and the Great Books," in the
political science section of the conference. Needless to say, friendship is an aspect of or kind of
love. We are not automatically used to seeing that it is a proper and legitimate topic for
consideration in political philosophy. As C. S. Lewis, among others, has pointed out, friendship
(philia) is to be distinguished from and related to other kinds of love, to eros, to storge, and to
caritas.
Friendship is prominently mentioned, to be sure, in the great books, including very often
the great books in political philosophy. In addition to Aristotle, whose treatise on friendship
remains unsurpassed as a philosophic examination of this exalted topic, we recall Cicero's great
essay De Amicitia, Plato's Phaedrus, plus numerous references in The Republic, The Laws, The
Symposium, and many other central dialogues.
Some systematic reflection about the relationship between friendship and political philosophy seems a worthy one and especially about why we find this topic generally missing as a normal aspect of what we have come to call political philosophy. Initially, let us propose that friendship is missing in political philosophy because in modernity nothing is conceived to be higher than the state. The ancient tyrant, as Aristotle told us, worried lest there be good friendship among his citizens, something on which alone could be mounted a successful attack both on his regime's validity or truth and on its strength.
If we reflect on the reasons that Aristotle gave for including friendship as a more important topic that justice, the political virtue, we should at first not be surprised that Aristotle is most forthright with us. "For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all, for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends?" (1155a6-9) Aristotle frankly acknowledges that it is the rulers who need friendship, apparently for their own private contentment, almost as if to say that if rulers do not have friends, they will be dangerous to themselves and their polities.
No one, rich or poor, with or without political power, would chose, in Aristotle's view, to live without friends. To be human in the fullest sense and to have friends are synonymous. Aristotle took this relationship between being human and having friends to be self-evident, as it is. He even thought it so important that he wondered on this account if there were not something wrong in the First Mover, in his God, who did not seem to possess friendship, even though he moved the world as a final cause by knowledge and desire? The notion of what it is to be a man, a human being, is not complete without the reality of friendship contained in that same notion. Hence, no one would choose a full life, with honors, riches, power, and pleasures, on the supposition that, at the same time, it lacked friendship. The case of the rich or the powerful lacking friends is even more poignant since apparently they have everything; they can buy or take whatever they want or need. Yet, Aristotle seems to think these latter still need friendship most of all. At first sight the rich or powerful seems to need friendship for selfish purposes; that is, so that he can be benevolent to friends, show off what riches and power can do.
Yet, this does not seem to be exactly what Aristotle had in mind, even though the ability of the rich or powerful to help friends is something worthy in itself, a use value, something that equalizes, but still in Aristotle's terms something of worth, if not of the highest worth. Those citizens with abundant means recognize that their riches cannot just sit there. Riches' only real worth is revealed in the extent to which they can manifest or effect something else. The rich and powerful are called precisely "laudable", that is, praiseworthy, when they are benevolent to others. And praise has something of the connotation of Aristotle's things beyond use. The highest things are beyond use, even when they require things of use. Aristotle does not imply that we should accumulate a huge pile of goods or powers so that we can go around all the time being benevolent to the not so fortunate. He merely meant that if we have wealth or power, we can, but need not, use them well.
Modernity, since it lacks its own internal moral principle, has often turned to the poor and the benighted as its last source of moral justification for its actions. These less fortunates whom we supposedly benefit with our laws or programs, however, would not, in all likelihood, be our own personal friends who presumably have their own share of goods and powers. Our friends are not really the poor or the weak, unless we ourselves are poor or weak. On the other hand, the possession of wealth or power does seem to suggest that we might want to give or bestow something on others. We choose not what has come to be considered today almost the only criterion of moral worth, namely the needy, but our friends.
II.
Aristotle thought that the highest form of friendship had to do with virtue and knowledge, without at the same time denigrating or denying the value and usefulness of other forms of friendship, those of use or pleasure. Indeed, Aristotle thought that all human relations, in so far as possible, needed to be made more gentle, more pleasant, more considerate with the addition of a depth better described by friendship than justice. Nevertheless, whatever can be said about friendship as useful or needed by the destitute or by the polity, its highest forms were found elsewhere. The existence of these more virtuous forms of friendship was, however, as such non-political. Yet, they were the very foundations of polity and right order even though they were beyond politics, as it were. The living, as opposed to the abstract, integrity of reality to be itself was upheld in true friendship. Thus, if a Socrates had to remain a private citizen in order that he might be a philosopher, this choice meant that what Socrates did was ultimately more important than what the polity did, even for the polity and especially for the activation of man's highest potentials in friendship.
Aristotle had affirmed that if man were the highest animal, politics would be the highest science. But there were beings higher than mortals so that we should, in so far as we can, imitate these higher beings because what we shared with them, our reason, was the best or most divine part of us. Plato himself said that human affairs as such are not intrinsically serious, at least in comparison with the seriousness of God. To make political glory the most serious part of human life, the mistake of both Alcibiades and Callicles, was to introduce disorder into both soul and polity. Discourse about the gods and what the gods had wrought, together with the singing, dancing, and sacrificing that were our only proper responses to them, was, as Plato said in The Laws, of much greater fascination to us, of much greater importance to us than the order of polity. This good or best order of polity was itself a good and noble thing, but not of the highest importance. A disordered polity, as a disordered soul, meant that we were deflected from considering what really was important. Because of this failure to know and love what was of the highest significance, our disorders appeared in the form of laws and institutions in society that supported our particular disorder of soul..
But we cannot by ourselves alone carry on this enterprise of examining our lives, of pursuing the highest things. In the beginning of the Third Book of the De Officiis, Cicero, in a wonderful passage, had cited Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus the Elder as saying that we are never less idle than when we are by ourselves nor ever less alone than when we are alone. This is the same Cicero, of course, who writes the De Amicitia, who understands that a contemplative life, even when carried on by ourselves, also for its full flourishing, requires or delights in friendship. Why is this?
III.
From the viewpoint of political philosophy, there are two perplexing elements in Aristotle's
discussion of friendship. One element has to do with Aristotle's remark that we cannot be friends
with God, even though our intellects are what is divine in us and what we should, in so far as we
can, devote our lives to developing. This goal is the knowledge of what is, to which intellect,
including our own particular intellect, is ordained. For Aristotle the fact that we could not hope
to be friends with God is conceived to be a statement of fact. Aristotle does frankly remark, as I
mentioned, that it is quite strange that friendship, as the highest of our own activities, should be
denied to God or to our relationship with Him. We know, of course, that Aquinas entered into his
discussion of this problem precisely at this point because revelation did appear directly to respond
to these perplexities already found in the powerful mind of Aristotle.
The second problem that Aristotle had about friendship was that we could not really have many good or virtuous friendships in our lives. This reflection of Aristotle also deserves our full attention, I think. At first sight, it seems to violate our sense of equality. Often, initially, we would want to be friends with everyone. But as the old adage went, "a friend of everyone is friend of no one." If we are just with everyone, as we should be, it is not because everyone is our friend. Indeed, as I often put it, justice is the most terrible of the virtues for this very reason, that it requires us to render what is due to everyone no matter what his character or relationship to us is. Justice looks upon another not as an individual or unique person, as friendship does, but precisely as abstracted from his own uniqueness. Justice relations are impersonal relations, necessary and virtuous, but wholly lacking in the qualities we ascribe to friendship. This is why we must also be just to our friends, but we are not necessarily friends to all those with whom we are just, which includes potentially every person in the world with whom we might come into contact. The maximum extent of justice is everyone; the maximum extent of friendship is one or two.
Yet, here we have the same Aristotle telling us that we should be just, that we should have friends, that justice needs to be softened by friendship, that we can have only a few good friends, and that friendship is higher than the activities of justice, to which latter politics is more directly devoted. Clearly, these observations in Aristotle harken back to that perplexing passage at the beginning of the Fifth Book of The Republic that troubled Adeimantus and Polemarchus, when they recalled Socrates' apparently off-handed remark that "friends should have all things in common." Socrates knew that this topic was one that had to be spoken of carefully, out of the glare of public opinion. Yet, all writers on friendship, including Aristotle, agree that friends should have all things in common.
We know, however, that this same Aristotle is most dubious about the communality of
wives, children, and property precisely because of the strong likelihood that this same communality
will diffuse and destroy the meaning of wifehood, parenthood, and one's proper care of property.
Aristotle's best possible world turns out to be opposed to the extremes of the proposals of The
Republic because the commonality of friendship in which everyone would be our friends destroys
the intimacy or lifetime concentration in which we could be only a friend with one or a few. The
effort to protect what is common by destroying what is private turns out to have disastrous
consequences even for the common.
Thus, Aristotle was not opposed to the idea that everyone should be friends with everyone else on the grounds that this would not somehow be a noble thing. Rather he objected on the grounds that we did not have, in this life, enough time and occasion in which to actualize all the depths of the communication of truth and virtue that is implied in friendship. One complete lifetime did not allow for the highest form of friendship with everyone, almost as if to suggest that the effort to overcome this intrinsic limitation of time would be a matter of hubris for mortals and an impossibility for the gods. We are confronted at all turns with our very mortality, with our limited time among the mortals.
It was this situation too that gave Aquinas some intimations about the need for and meaning of eternal life and of the importance of the doctrine about the resurrection of precisely the body, each particular body, which he conceived to be with Aristotle the principle of indivuation whereby each one was precisely himself. Aristotle on this score remarked that we want happiness precisely for ourselves, for Socrates, Xantippe, and Plato himself. And we do not want this happiness or virtue so much to be in the form of immortal souls, conversing with the gods in the Isles of the Blessed, as Socrates depicted them after his Trial in The Apology. Something about the integrity of Aristotle's analysis explains his own inability to see any theoretic conclusion that would not retain the finiteness of human beings as something more than simply souls. Ultimately, this attention to the wholeness of a human person is what grounds Aquinas' alternative to Aristotle's own positions as proper questions about human nature. That is, resurrection of the body and friendship of the whole human being retain the essential elements of Aristotle's own tendencies even when he could not see how they might work themselves out.
IV.
In some sense, this question about friendship and political philosophy is related to the reason
why Aristotle and his famous pupil Alexander were at odds about the best regime in which to live.
To Alexander's notion that all men should be brothers, should intermingle, should be under the
same law, thus that there should not be boundaries separating one polity from another but all should
be in the same rule or empire, Aristotle replied that we should all be within much smaller city-states, wherein the possibility of the exercise of real virtue and friendship would be more likely to
take place. It is noteworthy that Leo Strauss in our own time took up much the same position that
Aristotle did.
Aristotle thought that the random sort of personal freedom typified by the empire would
prevent or militate against any real political order, the lack of which would impede that sort of
leisure in which the highest things were possible to exist.
In the best regime, the politician is not likely to kill the philosopher because the politician is charmed by philosophy. Nevertheless, even in the best regime, the politician remains too busy to participate directly in the highest metaphysical things, however much he realizes their charm and necessity. Thus, to go back to Aristotle's problem with the paradox of having only a few friends in each life time, we can see that the best actual regime, a term I use here to distinguish it from Augustine's City of God, is composed of a multiplicity of separate and unique households and of virtuous citizens each with a few good friends, but all of whom recognize that justice is necessary among them, though insufficient for making real or actual what the life of the mind is about.
V.
Let me at this point go on to a perplexity I have with regard to Montaigne's famous essay "On Friendship" (1580). Montaigne's essay cites both Aristotle and Cicero, as well as Horace, Catullus, and Plutarch. Indeed, this famous essay is a veritable common-place book of citations on this topic from ancient and modern authors. The essay concerns Montaigne's friendship with a young Huguenot, Estienne de la Boétie. Montaigne stands at the very beginning of the question of modernity, of whether there is an order to which the human will is subject and to which politics is ordained. Montaigne lived after Machiavelli and Luther but before Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Is the discussion of Montaigne on friendship in essential agreement with Aristotle, or is there something new? Is there something in Montaigne that would, as it were, deviate in the probable direction of modernity, in the direction of Rousseau's "intimacy"? Is there a drift away from Aristotle's sense that the highest act of friendship concerns not just the friends themselves, in their own uniqueness, but their relation to truth, to what is? Aristotle's friends, the few or one that one can have, are not, as I understand it, creating the truth or the world. Rather they are discovering it, deciding whether they live in the same world. They want to know whether what they communicate reveals something outside of themselves, something they have in common, something that is the origin of what they already are.
At first sight, Montaigne seems to live in Aristotle's world. We should note, however, that Montaigne does give the name of his friend, whereas Aristotle does not, except casually to mention certain friends of his, not by name, with whom he had to disagree at times because he preferred the truth to his friend's position. Obviously, Aristotle was referring to Plato here, but he does not name him. Montaigne examines friendship with women and wives, with brothers, with parents, none of which measures up to his highest standards. He likewise, as does Socrates in The Symposium, rejects what he calls the Greek problem, that is active homosexuality, as not worthy of friendship, indeed as corruptive of it.
Let me cite what Montaigne does remark precisely when he recalls the passage from Aristotle about legislation and friendship that I cited in the beginning:
There is nothing to which nature seems so much to have inclined us as to society; and
Aristotle says, that the good legislators had more respect to friendship than to justice. Now
the most supreme point of its perfection is this: for, generally, all those (friendships) that
pleasure, profit, public or private interest create and nourish, are so much the less beautiful
and generous, and so much the less friendships, by how much they mix another cause, and
design, and fruit in friendship, than itself. Neither do the four ancient kinds (of friendship),
natural, social, hospitable, venerian, either separately or jointly, make up a true and perfect
friendship.
Aristotle, to be sure, was also concerned about distinguishing true friendship from those friendships based on utility or pleasure, even though he did call these latter precisely friendships and for the good reason that I have indicated about the inadequacy of justice. What we notice about Montaigne is that in his theory there is a kind of subtle shift from friendship based on exchange and activation of the highest things to an emphasis on the other friend as the exclusive subject. Though there seems to be nothing untoward in Montaigne's friendship with Estienne de la Boéte, its thrust or emphasis seems quite different from that we find in Aristotle. This is a subtle and delicate point, no doubt, but it does seem to be part of the struggle of ancients and moderns.
Yves Simon, in his reflection on friendship, refers to this very essay of Montaigne. Simon is arguing about the nature of a person, his ability to give gifts, to transcend himself because he loves a friend. Simon is concerned with the problem of whether we love a friend because of his quality or because of the friend as a person. That is, if we love someone because of beauty, what happens when it is destroyed by disease? Marriage vows suggest that these changes are to be considered to be part of the friendship of marriage, for better or for worse. So if we are asked what it is in a friend that we are related to in friendship, we respond that it is the person, the being of the friend.
It is here that Simon cites Montaigne famous remark, "If I am entreated to say why I loved
him, I feel that this cannot be expressed except by answering 'Because it was he, because it was I.'"
The only thing that human love cannot do is create out of nothing the goodness, the
desirability of its object. Divine love alone causes the beloved to be good, independently
of any goodness antecedent to love. In order to be an object for the love of a creature, a
thing must already be good: in that sense it is true that no one is loved or liked by his
fellow men except for his qualities. But, although many of these qualities are subject to
destruction -- the first example of Pascal is beauty -- a human being will never be totally
be devoid of qualities. There will always be in him a ground, or a multiplicity of grounds,
for disinterested love. Even though a lady has been loved for her beauty, smallpox does
not necessarily cause her to be neglected. Under the worst of circumstances, the excellence
of human nature, considered in actual existence and in relation to its end, would still be a
perfect ground for loving a person without measure.
A human being's ground for being loved, even by other human beings, is most clarified when we understand his mysterious relation to God.
Love can, therefore, transcend qualities. It reaches to persons in whom qualities themselves subsist and which are revealed through these same real qualities. Thus, what binds us together at the highest level is this capacity of love and friendship to see in reason and freedom the goodness that is there by divine love in the being of every existing person. Without this goodness that is there not from a finite person's own making, Simon remarked, friendship and civic virtue would not exist. The highest purpose of civil society thus is to make possible that human persons can exist and live in and with the goodness of other persons, each of whose goodness is rooted in the creative goodness of God. Society at its highest, then, is composed of a multiplicity of friendships each of which, to exist, requires time, mutual exchange, full awareness of the uniqueness of others in their relationships to the highest things.
VI.
The problem that arises because of the relation between friendship and political philosophy
was best posed, I think, by Ernest Fortin in a little essay that he wrote about Augustine.
It is against this background that Fortin approached the question of friendship ancient and
modern. There is a passage in the Acts of the Apostles that, curiously, is quite similar to Book Five
of The Republic. That passage describes the early Christian communities as selling their property
and living a communal life. They were bound together "with one heart and soul" (4:32). Fortin
discovered that most frequently when Augustine cited this particular passage, he did so by adding
that these early Christians were bound together because they were at the same time "bent on God."
The point of this addition is that human beings become friends by being at the same time bound
to one another and "by looking together in the direction of something outside of and higher than
themselves."
What is of particular interest in this consideration, I think, both in the light of Montaigne's essay and that of Aristotle is that friendship in modernity seems to have taken on a subtle emphasis that, on the surface, seems to exalt Aristotle's friendship in the direction of intimacy but which in fact undermines it. Fortin sees Augustine as the key here because, if we examine Augustine's own friendships, of which he had several -- Alypius, Nebridius, and one must add, in spite of Montaigne, Monica, if not the mother of Adeodatus -- they always recognize the importance of their relation to his own "restless heart". That is to say, if I might put it that way, the human friend that we have in Aristotle's sense is not God. Thus, for Augustine he is either a help or a hindrance to something beyond himself, yet without making friends merely instrumental or functional to something else. Each friend is in exactly the same condition of having a restless heart that will not rest except in God. Such is the intrinsic and metaphysical nature of friends related in God, the truth of which reality grounds the relation of one human friend to another so that neither is exclusively closed in on himself alone.
Fortin noted the frequency with which modern discussions of friendship seem to be posed in terms of an "I-Thou" relationship, a phrase made popular by Buber but which in modern philosophy goes back to Feuerbach, to an effort to see in man's relation to himself, especially the relation of love and friendship, only an anthropocentric projection, not a relation to an existing God. "As the use of such unnatural words as 'I' and 'Thou' reveals," Fortin observed:
... the new understanding is the product of a process whereby one prescinds from the actual
end or ends to which individuals or communities are dedicated. It presumes that there are
no pre-established, naturally knowable, or divinely ordained ends in the attainment of which
human beings find their perfection, and it dismisses as meaningless any talk of such ends.
In the light of my concern about Montaigne, what this passage connotes about friendship is that the friend is not the world or the sole object of one's concern with him, even when, or especially when, he is actually our friend in the Aristotelian or Thomistic sense. When the friend does not exist in truth, that is, when both friends do not have a common good in which each exists, they become laws unto each other, precisely what they cannot be in friendship as Aristotle understood it.
VII.
Clearly, the love that is friendship is going to be exclusive. If it is not, it is not going to be friendship, based on the amount of time and exchange that Aristotle realized was intrinsic to its reality. Yet, when we look at the New Testaments, we are not merely told that Christ calls us friends, but that we are to love both our neighbors and our enemies, neither of whom is necessarily or obviously our friend. Is the New Testament commanding us to do something that contradicts human nature? We have already seen that Augustine has maintained that the classical discussion of virtue was a valid one, but that it took something else, what came to be called grace, for even natural virtue to be practiced in its fullness at least by the actual human beings of our experience.
Fortin wants to know whether the New Testament itself does not violate the possibilities and metaphysical nature of friendship as it appears in the classical authors. "It is characteristic of the New Testament commandment of universal love that it ignores all the limitations that nature imposes on us in this matter," Fortin wrote.
One is summoned to love others without discrimination and independently of their personal
merits or qualities. But this could amount to little more than a tyranny of every individual
over every other individual. The pitfall is avoided only if the love that unites human beings
has its ground in the one good that can be shared by all of them without partition or
diminution, namely, God himself.
What is important about this comment is that in practice the Christian commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself is not to be immediately identified with friendship, the dignity of which is not lessened but made more exclusive and important by this same commandment to love our neighbor.
"I-Thou" relationships and friendship in their differences, as I have indicated, are to be seen as aspects of the question of modernity and classical philosophy. The difference between friendship in the classics and in modernity depends on whether friendship is itself ordered to anything beyond itself. The modern emphasis on human rights and values, for instance, both of which in modernity are rooted in a subjectivity presupposed to no being, is the theoretical grounding of the idea that modern friendship is concerned primarily with the friend, no matter what the friend is in his moral status or no matter what he holds with regard to truth, whereas friendship in the classical and Christian writers contains the "magis amicus veritas" principle. Rights in the modern sense from Hobbes are presupposed to nothing but themselves, so that there is no necessary theoretical context in which they exist. They exist because they are posited. Values in modern culture mean what we choose to hold or do, not our affirmation of what is good or true. This position, as I see it, means that a friendship based on modern rights or value theory would not need theoretical rectitude for its highest manifestation, but only agreement on what is willed. That is to say, the other as other, the "I" and the "Thou" are not pointing to some other good but only to the other as if each did not have his own destiny and both the natural law which neither gave to himself.
VIII.
In this context, it is worthwhile to look at Karol Wojtyla's new book in which this very
topic of "I-Thou" is employed seemingly in the modern manner. It is characteristic of Wojtyla to
know and account in his thought for modernity without compromising the validity of either
classical reason or revelation. This effort to seek what is valid in modern theory does not mean,
I think, that he would necessarily disagree with a Strauss or a Voegelin about the intellectual need
of the classics precisely because of the results of many trends in modernity, but he does seem to
take modern usages and ideas, test them for their truth, and modify them for his own statement of
their worth in the light of an acknowledgement of the truth which man did not himself make. In
this sense, Wojtyla has tried to employ the notion of "right" in a modern way, to define absolute
human dignity, yet without allowing its relativist origins to dominate. Confusion about the
subjective meaning of the words "value" and "right", however, still causes much puzzlement about
papal positions.
In the case before us, that which concerns Wojtyla's use of the "I"-"Thou" relationship, we
notice that the first time that he refers to this expression in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he is
in fact referring to man's relation to God, something in its own way very Augustinian. Karol
Wojtyla initially talks of prayer that is defined to be a "conversation." He explains that in a
conversation there is an "I" and a "thou" or "you". Usually, the "I" is considered more important,
but not in the case of prayer wherein the "Thou" is more important as it begins in God.
In his other two references to this relationship, Karol Wojtyla refers to Jewish thinkers influenced by the way that man and God address each other in the Old Testament. "The philosophers of dialogue, such as Martin Buber and ... (Emmanuel) Lévinas, have contributed greatly to this experience," Wojtyla observed.
And we find ourselves by now very close to Saint Thomas, but the path passes not so much
through being and existence as through people and their meeting each other, through the "I"
and the "Thou". This is a fundamental dimension of man's existence, which is always a
coexistence. Where did the philosophers of dialogue learn this? Foremost, they learned it
from their experience of the Bible. In the experience of the everyday man's entire life is one
of "coexistence" -- "thou" and "I" -- and also in the sphere of the absolute and definitive:
"I" and "THOU". The biblical tradition revolves around this "THOU", who is first the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ..., and then the God of Jesus Christ and the apostles, the God
of our faith.
Wojtyla's point of view, that of the person "in act", his famous "acting person" and not directly that of the same person's existence and being, does stand on the side of modernity, of consciousness.
Yet Wojtyla's is not a consciousness that is divorced from being and existence, but rooted both. Rather the "coexistence" that is characteristic of human persons reaches its highest expression in friendship because that is where the activity of two human beings is real, mutual, and dealing with the highest things. Moreover, the model for understanding the "Thou" of God is prayer wherein God does not exist so much as a cause or an origin but as a person listening and responding. The Christian God, apparently unlike the philosophical First Mover or Good of the Greek philosophers can not only have an inner life that might be described after the manner of friendship, but can also have a direct relation with finite persons.
Later in his insightful book, Karol Wojtyla returned to these same philosophers of dialogue
-- Buber, Lévinas, Franz Rosenzweig, to the relationship between the human "I" and the divine
"THOU". Interestingly, Wojtyla cites this particular usage in connection with the commandment,
"Thou shalt not kill". He relates this admonition wherein we human persons are addressed as
"thou" by God to our desire to see one another, including God, face-to-face. The philosophy of the
face is also found in the Old Testament. "It is through his face that man speaks, and in particular,
everyman who has suffered a wrong speaks and says the words, "Do not kill me." Wojtyla notes
how Lévinas in particular weaves together the philosophy of face and the command not to kill.
Wojtyla recalls the Holocaust but also refers to the governments of our age, even democratic ones,
that "sanction executions with such ease."
Are Wojtyla and Fortin at odds in this matter of the relation of friendship and "I"-"thou" presentations? It seems clear that for Wojtyla the existence of human beings is always "coexistence". He is looking at the highest expressions of human existence as such, not its mere standing out of nothingness as what it is. His remarks on the human face, at first sight, might seem to suggest that a personalist philosophy is limited to the face, that his position might recall Montaigne's and modernity's seeing the human person as the highest being. Yet, the face reveals more than the face by revealing itself. This sense of some common good or purpose, this coexistence, is the caution that Fortin had in mind when he cautioned about the strangeness of the usage of the "I"-"thou" relationship.
IX.
In the context of this discussion of friendship and its highest expressions, I should like to
recall the remarkable book of Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, since I think this
book, more than any other, makes the point about friendship and political philosophy that most
needs to be made.
Yet, if we take Aristotle's criteria for friendship, one or few friends in a complete life, the communication of the highest goods and virtues, for better or worse, with a common project, we can see that the focus we found in de Rougemont seems correct and a needed completion to the tractate on friendship. Moreover, as Aristotle had intimated in the First Book of the Politics, the condition of the household is the cornerstone of the structure of the polis. It cannot be otherwise. Perhaps it can be argued that the condition of friendship in the household is, in a sense, more important than the discussions of friendship in the polis. It is more important perhaps because the sort of friendship that was proposed in the classical authors can in fact only be realized fully in the household as it transcends itself so that, in a sense, the primary location of that leisure in which are exchanged the highest things among friends is found first and last in the household and in its mission. All through modernity, we have sought to remedy our ills through the state in a process that has more and more destroyed the family, that more and more claimed that our ills were structural and not moral and religious.
Thus, we return to Fortin's remarks on Augustine about friendship needing for its own good some sense of transcendence in its own very activity, for it to be itself. This transcendence is also present in the "face-to-face" or "I"-thou" encounter typical of the household, with its intrinsic awareness of what lies beyond itself. The point is clear from The Confessions (VI, 14), wherein Augustine speaks of forming with his friends precisely that common form of life that in Christianity must take either the form of marriage or a monastic or religious life. With this in mind, we can perhaps begin to realize that Aristotle's tractate on friendship, his advice to legislators to remember that friendship is more important than justice, is the key for the complete rethinking of modernity. This rethinking should be conceived not so much as a return to virtue, as we would have it in Strauss and Voegelin, though this is a worthy cause, but as a return to friendship, to those few lifetime and virtuous friendships upon which everything else noble and good depends.
The purpose of the polis is to allow for these friendships in the family, to multiply them as authentic and protected unities as widely as possible. This purpose should be promoted even for the polity's own interest. But how this is done, the strength for it, the love for it, this consideration, in the light of the chaos that in fact exists in this area, takes us back to Augustine, to the notion that the classical writers were correct about the nature of virtue and happiness but were somehow unseeing when it came to the revealed means whereby these ends that we could understand by reason might be achieved in this life. But no consideration of human life, its mortality, face-to-face, denies that in this life we are pilgrims and wayfarers. Our highest friendships intimate "I"s and "thou's" that are permanent. This sense of permanence, intrinsic to the highest activities of our kind, is itself something that takes each of our restless hearts to a "Thou" that is found through all that is, but to a "Thou" who is not Himself, any of these "beautiful things" that we do see.
Personal existence is a coexistence, even in the Godhead, wherein all existence is in act, in mutual consciousness. The tractate on friendship in political philosophy and the tractate on charity in revelation are not two unrelated treatises. They are tractates that pose questions one to another that, when sorted out, suggest that they are part of the same tractate in spite of their apparently different origins. The highest discussions in political philosophy, those on the best regime and on friendship, suggest that the best regime is composed in its parts of a multiplicity of friendships that bear the marks of those things, metaphysical and revelational, that transcend all political regimes without denying that mortals are by nature social animals and need them. Human lives remain lives of coexistence in the highest things, the things that transcend politics but do not deny the necessity or limitations of politics. The highest things exist also in word, in conversation, the exchange of which in act constitutes that friendship to which existence itself is ordained. In friendship, what is and what is revealed reach active consciousness in finite beings whose nature is specifically political, for others, and whose intellects are capable of all that is.
4) From Notre Dame Jouunal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy, 11 (#2, 1997), 467-86. ENTITLEMENTS: UNINTENDED PARADOXES OF THE GENEROUS STATE
There will always be a wide range of difficult situations, as well as hidden and grave needs, which the manifold providence of the State leaves untouched, and of which it can in no way take account. Wherefore, there is always widespread scope for human action by private citizens and for Christian charity. Finally, it is evident that in stimulating efforts relating to spiritual welfare, the work done by individual men and by private civic groups has more value than what is done by public authorities. -- John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, #120, 1961.
I. A cartoon in The New Yorker (Hendelsman, April 1, 1996) puts us in the living room of an uppity, probably Manhattan apartment. We see a reading lamp and, on the wall, a painting of what appears to be an odalisque. A father in his reading glasses and comfortable turtle-neck sweater is sitting in the sofa-chair paging through what looks like nothing so much as The New York Times. Beside him at the chair's right arm is his young son, about age five. The son is stationary holding in his hand the cord of a toy fire truck that he has obviously been pulling around the room while his father was reading the paper. The boy is now, however, standing alert, looking wide-eyed at his parent who has momentarily turned aside to speak to him in a most fatherly fashion, as if he were revealing the secrets of one generation to the next. The father, with a bemused, if not devilish, look on his face, off-handedly addresses the astonished boy. "By the way, Sam," he tells him, "as someday you'll be paying for my entitlements, I'd like to thank you in advance."
This cartoon, in fact, is as good an introduction to entitlements as any more scholarly one could be. We have here both the name "entitlement" -- you know it is an "in" word when it appears in a New Yorker cartoon -- together with current intimations about what it means. The lore about entitlements is that the younger generations will, much to their chagrin and expense, have to support, at rapidly increasing cost, the tremendous economic burden that the aging generations are going to cost. Notice here that we find implied nothing of the old-fashioned notion that families support each other in youth and old age via their own provisions and foresight. The son, whether he likes it or not, will take care of the father through the intervention of the all-powerful state. The son is expected, precisely, to "pay" for his father's entitlements.
The father, be it further noticed, is not working to leave his son an inheritance so that his son can have a better start in the world. Nor is the father saving for his own retirement. The father expects to be provided for by the mandatory entitlements that his son's generation will have to work to finance. And lest he, the father, seem ungrateful for this bounty, he is giving Sam, his son, an advanced word of appreciation while he (the father) is thinking of it. Sam, needless to say, stands bug-eyed before this inexplicable information that dooms him to slave away all his life to provide for his own and others' of his age parents. The father is obviously pleased at this ironic turn of events as it lets him off the hook for providing for his declining years. Probably the only cloud on his horizon is mandatory euthanasia when the entitlements' burden becomes too high for keeping dottering old men alive.
The morning I began these considerations, to continue these introductory remarks, I boarded the D.C. Metro Subway at Rosslyn, in Virginia, to go to Metro Center in the District of Columbia. I had to go there to buy four $10 senior citizen Metro tickets, to which I am entitled, having duly proved and registered my chronological age at a local Library on Wisconsin Avenue and R Street. The only place where I can buy these tickets, however, is at Metro Center. If I am out of pre-purchased tickets, I cannot use the normal fare kiosks at Metro stations for the special senior ticket. Without my entitled, pre-purchased ticket, I have to pay the regular steep fare. With these tickets, I cut the cost of a regular Metro fare more than half. Whether I am rich or poor does not make any difference in acquiring these tickets. Age, not need or merit, alone counts. Similar reductions exist for children. To use another word, I might say that I have a "privilege", a private law or arrangement to cover a special case that the legislator deems worthy. Presumably, the regular fares on Metro or general taxes are levied to pay for my less expensive ticket. Just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, so there is no such thing as a reduced Metro fare for which someone does not have to pay the difference, though I grant the free enterprise possibility, to which public entities are notoriously blind, that lower fares may in fact induce more to use the system and thus increase revenue!
On coming back from Metro Center, moreover, I took another line and got off at Dupont Circle, a stop that enabled me to use a bus transfer without having to pay extra. When I walked over to P Street, I noticed that several people were waiting for the G-2 Bus, which, as my good luck would have it, had just pulled up. As the first lady in line started to get on the bus, the driver asked her to stand back. Suddenly, noise of whirring machinery indicated that the lift for disabled passengers, installed by law in every city bus, was in operation. When it had extended itself, a gentleman in a wheel chair was efficiently lifted down to the sidewalk. He proceeded to wheel himself away and we all boarded the bus after the lift had been replaced. This man was again entitled to have the same ease of transportation as normal citizens, whatever the added cost of installing the lift mechanism on every bus might be.
These somewhat random but common incidents of humor and every-day existence serve to call our attention to the meaning and problems that occur in a political society in which entitlements have come to play an unexpectedly large role. At first sight, entitlements appear both as rights and as gifts from a generous state honorably seeking to provide for everyone. On the other hand, someone must pay for this generosity. What appears to be free usually is not. And secondly, entitlements, particularly those administered by the government, seem to undermine personal initiative and responsibility so that they become but another example of the growth and extent of the control of modern state in the lives of its citizens. Clearly, entitlements deserve serious examination.,
II.
The word "entitlement" cannot be found in Aristotle's Politics or in St. Thomas' discussions of natural law, jus gentium, or justice, though one might argue that hints of it can be found in certain aspects of their discussions of distributive justice and epichia or equity. It does not appear in the Ten Commandments, in the Declaration of Independence, in the Constitution, or in the first Ten Amendments. One searches in vain for it in the 1935 Edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, nor is it in the 1968 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The word is not in the Spell-Check of Word Perfect 6.0, but it is in the Random House College Dictionary of 1975, where "entitle" itself means "to give a person or thing a title, right or claim to something; furnish with grounds for laying a claim." Evidently the "title" is "given" not "due" or "earned". The verb "entitle" has overtones of giving titles of nobility, of something to do with honor more than justice or debt. Entitlement first appears in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature in 1988 with no specific journal entry, but with this interesting note, "See Economic Assistance, Domestic". As a technical word, the term has been in the courts since the late 1960's. Only after 1991 does it appear with any regularity in the Periodical Indices.
Interestingly enough, what we can learn from this brief survey is that in the beginning of its recent development, "entitlement", for the index classifiers at least, seemed to be understood as a domestic variant of "foreign aid". And "aid" in any form usually had the connotation of something temporary, something supplied to get some project or work started, something supplementary or helpful, something due to largess. The first entitlement entry in the Social Science Index was in 1991, in which an article from The Economist of London was listed with the instructive title, "The Entitlement Mentality", as if it were some sort of mind-set, if not a disease. At first the word seemed to be merely a budgetary term, a way to account for the disbursement of certain government monies, without any implied philosophical implications about the theoretic grounds to explain why such monies should be offered. In its usage all along, the word hovered very close to the word "right", itself a word of some considerable ambiguity in modern thought and one always in need of clarification about how it is being used.
The Latin word for "right" in pre-modern thought was jus, a word that meant something
objective, something apart from human will, some norm of reason which the will searched out and
to which it was obligated. Jus meant what was objectively right or due in an exchange or
relationship, what one was obliged to whether he liked it or not. Jus called us because of what it
was, because of its rightness. After Hobbes, however, the word "right" in most modern thought lost
its objective grounding and became, following perhaps Suarez, subjective.
Man has a natural "right" to everything, to repeat the view of Hobbes and his modern
followers.
Legally, rights were often originally "liberties", a stated freedom from certain laws and
customs, a limitation on government.
Classic "bills of rights" from the English, French, and American Revolutions did not talk
of entitlements, but the lists of "rights" that came into fashion with international organizations after
World War II did have "economic and social" rights, notions that come pretty close to what we
mean by entitlements.
III.
"What are entitlements?" Peter Peterson and Neil Howe ask in their 1988 study On Borrowed Time. The term entitlement usually refers to those benefits -- whether in cash or in kind -- that
the federal government automatically pays to qualified individuals. As a rule, entitlement
programs ostensibly contain some strong social welfare dimension, though in the case of
Social Security and Medicare, this is obscured by the insurance metaphors commonly used
to describe payroll taxes and benefits. As defined by the House and Senate Budget
Committees, entitlements consist of any federal outlay that either requires no annual
appropriation by Congress or must be appropriated by Congress according to the terms of
some underlying statute or program legislation. Thus, as long as a given law remains in
force, an "entitled" beneficiary can sue the government for failure to pay benefits. If the
underlying statute were to be amended or abolished, however, program participants ...
would have no legally enforceable right to receive their payments.
Similar provisions are found in most modern states and in most state governments in the United States.
Certain benefits thus are due to certain defined classes or types of citizens or oftentimes to all citizens. The origin of these benefits is founded in legally enacted public purpose, one that the courts have generally expanded in liberal fashion. It is assumed that these benefits help and do not hinder the recipients or the polity that distributes them. Very often it takes some time to evaluate the effects of such entitlements. Aid to dependent children, clearly well-intentioned, may, in fact, end up undermining the integrity and existence of a two-parent family and the well-being of children themselves. Good intentions alone do not always or even usually make good laws. No doubt the least studied aspect of the modern state system is the analysis of the dire effects of legislative and judicial good intentions. Once one falls under the defined categories, in any case, he can expect his benefit and can sue the state if it or some other entity under its jurisdiction fails to provide for what it has promised. If rights, privileges, and liberties were originally conceived to be limits to or exemptions from state jurisdiction, entitlements seem to emphasize rather what the state "owes" to its citizens, wherein the state keeps the power both to define what the citizen is, no matter what his existential status as a human being from nature, and what benefiting him means. Rights and entitlements do not come from outside of but from within the state.
Politically, most states have found that they cannot easily restrict entitlements once their citizens have come to "expect" them from their government. Entitlements come close to defining and spelling out what states "owe" to their citizens. The purpose of entitlements often is to bring everyone up to a certain minimum judged to be necessary for human well-being. All the resources of the state are commanded to meet this need to which someone is entitled. Conceived in this fashion, the state claims a moral purpose, a compassionate or paternal purpose. The state assumes into itself more and more the private aid-giving institutions when their moral or religious impetus or inspiration flags or fails. Behind this notion of entitlement we must at least ask about where this principle that the state "owes" anything to its citizens comes from? What might entitlements imply about human nature and the state? Is the state the only or major source for confronting the needs that entitlements are designed to meet?
The discourse of entitlements is almost always lofty and noble in intention. The results of their enactment into law, however, frequently seem less exalted, often appearing to to foster laziness, dependence, and state control of all phases of human life. On the obvious assumption that whatever the state distributes must come from someplace other than itself, from what citizens produce or earn, entitlements, unlike say the original Homestead Act of the last century, emphasize not the producing aspect of public life or the principles and attitudes that are required for it but the distribution aspect. It takes no great subtlety to see how such differing mentalities that emphasize distribution or production can come into conflict in practice.
Aristotle's famous virtue of munificence (The Ethics, Book 4) saw great virtue in allowing the very rich to distribute their wealth privately in the form of things that foster the good, the true, the beautiful, or help for the needy. This Aristotelian virtue recognized that wealth, legitimately acquired, could be used for good or evil purposes. The virtue sought to orient the soul those things that were noble and worthy, that provided for a level of living and worth attained only by those who understood the value and purpose of higher things in the community. While this virtue still exists in free societies, the fact is that high taxing policies, often caused by needs to pay for entitlements, minimize this capacity and resource of munificence in the population. Moreover, with increasing control of the definitions of good, beautiful, true, and what is needed, the state gains more and more control of the culture. It is no accident that higher education, humanities and arts policies, shows in museums reflect this concentration of distribution capacities in the hands of the state.
Obviously, the term "entitlement" has been fashioned to cover a phenomenon of the modern
state, one almost has to say, of the "welfare state". The dictionary definition of the welfare state
is, interestingly, "a state in which the welfare of the people in such matters as social security,
health, education, housing, and the working conditions is the responsibility of the government."
Presumably, a non-welfare state would be one in which the "social security, health, education,
housing, and working conditions of the citizens were not the responsibility of the government" but
of the citizens themselves or of some other social body. At least some people in modern political
thought have seen such a welfare state as a "servile" state, a state in which well-being is exchanged
for government control, even if the government be democratic and supposedly benign in form. The
essence of the "servile" state is one wherein the citizens must work for those who do not work
productively, be they capitalists or bureaucrats.
IV.
Entitlements refer to the distribution of society's benefits, usually financial but also benefits in kind, like Food Stamps, to those who fall into this or that legislatively defined category. Entitlements seem to be products of what I am calling here not the welfare state but "the Generous State", for they do not merely address dire, temporary conditions but long-range ones that need not always exist but which are nice or helpful when they do exist. The citizens of the Generous State are often well-off, presumably because of the benefits they receive. That is, in terms of average income, compared to other societies, those on entitlement income seem rich in terms of goods and services. Generous states in the modern era, however, are running into increasing public debts and concerns about bankruptcy because, following a principle already found in Plato, desires for benefits, once set in motion, seem unlimited. Since the state itself produces nothing, its so-called "generosity", a name properly used of individuals in their personal relations to others, comes from others, from monies garnered through the taxing process. The irony of being "generous" with someone else's money does not lessen when the state itself is said to be generous.
Some entitlements are for everyone; some for this or that group within society, often initially perceived to be given on a "need" basis. It is clear that organized and active societies can and do produce enormous wealth precisely because they are so organized with an enterprising population. The principle of specialization is also a principle for societal wealth production. The world is not really a zero-sum game, wherein everyone has to produce everything or wherein there is a fixed amount to be distributed such that if we give to some, we must take from others. Belief in such a position, such as we often find in modern ecologists or environmentalists, is one of the major causes for the increased power of the state in recent times.
The ultimate source of wealth, however, is not material goods or things in the ground but the human brain, intelligence, which to all practical purposes is unlimited. If we add the human brain and its innovative capacities to the gifts of the earth, unexpected, enormous riches result. Entitlements are based on the share of this wealth that is commandeered and distributed by the state on some public basis defined in its law. Entitlements can thus be conceived as incentives, rewards, compensations, and free givings, but their cost can also be burdensome and counterproductive so that they actually are a drag on society, especially when they are looked on independently from the problems and conditions of production and the nature of human intelligence.
In their present form, entitlements could not exist, however, if the state did not exist and did not command some portion of what is produced by citizens to be distributed on its (the state's) and not the citizen's own criterion. The state as such is rarely, if ever, a producer of wealth. This is, among other things, the lesson of modern socialism and communism. Payments to a states' own bureaucrats and administrators, moreover, can turn out to be a huge cost, especially in states wherein the well-being provisions themselves require a large voting bureaucracy to distribute the entitlements. Indeed, the entitlements of state employees in terms of vacations, retirement benefits, health care, and other privileges often are far in excess of those available to non-state employed citizens. The employees of the state become major political actors seeking to protect or extend their benefits and their own entitlements.
What the state has to distribute, however, must be taken from what is produced by someone other than its own employees. The experience of modern states is that, however necessary a stable public order may be, these states are themselves notoriously poor producers of wealth and often fail to understand how wealth is produced at all. Poverty in the modern world is often caused, not by lack of resources, but by the state's selecting the wrong intelligence about wealth and the conditions of its increase. The ability of a state to offer entitlements is always jeopardized by its taking, usually through taxes, of much too high a percentage of the wealth of its people. This is why the best entitlements policy must always be that which leaves as much as possible with those who produced the wealth in the first place for their own provisioning of their needs. It is not just a question of the volume of money collected from the productive citizens but of resultant lowering or destruction of incentives. In this sense, the claim to entitlements brings us straight to profound questions in economics and political philosophy.
V.
Perhaps the oldest efforts to distribute benefits came from the wars, from pensions and allotments of land or money, later to G.I. Bills and guaranteed benefits on retirement, payments, PX privileges, Veterans' Hospitals and Homes. Here, in the case of the military in all societies, there was the relation between military compensations to distributive justice and to the unequal bearing of others' burdens in war and defense. Soldiers in the Roman legions looked for grants of land on being mustered out of service. Those who fought in battles or served in armies were considered to be entitled to special rewards or benefits, in many cases to lifetime care, from a grateful citizenry whose freedom the armies had defended or preserved. Failure to carry through promised recompense was in many societies a course of civil disturbance if not governmental overthrow.
On retirement from the military, which happened by comparative standards at quite an early age in recent times, the veteran could go to work and make whatever sort of income he could garner. Aside from income tax totals, his military income was simply a regularly received payment or allotment. The veteran considered that he was entitled to it, even that he earned it. If he did not want to do another thing the rest of his life, that was fine too. This distribution of benefits was looked upon as a matter of justice. And that word justice brings us back to the classical discussions of general and special justice, of commutative and distributive justice, of equity and fairness. Entitlements did not seem to have quite the aura of justice or right connected to them.
All forms of justice had the connotation of "rendering what was due". Justice relationships needed to be defined in terms as clear as possible to be understood, preferably in mathematical or proportional terms. It needed to be evident that someone was not getting something for nothing, but for a title, a reason. Getting something for nothing was indeed a very high form of exchange, perhaps the highest, something we call gift or benefice, but it was not justice and did not fall under the aura of the state. A world of only justice was a terrible world since it only looked to exchanges, to abstract relationships, not to the persons who did the exchanging in their particularity. But still justice was a reality and could not be overlooked except, again, voluntarily or freely. Notions of forgiveness and repentance were designed to mitigate the rigidities of justice. There was something particularly noble about not demanding justice. One could accept another's burden or give of what was justly his without demanding anything in return. Justice indeed seemed to exist for something beyond itself; it seemed limited.
Entitlements somehow appeared to recognize that this something beyond justice can be
articulated even by the state, though one might still argue whether what is being gotten at by
entitlements is the best way for a society to meet its problems, even its peripheral problems.
"Rights talk", as Mary Ann Glendon called it, or "entitlements talk", as I will call it here, seems
to bear the connotation of a demand that something be given freely, an obvious contradiction.
Commutative or rectificatory (making right) justice was that exchange that took place either because of damage done by accident or deliberation, such as skidding into another car because of a flat or because of stealing, or because of advantages gained by voluntary agreement. What is characteristic of all forms of justice is the mutual and equitable exchange. What is owed is what is to be returned. Justice enabled damage to be repaired or it enabled something new to enter the world through entrepreneurship. Careful accounting of who did what, of who was responsible for what, was in effect in commutative justice. On this basis of surety, one could go ahead and plan rationally and expect results of one's foresight and work to be apportioned out fairly. Justice wants rewards to be assigned exactly and with reason, with title.
Insofar as the state entered into these agreements or exchanges, it was primarily to hold the contractors to their pledged word. Without the assumption of justice, very little would be undertaken. In the case of distributive justice in which the common goods or burdens of society were assessed and meted out, however, the principle of exchange was after the manner of proportionate contribution or proportionate burden. Civil disturbances or unrest, Aristotle had told us in the Fifth Book of The Politics, occurred when those who contributed more felt they were rewarded less or when those who had no distinction thought that everyone ought to be treated absolutely equally, no matter what more they did. The polity, in any case, was recognized as an arena in which there was a common good, that is, where many different private and individual goals and institutions could flourish because there was a settled order so that everyone did not have to do everything. The state did not "do" everything but provided the settled order in which myriads of individuals and their organizations could operate to do what they saw fit. If the state tried itself do everything, it would violate its own common good. The Platonic undercurrent to this principle simply meant that spiritual and material riches of the whole required that many different talents be allowed to flourish. Not everyone could or had the time to do everything.
VI.
In his book, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Leo Strauss remarked that one of the causes of
disorder in the modern state was precipitated by Christianity in a rather paradoxical fashion.
A further element in this consideration has to do with the modern idea of rights. The
modern idea of rights has its origins in Hobbes and his state of nature.
enforced or defined. No one had to bother about some sort of "higher law".
If we put these several ideas together, we can begin to understand what is behind the
question of entitlements. "Rights ... are demands for government goods and services," R. Shep
Melnick has written, "rather than for demands for protection against government intrusion --
entitlements, rather than liberties.... The traditional American emphasis on individual rights has
melded with the modern welfare state. If the older view of rights as individual liberty delayed and
stunted the growth of the welfare state, then the newer view of rights as entitlements has helped
it to flourish."
Why have entitlements enabled the government to flourish? One aspect of this question would be that the size of government increased to administer the entitlements themselves designed to provide for the people. Government itself became a major cost. Those who worked for the government, in terms of vacations, health insurance, retirement, conditions of labor, turned out to be the most protected group in society. Entitlement programs also became the vested interest of those who administered the program. Government workers did not work for good will or charity. The service structure to administer politicized compassion was itself a great independent cost. A certain significant percentage of every sum spent on compassion and entitlement went to those who administered the program. Thomas Sowell has pointed out that in terms of foreign aid, the amount of money returned to the Third World from families of immigrants or guest workers exceeded all the public foreign aid of all the nations. We can wonder whether some analogous system not on the state level might not be a better one to achieve the purposes that entitlements were designed to accomplish.
VII.
From the viewpoint of political philosophy, in conclusion, how does one take the measure of entitlements? There is an ancient argument about the state and its justification. The first argument stems from Aristotle and Aquinas, both of whom understood the darker side of human nature, especially the tyrannical tendencies that are often found in human experience. Their positive argument maintains that, in spite of the admitted defects of actual human nature, the state is a natural institution. Man is by nature a political animal, but not only a political animal. Or better, it can be argued that in being a political animal, man is still a being whose end and purposes transcend anything limited to the state's purposes itself. This means that by the very fact of his following his given nature, man should set up a civil polity to enable him to do many things that could not be done or done as well outside of this formal organization. But it also means that even with the state institutions in effect, these civil institutions do not exhaust or define man's highest purposes.
This state could be organized according to various ends, not all of which were noble. The question of the best regime and its location was a crucial one, even though the best regime that could be expected in politics in this world existed only rarely. All actual regimes were in practice less than the best. Man's disordered soul could reflect itself, as Plato knew, in his political organization The Republic, Books VIII-IX). But implicitly, the state existed that the myriad forms of good that man could cause and ought to cause could come to pass. The state existed, in other words, that the highest things might exist, things that were mostly beyond the state. Human actions, however, were legitimate and their expressions in terms of habits and laws were the proper, if limited, arena of the state.
The second view of the state, one associated with Augustine, held that the state was
primarily a remedial institution; it only existed because of sin or the Fall, which itself ought not
to have existed. Man is not by nature a political animal in this view.
That is, the state can be the most dangerous of human institutions, multiplying evil as well as good. Not infrequently in history the state has been the most dangerous enemy of human dignity. The best the state can do is to keep disorder at a minimum without ever promising anything approaching perfection. This is the sort of realism that greets us with any historical knowledge of human existence. And in terms of the topic of these reflections, of entitlements designed to benefit citizens and the operations of the Generous State, we can expect that such arrangements will be subject to abuse and in fact may serve to corrupt, in some unexpected but easily identifiable fashion, a whole society in the name of something that seemed like a worthy enterprise.
In examining the mechanisms of entitlement legislation over the years, it is not difficult to see the Augustinian side of what seemed to be a worthy proposal working itself out. In civil life as in personal life, it remains true that we judge legislation by what we intend it to do, but we must be honest enough to see that we must also examine it in the context of what it does do. Entitlement proposals seem to be a product of efforts to guarantee a stable and prosperous life for the citizens of modern states. The state sees itself as dispensing good things to its citizens, as fulfilling its obligations to them in terms of distributive justice.
The question remains, however, whether the state should be the institution that is primarily responsible for this otherwise laudable purpose. Certain minimal things must be granted to the state both as a directing and as a remedial institution. On the other hand, the state is one institution among others. It is, if we can put it this way, that institution that makes it possible for other institutions to exist and flourish. Likewise, it is, because of its coercive monopoly, that institution that can prevent their developing. The most important things are not found in the state. The temptation of all modern states is to deny this proposition, to assume into themselves those elevated expectations that were implanted into the soul of man by revelation but to assume that these expectations could be provided by means other than those indicated in that same revelation.
Once man is no longer seen as someone whose ultimate purpose and destiny transcends the state, his sights are lowered to this life. When this lowering takes place in the minds of individuals, then the relative rank of the state is elevated to that of the most important institution available to man. It has subsumed into itself those things formerly held to belong to something higher than the state. Aristotle had said that politics is the highest practical science, not the highest science as such. One could argue, as I do argue, that the modern discourse of rights and entitlements is the result of this subtle displacement of the position of the state from that of a natural institution subject to the nature and ends of man to that of the highest institution itself. The function of the state comes to be the defining and providing function for all that is needed for human life, a provision that conceives its task in primarily this-worldly terms. The state expresses itself in terms of laws, rights, entitlements, and benefits. The growth of entitlements, of the state's increasing control of human well-being in all its phases, including primarily its very definition, is the case of a well-intentioned proposal going wrong because its authors' understanding of what it was about is motivated by ideas and provisions that work against human nature and destiny as that is understood in its fullness.
The redress of this growing control of the state through its benefit giving, generously
motivated activities, it would seem, lies, at the institutional level, with a re-emphasis on the
production side of human well-being, on what produces wealth and the virtues and essentially
private but still social institutions that result when people are given the freedom and duty to provide
for themselves.
Entitlements are in fact political and economic realities that most often were proposed and enacted with the best of intentions. As their purposes worked themselves out, however, it became clear that they had the effect of transferring much wealth and independence of the citizen over to the state. Theoretically, the state assumed the responsibility not only of well-being but of defining well-being. The Generous State treated its citizens and especially those who directly worked for it exceedingly well. Somehow, it also corrupted the whole social order because it did not attend to the productive or innovative side of human reality and the vast reaches of intelligence and organization that were located there. This is why the remarks from John XXIII cited at the beginning of these reflections remain so pertinent. The secret sources of grace and human energy need to be allowed to work, need to be fostered through the principle of leaving things at the lowest level as possible, through not wanting the state to provide for all ills and the righting of all wrongs.
The state as the primary substitute for divine providence and bounty is a dangerous entity precisely because it has lost contact with the true destiny and nature of man as he exists in this world. We have, so to speak, been blessed with an "entitlement" that always limits the state and elevates us to a higher level than the state can provide for us. When this higher level is restricted, unrecognized, not allowed to grow, the state will see human life as a failure on its own terms. It will come to see its own task as that of replacing those energies and forces that are no longer encouraged or allowed to exist in human society.
The generous state easily becomes the all-caring and all-powerful state, seeing itself as acting in the highest and most noble motives. Entitlements that reduce us to wards or subjects of state largess as the proper and only ambiance for out actions and security are not neutral either in theory or in practice. Reflections on entitlements, like all questions of politics and economics, can and should bring us to confront the conditions and nature of the highest things. When we do not have these latter considerations in proper order, we will in all likelihood end up corrupting even those institutions, such a entitlements, that we proposed and put into effect with the most noble of intentions.
5) From The Academy, 1 (February, 1995), 5-6. Also in The Unseriousness of Human Affairs (Wilmington: ISIBooks, 2001), 107-10.
ON SELF-DISCIPLINE
Everyone has heard that "all work and no play make Jack a dull boy." Now, I am not exactly sure just who this famous Jack is, but I suspect in his own way he is each of us when we confront the notion of precisely self-discipline. Clearly, the notion of discipline, especially disciplining one's own self, has to do with the systematic process by which we acquire knowledge or virtue or art. Discipline means instruction, especially organized instruction. When we add the notion of "self" to this instruction, we are indicating that we are ourselves objects of our own rule, our own need to instruct ourselves. Ultimately, no one else can do this for us. Our lives are ours to order, to put some sort of principle or purpose into our many and varied thoughts and deeds. Our lives are also ours to leave in disorder or in an order that deviates from what it is we know we ought to be. We should not, moreover, underestimate the difficulty we confront in ruling ourselves. Christianity even suggests that most of us might well need something more than ourselves properly to see and rule ourselves.
This topic is really what the First Book of Aristotle's Ethics is about when he tells us reflectively to look back on our deeds and our thoughts and see, if we can, that for which we act, that which we think to be most important and that which governs all we do. No doubt we can mislead ourselves in this self reflection. We can think we act for the noblest purposes, whereas in fact, as all our friends know, we act for money or pleasure or vain honors. It is difficult to see ourselves as we are, even if this inner "seeing" is one of the most important things we must do for ourselves. The famous Socratic admonition, "know thyself", meant at least this knowledge of our own implicit ends, in addition to knowing the kind of being we are given by nature -- our human being, something we did not give ourselves.
The student who first comes to the university is no doubt exhilarated by a kind of new found freedom. He is still too young really to have acquired a good knowledge of himself or a firm capacity to rule himself. From all I hear, high schools any more are not themselves exactly models of balanced preparations for orderly lives. But I suppose to most high school students in comparison to college, high schools look pretty confined. Many young men and women, no doubt, have, by the time they reach college, already failed to discipline themselves. They have barely begun to acquire the habits and incentives necessary to figure out, not what they should do in terms of a profession or job, but what life itself is about, itself a lifetime task, to be sure. Many of us, unfortunately, make very serious mistakes very early in our lives. College is a place in which, if we are wise, these mistakes can be either corrected or, on the contrary, magnified infinitely.
Now, I am not someone who thinks that we will really learn what life itself is about in college courses. We may, no doubt, get snippets here and there. The ideology or intellectual chaos that is often, as many critics point out, the meaning of college curricula themselves needs to be reflected on and understood. Universities and colleges are there to be "used". We are not to attend them blindly, even though we can and must make ourselves teachable. A good number of the very important books and ideas that a student will need to know if he is to know the truth, to confront what is good, are never even mentioned in any university curriculum or course. This situation would imply that we need to know something about life even before beginning to learn more specifically about parts of it in an academic setting. If we are lucky, we begin to suspect that some of these things we need to know, the highest things, come from our parents or our church or our friends or our own curiosity. Many a man has saved his soul because of some book he chanced to read in some obscure library or used book store. Many a girl has understood what her life is about because she happened, one random summer afternoon, to talk seriously to her grandmother or to her aunt.
Self-discipline, the rule over all of our given passions, fears, dreams, thoughts, can be, if simply taken for itself, a dangerous thing. We can be Stoics who conceive self-discipline somehow as an end in itself, whereas it is really the pre-requisite for seeing and loving what is not ourselves. Self-discipline can become a form of pride in which we attribute to ourselves complete mastery over ourselves with no willingness to guide ourselves to ends that are to be served or people to be loved. None the less, our "bare" selves are objects to ourselves. We recognize that our ability to accomplish anything at all begins with some realization that we must take control of ourselves. We must begin to note in ourselves those things that cause us troubles. Plato said that the worst thing that can happen to us is to have a lie in our souls, especially about ourselves. These difficulties can even be other students, perhaps even teachers, who interfere with our studies or our responsibilities, including our responsibilities to God. They can be things like drink or drugs or our own laziness.
The purpose of self-discipline in the best sense then is not ourselves. That probably sounds strange. The classical writers, I think, used to relate self-discipline to liberty. The person who was most free was the one who had the most control over himself. The person who was most unfree was the one who was ruled by pleasures, money, or power. Self-discipline does not, however, solve the question of what is knowledge or truth or good. In this sense, it is instrumental, something good for the sake of something else. John Paul II put it well in his profound new book, "the fundamental dimension of man's existence ... is always a co-existence." We are ourselves to be sure and we are to rule ourselves. But once we have managed to approach this no doubt difficult issue, what remains is the rest of our lives. We can then begin to focus on the things of the highest importance and dignity, something we would be unable to do if we did not succeed in imposing some self-discipline on ourselves. Paul Johnson in his book, The Intellectuals, has suggested, with considerable unpopularity, that there is an intimate connection between our moral life and our intellectual life. Sometimes, I think the history of our times can be described as an argument on whether or not this connection is true. Self-discipline is the beginning of wisdom, not its end. When we have discovered the purpose for which self-discipline exists, we will, if we are sane, hardly recall anything about it because it has enabled us to become free to see so much else.
6) From Religion & Liberty, 5 (January/February, 1995), 6-8.
THE STATE THAT JUSTIFIES
With the crisis of communism, almost every one thought that a clear lesson about the state, its size and function, had been learned from the experience of the twentieth century. Human well-being required a very limited state. The state itself, it seemed obvious, had turned into man's greatest enemy, so its purpose and centrality needed rethinking. The size and nature of the economy could be best left to the free operation of the market. Most institutions of culture, as parts of the natural order, were to be left in the hands of voluntary agencies. Education could not be a monopoly of the state, nor could the press. Religion was to be free and encouraged. The organs of culture -- the museums, the galleries, the theaters -- were not to be under the administration of state bureaucracies. The state was best left to certain general purposes, such as the common defense, police, the provision for institutions of justice resolution.
The employees of the state, moreover, were not to be the most well-provided for and pensioned in the whole society. They were not to be of a size and organization that their well-being was itself the major political factor in deciding elections. They were not to be able to stop the functioning of the organs of society for their own benefit. They were to be servants, not primarily receivers of public benefits. Very many of the things the state was doing could be done more efficiently and cheaply by putting these activities in private hands. Private property and private initiative turned out to be in fact guarantors of freedom as well as of productivity.
What seems clear from the few years since the crisis of Marxism is that these lessons about the nature of the state have not always been learned with any clarity. Indeed, in the minds of too many, the institutions and attitudes towards the state are being reversed, even in the democratic societies, on the grounds that now that no external enemy exists, the state can begin to take control of all neglected aspects of society. Socialism, in fact, in its second phase in the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century argued that there was nothing wrong with the goals of Marxism, but that its purposes could best be achieved by capturing the institutions of the liberal state though by political not revolutionary means. But the purposes of socialism were total control by the state, a purpose that reappears now under names like "welfare" and "liberal" instead of socialist. A new version of this sort of state socialism, though rarely called exactly that, is now being proposed as the objective of republican government. Moreover, the citizenry in democratic societies, in its voting patterns since World War II, have, at some level, come to expect to be considered the primary objects of state attention. They often seem to have lost their sense of independence and initiative and to accept a passive role. The bureaucracies, media, and politicians accept this condition as natural. Indeed, it is their primary justification for existence. A helpless, wanting, and envious citizen body is the tailor-made counter-part of the zeal of the politicians and bureaucrats who are anxious to attend to everything.
That this disastrous trend may be changing is one of the more hopeful signs of recent political life. Certainly the dangers of this "democratic socialism" are more clearly recognized by the people if not by those in power in recent decades. Democracy, of course, will not work with an unvirtuous people, and the origins of virtue are not primarily political.. Some encouraging signs that people are beginning to realize this moral level, even on the political plane, seem evident, however much they still need to be put into effect precisely to counteract the established bureaucratic and ideological state, even in democracies.
Luther during the Reformation had argued that the only thing that justifies us before God is faith, sola fides. Ironically, this very teaching had something to do with the rise of the secular and absolute princes in the German states that became Protestant. The religious institutions that stood between the state and the people were subsumed into the state. In more extreme though not uncommon forms, the state took over the administration of religion along with the hospitals and schools that had originated in religious motives and enterprise. If religion was still allowed its ritual practices -- and this was not always the case -- its general forms and the appointment of its leaders were under parliament or the king.
Moreover, the state itself acquired certain religious overtones or missions. Political oratory in democratic societies is surprisingly biblical and ethical. The drying every tear and the curing every hurt became not so much a description of heaven but a policy of the state. Hospitals and education had in fact been mostly developed under religious influence and guidance. These institutions gradually or violently came under the control of the state, without losing their sense of mission. "Humanitarian" motives replaced religious ones. Religion was looked upon either as a source of discord or as a supporter of the state, not as a transcendent relation to God and thus the source of energies and initiatives that were not inspired by politics or motives of self-interest..
In modern times, for men who have lost their faith, the state has taken on particular importance. The limitation of the state that came from the notion that there were things, the highest things, that did not belong to Caesar, disappeared. Indeed, the state in modern times can be called the one substitute for God that claims total allegiance of the human soul, even when that soul still claims to be pious and religious. When the state becomes in effect an instrument of political ideologies themselves designed to cure human ills, it does take on characteristics of a substitute religion. The classical idea of civil religion was that it kept the masses quiet since they could not understand the ideas behind philosophy. The new state replaced this negative view with the positive notion that the state actually took care of the masses. It did not merely keep them quiet by religious tales but gave them all they needed in terms of material comfort and ethical purpose.
The "poor" and needy as political justifications for ever increasing state power have become, in fact, the primary cause of the rise of the modern state, whereas the means learned in modern time actually to help the poor and needy invariably imply a lessening of the power and scope of the state. The growth of the state, what Belloc called the "servile" state, goes hand in hand with preventing any independent institutions and initiatives that could address means to alleviate poverty or need outside the state. The state needs for its own size and control the moral claim to be the primary and increasingly the only institution that deals with human need and through it of human purpose. Those elected agents of the state who appeal primarily to this benevolent motive are the immediate agents of the enormous increase in the power of the state in human life.
Many writers have noted the relation between a secularized notion of compassion and the
rise in the power of the state. The state comes to conceive its mission and its purpose as "taking
care" of everyone -- this is really what is behind the health care debates as we know them. We
have produced, as I have called it, "the all-caring state.”
This state is not interested in a system of ordered liberty wherein the major personal problems of the citizens are taken care of by the citizens themselves, on their own initiatives and with their own institutions. The principle of subsidiarity, that is, leaving responsibility at the lowest possible level, is not the primary focus. The emphasis is to proceed from the top down because the greater the perceived problem, the greater ethical scope given to the compassionate state. Every local problem is a national problem, a humanitarian problem. The state deals with a general populace who have lost their initiative to solve their own problems. The state thus appears as an angel of mercy. Everyone is a victim. No one is responsible for his own disorders. Personal disorders are not cured by personal reform but by political regulation of consequences.
This loss of individual and local responsibility is encouraged by a state only too willing to step in to fill this void through its own laws and institutions which gain more and more control of the economy and the institutions of society. The further loss of any sense of a transcendent purpose that would suggest that the state is not the proper organ for justifying every human activity enhances the power of the state since no real room is left for a free and responsible citizenry to do anything apart from the state. Everything becomes politicized, especially those things in the most sensitive area of charity and compassion. The tax power is the measure of compassion. State schools and agencies take control of the primary functions of the family, whose chaos is itself in large part the result of the efforts of the compassionate state.
As the phenomenon of the all-caring state becomes more evident, as the state assumes the compassionate role of assuming all risk into itself, both the efficiency and cost of such a system become more and more evident. Those in charge of such states cease to think that their purpose is to take care of the people in whatever they want. They begin to address themselves rather to what the people want, or better to their wants, which are now seen in need of control and regulation. The rulers become what C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, called human "conditioners". The political project becomes one of refashioning man, of making him into a sort of being that will be able to live in this new benevolent state that has been fashioned out of the compassion of the conditioners. It is here that the modern all-caring state comes into direct conflict with human nature as it has been known. The state does not see itself to be limited by human nature or any transcendent purpose. The common good becomes its good. What it fashions is what can be or must be. The re-definition of man gives the state enormous new scope and power. It is indeed a divine claim.
This new all-caring state sees no limit to its sovereignty. What it wills is not restricted by what the people are. What they may be from nature runs into conflict with what this new state perceives to be the conditions of its own being, which is justified because it is doing so much good. This perceived benevolence begins to mean that certain things must be sacrificed. At the roots of our civilization, Socrates said that it is never permitted to do evil, that it is always better to suffer evil than to do it. The power of the state was that it could kill a Socrates. But if it did, there was still his example. What was required to avoid this critique of nature of what the state could do in its search for taking care of everyone was to kill the Socratic idea that there are things that the state could not do. Thus, if human life was individually sacred, this sacredness would restrict the state if it concluded that it must control human size or the freedom of individuals to have and care for their own children. Hand in hand with the new state's mission, then, is to carry out to its logical conclusion that there is nothing above the will of the people. Since this state is to express this will, there is nothing it cannot do against its own purpose or interest.
Consequently, what is behind most of the social and political issues of our time as they work themselves out in legislation, court decisions and policy, it an effort to defy the limits of the state by redefining the nature of man so that the classical definition does not restrict the state in any way from achieving its all caring purposes. Everywhere there is a policy of dealing with the effects of human actions and not with their known causes and the moral response to them. Practically all of the agenda of the all-caring state arises from violations of virtue, of the Commandments. The all caring state cannot admit that there is a fundamental relation between personal morality and the causes of the disorders that give rise to the increased powers of the state. Thus, instead of returning to the classical notions of the limitations of the state and its relation to personal morality, the all caring state proceeds in the opposite direction of addressing itself only to the effects.
Once these effects are so widespread that they begin to overwhelm even the all caring state, its theoreticians begin to propose ways to limit not the state but man himself. He will be redefined, reeducated, and restricted to act only within the narrow limits that this new all caring state allows. All of these changes will be proposed "democratically" but they will have the effect of undermining the ethical integrity and freedom of the sort of being that man was intended to be. "The state that justifies" is that state that explains its intentions and actions in the name of humanity, of the needs of the world. But what is justified is precisely that concept of man that makes him "servile, that reduces him to a subject of the care of the benevolent state whose justification in being is precisely a perverted form of brotherly love or charity, one that does not begin with what man is but with what the new state thinks he must be even if he is not.
7) Unpublished -- James V. Schall, S. J.
SOLZHENITSYN AT COLLEGE
For more than a decade after the 1980 publication of Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses and Six Later Reflections (Ethics and Public Policy), I assigned this book both semesters to a large undergraduate political philosophy class. Unfailingly, year after year, the text struck students' imagination, not merely because of Solzhenitsyn's rhetorical power, but also because of the range, nature, and vigor of the responses to it. Unsuspecting students at first were surprised that what Solzhenitsyn said was not obvious.
The book contained critical Editorials of Solzhenitsyn's address from the New York Times and the Washington Post, the rather acid comments of Sidney Hook and Arthur Schleslinger, Jr., the snippy one of James Reston. In fact, every reaction was stimulating. Harold Berman on law and Michael Novak on philosophy and theology were finely done pieces.
The essay that unfailingly struck the students was that of Charles Kesler, who was, at the time, a student listening to Solzhenitsyn out there in the rain-swept 1978 graduating class. My students wondered, perhaps, how a new Harvard grad, barely older than themselves, could write, "The moral reliance on institutions, commerce, and other substitutes for virtue implies a separation of law and morality where once there was merely a distinction. It is this separation that has provided 'access for evil.''' As we too had been reading Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, one hoped that they did not have to go to some other college to find out how Kesler could do it.
Already in 1978, in this address, Solzhenitsyn had stated clearly that socialism was dead. But what was most arresting about student reading of Solzhenitsyn, in my recollection, was the impact of the great Russian writer's moral passion. I had myself remembered considering, in The Gulag Archipelago, the gruesome reality that much of our society at the time had not wanted to contemplate. I recalled the power of Solzhenitsyn's account of the guards each evening taking away his glasses so he could not read, of taking away everything, of his sudden, almost Gospel-like realization that only when he had nothing could he see what it meant to be free of such a tyranny, that it could no longer "do" anything to him but take his life.
Often in the same classes, I was struck by the "moral" appeal that Machiavelli exercises over unsuspecting students. Suddenly they are eager to imitate what men "do" do; they covet the freedom to use either good and evil means for purely political ends. These were the years of mockery of worries about an "evil empire." These same students could read Socrates' "it is never right to do wrong," and, too often, fail to see its relation to modern politics descended, as it mostly is, from Machiavelli's indifference to right and wrong.
Yet, Solzhenitsyn was worrisome to undergraduates' naïvté, to any incipient moral realism, even imagined. Solzhenitsyn fervently told the students, carefully reading him in a college class, that this evil that existed in the dark heart of communism had western roots, that it was in fact, under a different rubric, what they were being taught in the college of their choice.
"This tilt of freedom toward evil," Solzhenistyn told the Harvard students and their often unwilling professors and parents, "has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man -- the master of this world -- does not bear evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected." On reading this passage, the wary student would think to himself, "but this is what I am hearing in my sundry social science classes, in my theology classes, in my science classes, and especially in my history and English classes." I would remind them that we studied this same issue when reading the account of the Fall in Genesis, that evil is located in will, not things. Such institutional reform, however, would be praised in Rousseau, the modern father of the idea, whom we would also read. Students wondered how this bearded Russian novelist knew these things.
Solzhenitsyn left no one neutral. Why this book bore such an impact, and still does, is that half way through the address, given on a rainy graduation day twenty years ago, any student in any college, on reading it, begins to realize that, contrary to what he expected, this Russian is talking about himself, the student, not about some horrid Marxist criminal types.
Students likewise love media and media figures. They invite them to give their lectures and commencement addresses. Suddenly, they read Solzhenitsyn's scathing words about the lack of moral and intellectual integrity of this same media. "A person who works and leads a meaningful life," he tells them, "has no need for this excessive and burdening information."
Solzhenitsyn spoke of a "decline of courage," of yielding to passions before any truth or cause. He talked of the lack of will, of the corruption of the legal system itself. As a good percentage of any class plan to enter the law, students were upset to find that their chosen profession may be a cause, not a solution, to the problem. Even though they had read St. Thomas on the primacy of reason to will in law, they could not easily comprehend that our system of law has become mainly positivist, with nothing above it but human will's autonomus power to change its direction. How, they wondered, does Solzhenitsyn know these things about the foundations of our legal philosophy?
Finally, there was the "God question." "On the way from the Renaissance to our days, we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Compete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility." Again, what is this? "Restrain our passions? our irresponsibilities?" Had the same students not been told to "feel good about themselves?" Had they not been told about relativism and post-modernism and do your own thing?
Students, I think, went away from their own Harvard address suspecting that this mysterious, prophetic, aloof Russian somehow had "been there." What unsettled them most was that this riveting man warned them that their society was, by another route, heading in the same moral direction as communism. Only a few, I think, were courageous enough to accept that what Solzhenitsyn said was in fact true. But even a few are a beginning.
8) From Maritain Newsletter, 1998.
THE STUDENT BEFORE ST. THOMAS
We have to assume that almost no student in any college or university today knows anything about Thomas Aquinas. There may be hints that he existed; that he was a leading medieval thinker; that Catholic thought is greatly influenced by him. But the fact is that the student is never actually presented with Thomas Aquinas. And even in those few places where he is taken more seriously, rarely is there more than a semester given to this or that aspect of his work. I do a course about every four semesters on "The Political Philosophy of St. Thomas." But of course, the idea of talking about what Aquinas said about politics without mentioning what he said about everything else is next to impossible. But the minute one wanders into everything else, the semester is gone.
In the intellectual disarray of contemporary universities, secular, Catholic, and otherwise, what does one say to students about Thomas Aquinas? Suppose you say, "Aquinas was the greatest mind that ever existed." They have already been told that about a gillion other guys are the greatest mind that ever existed, among which often was not Thomas Aquinas. The irony here, of course, is that Aquinas, above all, was a teacher of beginners. He sought to explain precisely how to learn and what to learn. He also taught us to know that we know when we know. Moreover, he was never hesitant to teach about what is, about what is worthy of being known, including God, insofar as we can know him. Nor did Aquinas intimate that because we were taught things in revelation that this information was useless. He taught rather that it was quite remarkably inciting as as a means to make the mind itself more accurate and as an answer to many perplexities that reason could not answer.
I recently heard of someone who was reading the Summa Theologiae for the seventh time in its entirety. That is over four thousand pages each time, and anyone who wants to read "all" of St. Thomas, would have many times that amount to read seven times. There is, of course, no substitute for direct contact with what Aquinas actually says. He too has many commentators, many summaries of his Summae. I would not want to distract from this endeavor to know him directly or claim there is a substitute for it.
But where we are today is that we need to begin, and more especially to have the desire to begin. Is there anyway in a semester, say, or simply to take a student aside, apart from all the chaos that he is given in school and in the culture, and at least give him a chance to begin St. Thomas?
Here is what I would suggest. I would find a couple of solid texts of Aquinas, ones in English, though I would explain that it is quite easy to learn St. Thomas's Latin. Leaning Latin, for contemporary students, will often come as a result of already knowing something of St. Thomas' thought. I would spend a considerable amount of time on the texts chosen, though they should not be overwhelming. Aquinas can simply overpower us so we must keep him at first in manageable proportions, as he himself suggested. We could read, say, the whole of the treatise on law, then the treatises on the end of man in the I-II, then perhaps, the treatises on justice or prudence. We could try those on providence or evil. We can usually find anthologies or independent texts with such treatise in them, or they are found in various editions of the Basic Works.
Woven in and around these readings, I would read the following four books with the students: 1) Josef Pieper, A Guide to the Summa, 2) G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas, 3) Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, and finally, 4) Josef Pieper -- an Anthology. I would keep in mind, and perhaps read, either the Weisheipl or Torrell biographies, or something of Gilson or Maritain or McInerny.
I would not do more than this and best to keep it tight. St. Thomas easily leads to all things and in any reading of him, this quality of his work should be constantly stressed. But what I have in mind here is simply a way to begin, a way to cause any half-way alert student to begin to wonder, not just to wonder about how Aquinas himself did all he did, but wonder about reality, about what it was that concerned Aquinas, reality, what is, and its causes, insofar as we can know them. It is my suspicion, at least, that these readings of Aquinas and those who were most like him leave the average student at least wondering, at least beginning to realize that most of what he has been taught is paltry compared to the genius of Aquinas and the paths to which he can lead anyone open to him.
THE ORIGINS OF CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT: THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
"History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public.... These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real good." -- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.
Two dicta of conservative thought are: 1) Preserve what is worth saving, and 2) To preserve anything worthwhile, some change is necessary. Christianity came into the world as something new -- a new understanding about the inner life of the Deity (the Trinity) and a new understanding about man, made manifest by the Incarnation of the Second Person of this Trinity. "The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us" (John, 1:13). If the Deity itself embraced the human condition, with all its ills and problems, man could not be all bad. Indeed, this fact became the ultimate foundation of human dignity in Christian thought. All things remained, in their essence, "good", as Genesis had taught, even while we must account for the obvious presence of evil.
With regard to Israel, Christianity understood itself not to be a rejection of the Law and the Prophets, but their fulfillment. The "New" Law did not abrogate the Ten Commandments, the norms about how we should live. The spirit in which these Commandments were to be observed was deepened with the doctrines of mercy, forgiveness, love of enemies, and grace. These Commandments, when examined, covered the main moral disorders likely in most human lives -- murder, adultery, lying, stealing, envying, coveting. The violation of these Commandments filled the world with the various disorders that have appeared in every age. Men have sought in vain to replace this outline of correct living with other philosophies, ideologies, or faiths, but these justifications, as Burke said, were really presented, on examination, as partial goods that sought to overturn what was to be kept.
Christianity, moreover, though it generally accepted the state and property as reasonable, was not a teaching about politics or economics, but about man's ultimate purpose and destiny, on how to attain it and on an institution in which it was to be achieved, the Church, not the state.. The teaching about politics and economics was to be learned primarily from experience and from the philosophers. Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Athens and Rome, along with subsequent philosophers and states, were worthy sources of practical wisdom, unless public life somehow interfered with a primary duty to God. When Peter and John were commanded to cease preaching, they responded with the ever-recurring counter question, "Do you think it better to obey God or man?" (Acts, 4:19). This question alone always limits the state.
Peter and Paul were both presumably executed under one of Rome's worst Emperors, Nero. Both apostles, however, advised Christians to be obedient to the Emperor, for his power of the sword was given to chastise evil doers (Romans, 13:4, 1 Peter, 4:3). That is, Christians had to learn to distinguish between a tyrant and what a good ruler was supposed to do. If the tyrant demanded something outside his legitimate powers, they chose death rather than obey him.
Other New Testament brief comments on politics have, moreover, served to give guidance to conservative thinking. The most famous passage in the Gospels about politics has to do with tax collecting, that ever present sign of political power. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's" (Matthew, 22:22). This meant that religion did recognize that Caesar, the political power, was legitimate for its own purposes, even reasonable taxation. But it also meant that within the realm of politics itself, some things were not Caesar's. Caesar could not, for reasons of state, forbid the preaching of the Good News.
The subsequent history of man has been marked with all sorts of Caesars who claim more than their due and sometimes with religious leaders who claim more than theirs. Characteristic of conservative thought is the effort to preserve within its own structure both what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God. From the point of view of religion, the most dangerous state is the one that is bound by no limits. From the point of view of conservatism, the most dangerous religion is the one that makes politics to be its most important interest.
The history of Christianity is surrounded by efforts to clarify and define in law what things do belong to God and what to Caesar. This duality of legitimacy, characteristic of conservative thought, sees a dynamism in the lack of power concentration. Christ's discussion with Pilate at His trial graphically shows what is at stake (John, 19:10-11). Pilate, as a provincial Roman governor, maintained that he had the power of life and death. Christ's response was that he (Pilate) would have no power unless it was given to him by Christ's Father. The manner in which political power was seen to be both natural and coming from God in its essence was one of the burdens of all Christian thought, particularly medieval thought, to demonstrate. Modern conservative thought preserves both of these aspects in its theoretical understanding of itself, both the authority of Pilate and its transcendent limits..
Generally, two Christian theories with regard to the legitimacy of the state are found, one from St. Augustine (d. 430) and one from Aristotle via St. Thomas (d.1274). The Augustinian tradition argued that government was necessary because of the Fall, because of original and actual sin. Therefore, we should not locate perfection in any form of government. The Thomist position held that there would have been government or rule even had man not sinned, that government was, as Aristotle said, natural to man. St. Thomas held that both of these positions could be reconciled because both were true in different ways. Some governmental institution with coercive powers was needed because of the actual disorders manifested in public stemming from man's own personal disorders. The second position was that man was a political animal and needed to rule even himself by reasonable argument and order. This background in conservative tradition has explained the presence of both a political realism about what to expect of man, including his sins, and a kind of hesitant optimism about the importance of human ideals and the attraction of the good.
This Christian experience with government came generally to be argued under the heading of natural law. Natural law was a term arising from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Both Israel and Islam were religions of "the Law". Christianity used law in a rather different way. Law was conceived by St. Thomas as an organizing principle, an "ordination of reason", by which all orders of reality could be distinguished with clarity. Thus, there was an eternal law, a natural law, a divine law, a civil law, and even a law of sin or disorder (I-II, 90-97). The careful elaboration of how these orders or laws related to one another was the way in which the principles of diversity and unity found in Christian tradition came to be intellectually understood.
All things had some proper mode of action or some law governing their normal functioning. What was characteristic of Christian thought was the enormous variety that was present within the same cosmic and human order. Hierarchy was not opposed to the ordinary, but both were necessary. Unity of doctrine was not opposed to a wide divergence in ways to live it. Eventually, this understanding gave rise to what came to be known with Pius XI (d. 1937) as the principle of subsidiarity. This principle simply means that all authority should remain at the lowest level possible. Not all things were well governed from top downwards. Thus, there might be an argument for the authority of a state or an empire, but there was also an argument for lesser units that had their own autonomy and tradition. The legitimate even at times chaotic variety within conservatism stems from this line of thought.
Thus, the main contributions of Christianity to conservatism are these: 1) incorporating change into abiding truths and principles, 2) distinguishing between God and Caesar as normal aspects of one civil society, 3) establishing the intrinsic worth of the individual who is at the same time a member of larger groups, including the Church, all of which are allowed a presence in society, 4) acknowledging that hierarchy and subsidiarity are normal elements of a healthy society, and 5) working out theory of a natural law that sought to understand the various orders in which men were to live and that would also explain why experience and diversity were normal parts of the social order.
10) From The Shakespehrian Rag, III (Winter, 1991), 7.
"CONTEMPLATA TRADERE"
Certain questions, good questions, never seem to be asked any more. Certain other questions, even when asked, confine the range of possible answers by some a priori theory or prejudice that prevents us from taking a look at the whole scene. Our character is decided too much by what we do not want to know, especially when what we do not want to know is in fact the truth.
When I am not busy writing law school recommendations for otherwise normal students, who even seem to understand that about seventy percent of the world's abundant supply of lawyers already exists in the United States, I wonder if they ever ask themselves about ends? I know the question of "ends" cannot safely be mentioned in the polity itself because that would imply that some forms of life are better than others. We do not want that sort of teaching around. Virtue cannot be a viable option for that would mean that some things are vices. Still, as an act of rebellion, it is good to wonder about things that we are not supposed to think about. Wonder, after all, was one of those things that most distinguish our lot, as Aristotle once said.
Thomas Aquinas inquired about which sort of religious life was best -- one devoted to contemplation, one devoted to an active life like giving alms or attending the sick, or one in which elements of both contemplation and action were present. In giving his answer to this query, Aquinas used an example. "Just as it is greater to illuminate something than merely to shed light, so it is greater to pass on to others what we have contemplated, than just to contemplate" (II-II, 188, 6). That is a sort of neat image, I think, a light illuminating nothing.
Few would suspect in that brief passage that much controversy lies hidden. The first thing that Aquinas suggests is that bishops are supposed both to teach and to contemplate. It is a good thing to imitate their examples. We wonder whether Aquinas was not merely defining what bishops are supposed to do, but also urging them to do it, as if perhaps some don't! It is not enough, moreover, that we do good works or pray to God. What we do should directly flow from what be behold and pray about. Behind Aquinas' brief remark is an awareness of the wholeness of our being, that we are to think and act, think before we act, act on the basis of what we think. We are to contemplate, that is, think rightly about the things that are.
The early Jesuits, a couple of hundred years after Aquinas, came up with their own "answer" to this famous position of Aquinas about passing on what we contemplate. They were to exist not so much in order "contemplata tradere" but were to be "in actione contemplativi." The Dominican formula seemed to have the noble notion of spending much time figuring things out, then going forth to teach and preach what one had drawn into his soul.
The Jesuit formula, for its part, suggested that what goes on in the world of action had its own spiritual content. We were to behold this content as it came forth onto the visible world. One could interpret the Jesuit formula either as seeing a sort of newness of the divine providence working itself out in the events of the day or as being engaged in worldly affairs but with a certain distance to realize the abiding things of God in all things, even in the events of the day.
What does this have to do with ends, virtue, and not adding to the world's supply of lawyers, with the questions that do not seem to be asked any more? We are to take into our souls all the things that are, even the meaning of our own actions. Those things that flow into us and those things that flow out of us belong to one world. We are not complete if we do not reflect on the highest things, or even on our own things. Nor are we complete if we do not seek to relate all things to one end, not just to any end, but to the truth of things.
We need not all be bishops, or Dominicans, or Jesuits, or professors, or lawyers, or aides in hospitals, or providers for the poor, though we can choose any with a good spirit. But in each of our actions, we are to behold, not ourselves but the things that are. We are to pass on those truths we have first contemplated, reflected on. If no one teaches us this truth in our own world, we are to seek a world in which such things can be asked. We are not to be defeated by the questions no professor or politician will ask us.
In actione contemplativa. Contemplata tradere. In these two phrases, we can rediscover the world in all its causes.
Sicut enim maius est illuminare quam lucere solum, ita maius est contemplata aliis tradere quam solum contemplari.
11) From Crisis, 11 (February, 1993), 27-30. "DESTINED TO ETERNAL HAPPINESS": THE SOCIAL TEACHING IN THE GENERAL CATECHISM 1) "Dès conception, elle (la personne humaine) est destinée à la béatitude éternelle" (#1703). 2) "Il n'y a pas de solution à la question sociale en dehors de l'Evangile" (#1896).
To emphasize the central social teaching in the General Catechism, I will leave in their French original two brief statements that undergird everything contained within this teaching. The first statement grounds the particular, incredible dignity of every existing human person, a dignity little recognized in practice either by our interpreted Constitution or by our public policies or by our private theories about ourselves.
Every person, it affirms, begins at conception and is, from this beginning, destined to the happiness of eternal life. This reality is what we deal with when we encounter any human being, be he in our time, in past time, or in future time, be he an unborn child, a rich woman, a poor Brazilian, a sick adolescent, a young football star, an old philosopher, or a prosperous Japanese industrialist. No other religion, philosophy, or hypothesis about mankind surpasses this teaching in truth or in dignity. Already here is found the reason why we cannot deal with any human being as a mere means. The theoretic and practical disorder of soul of everything from abortion to marxism to relativism, to Buddhism is implicitly here.
The second citation deals with the only real rival to God in the modern world. This rival is human social life in this world conceived as independent of God and accountable only to itself. This reality alone, it is implicitly held, gives human life its meaning. The Catechism affirms, boldly and directly, that however well we construct a social or a political order by our own admittedly vast powers, also duly acknowledged in the Catechism, that, even in this world, in its own valid life and purposes, no real solution to any of mankind's major disorders will occur without first this understanding of the eternal destiny of each conceived human person. This position is not a subsumption of politics into theology. Rather it is a simple, experiential and doctrinal observation that, as a matter of fact, no social order will be able to complete its own worldly purposes without the influence of the Gospel in its own order, even though this achievement is not what the Gospel is primarily for (#2820).
To understanding anything means to grasp the order or place in which the thing exists in the scheme of all things. While it is quite legitimate in logic to concentrate on one particular part or aspect of reality to the exclusion of other aspects, it becomes a danger if this concentration excludes a proper relation to other things. The social doctrine of the General Catechism falls in Part Three of the Catechism, that is, in the part having to do with what we do in our lives after having understood in the first part what the faith teaches about God and in the second part about the sacramental life as it relates to God.
In other words, no discussion of human society will be adequate without first an accurate knowledge of God and the revelational means to Him seen in relation to the kind of limited beings we are. We are beings who, as we see in the fourth part of the Catechism, also are to converse with and pray to this God of Three Persons. This spiritual life too is intrinsic to the social teaching of the Catechism.
The discussion of human action insofar as it is human and free, the general subject matter of the political and ethical sciences, is of course presupposed before any complete understanding of the faith itself can be had. Revelation cannot be addressed to rational beings who know nothing about themselves, nothing about the kind of unique beings they are in the universe. We cannot, in any complete sense, understand the faith simply by itself, even though it has its own intrinsic intelligibility. We need to have the intellectual tools and the moral confidence to realize what we can and cannot know by our own intellectual powers. Catholicism is a religion of intellect and makes complete and coherent sense only when we have pursued to its limits what we can know by ourselves, by our own powers, themselves open to the reality that is not ourselves.
The Catechism does not, however, begin with this natural reasoning and proceed to supernatural reflection. It does not deny that one can approach the faith from this angle. But that is not the purpose of precisely a Catechism. A catechism is a carefully worked out and complete explication of what the faith holds about itself from its own revelational resources which sometimes includes things that can be known from reason, such as the very existence of God (#31-35).
A catechism is designed to set forth in intelligible terms the positions about what faith means, positions that have been hammered out by the Church in controversies and experiences lasting over the centuries (#11). Without claiming that we have either divine or angelic intellects, it is the mark of Catholicism to insist that the human mind hold itself to explain this faith in all its aspects in the most clear and intelligible terms possible. We do not praise God by denying the very purpose of the intellect to know as best it can whatever is, including God Himself. This General Catechism in this sense of a clear coherent exposition of each element of the faith is an extraordinarily fine piece of work.
The philosophical counterpart to the Ten Commandments and the Two Great Commandments is the classical discussion of the moral virtues. These virtues (understood in contrast to the vices opposed to them) are justice, bravery, temperance, prudence, liberality in use of material goods, truth telling, and manners. These virtues are only completely understood when seen in relation to each other, when seen, that is, in how they affect others either immediately or in a family, or in a polity, or in the interchanges of men across the world.
The Beatitudes and the Two Great Commandments, which the Catechism treats as an organic part of the social life of man even though originating in faith, are those specifically graced deeds that correspond to the virtues but yet transform them or go beyond them. In a certain sense, they are designed to meet the problems that come up from the paradoxical inadequacies of the natural virtues themselves. "You have heard it said, but I say to you...." "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" -- this latter seems to be natural justice but it does not really work even when it does work. Something beyond justice, like mercy or forgiveness, seems necessary for justice even to be justice or bravery even to be bravery. The great Aristotelian teaching on friendship, St. Thomas taught us, can only be fully understand in the light of the teaching on charity.
The Catechism puts it this way: "The human virtues are rooted in the theological virtues (faith, hope, charity) which adapt the human faculties to participation in the divine nature. For the theological virtues refer us directly to God" (1812). We should not overlook the tremendous import of such a passage for it indicates how and why what we do in this world can become related to our eternal salvation, why the "cup of water" that we give is not merely a virtuous thing to do but actually salvific to us, without ourselves causing our own salvation.
The great Platonic doctrine that soulcraft is statecraft appears in the teaching of the Catechism in the relation of the person to society and in the particular transcendence that each person has, through his destiny to eternal life, to any civil order. This transcendence is, in fact, what primarily limits the state, what should prevent it from claiming to be itself the final end of human life, even though the state is an end, a proper purpose of human life that either aids or hinders man from reaching eternal life.
The Catechism thus can reemphasize the classic doctrine of subsidiarity (#1883), of leaving the smaller units to do what they can do, without at the same time obscuring the higher end both of civil life and of the person himself. In this sense, religion as "the opium of the people," as a theory designed to exalt the work in this life, is put in its proper context. The "opium of the people" is not religion but civil society conceived to be itself the explanation of all things.
To further emphasize this very point, the great tradition of natural law, which in some sense has been neglected in recent Church documents, reappears in the Catechism in its rightful place and with the correct emphasis on its importance.
The precepts of the natural law are not perceived by all in a clear and immediate manner. In the actual situation (of life), grace and revelation are necessary to sinful man in order that the religious and moral truths can be known 'by all and without difficulty, with a firm certitude and without mixture of error.' The natural law provides to the revealed law and to grace an assistance prepared by God and in agreement with the work of the Spirit" (#1960).
This position is of course a reflection of St. Thomas.
One of the most dangerous "new" doctrines found in modern Catholic social teaching has been that of "social sin." It is, in its intellectual roots, an effort to employ the Rousseauean teaching that the disorders of our soul arise from outside of our wills in some arrangement of property or family or state. Reform of the social order, then, would come before inner reform, statecraft before soulcraft. Following the usual Thomistic approach of trying to save the glimmer of truth that is found in every error, the Catechism acknowledges the classic doctrine, found in Aristotle, that civil and economic structures or regimes do make it easier or more difficult to practice virtue.
On the other hand, the root of the problem lies in the person and ultimately in his relation to God.
By itself, no legislation would know how to make disappear the fears, the prejudices, the attitudes of pride and egoism that are the obstacles to the establishment of truly fraternal societies. Such conduct will cease only with that charity which finds in each man a neighbor and a brother (#1931).
Thus, in the discussion of precisely sin, the Catechism takes up the question of "social sin." This notion, be it noted, is dangerous because of its Hegelian implications of a social being with its own will and responsibility apart from the wills of each person who alone is made for and responsible to God. Sin too has a social aspect. The Catechism is precisely correct in its teaching on this topic: "The 'structures of sin' are the expression and effect of personal sins. They induce their victims to commit evil in their turn. In an analogous sense, they constitute a 'social sin'" (#1869).
The reform of society, then, can never be apart from the reform of ourselves, so that the preaching, the doctrine, the sacraments, and the prayers of the faithful are the first necessities for the reform of the social order.
It is necessary then to make a spiritual and moral appeal to the person and to permanent exigency of his interior conversion, in order to obtain those social changes that are really in his service. The priority given to the conversion of the heart does not eliminate but, on the contrary, imposes an obligation to support, in place of institutions and conditions of life when these latter provoke sin, those means that make society healthy and enable it to conform itself to norms of justice and favor the good instead of placing an obstacle to it (1888).
By making sure that an alien social theory does not replace the core meaning of human life, the Catechism nevertheless guarantees the positive responsibility we have to work for a good society.
The Catechism recalls the classic teaching about the legitimate diversity of regimes or civil orders in two ways:
1) It does not belong to the pastors of the Church directly to intervene in political construction or in the organization of social life. That effort is part of the vocation of the faithful laity, acting on their own proper initiative with their fellow citizens. Social action can imply a plurality of concrete ways [to achieve its purposes] (#2442). 2) A diversity of political regimes is morally admissible, provided that they work to the legitimate good of the community that adopts them. Regimes whose nature is contrary to the natural law, to public order, an to the fundamental rights of the human person, cannot realize the common good of those nations upon which they impose themselves (#1901).
The Catechism repeats St. Thomas' position that "human legislation only bears the character of law insofar as it is conformed to just reason" #1902). To reaffirm this position, we read in the discussion of the Fourth Commandment that "no one is able to command or institute that which is contrary to the dignity of persons and to the natural law" (#2235).
Can we do anything about such unjust regimes? The Catechism does not hesitate to set down the classic principles:
Resistance to the oppression of political power will not legitimately recur to arms, except when there are found united together the following conditions: 1) in the case of serious and prolonged violations of fundamental rights, 2) after having exhausted all the other means, 3) without provoking worse disorders, 4) if there be a well founded hope of success, and 5) if it is impossible reasonably to foresee better solutions (#2243).
The task of a Catechism is not to decide when or whether such conditions exist. But the measure of its completeness is that it recognizes the realities of human life and the dangers to mankind that arise from disordered regimes. Inertia is not sanctioned.
So many clear and principled things exist in this document from the question of abortion to that of taxation. "Since the first century, the Church has affirmed the moral malice of every procured abortion" (#2271) and, as if to anticipate the heinousness of President Clinton`s decree on fetal experimentation, "it is immoral to produce human embryos designed to be exploited as disposable biological material" (#2275).
Of taxes, we have a reaffirmation of the obligation to pay just taxes, though the Catechism: "It is unjust not to pay to the organizations of social security the rates established by proper authority" (#2436). Unfortunately, except as a matter of general principle, the Catechism did not discuss the much more serious problem of unjust taxation by the state.
Again, there is a discussion of the universal destination of the goods of this earth to all mankind, within which there is a defense of private property (2402-06). However, there seems as yet little awareness of the often blatant anti-Christian presuppositions found within the ecological movement.
The social teaching in the Catechism is rich and well-presented. In conclusion, it clarifies things that often are confused. For instance, take the question of religious liberty: The right to religious liberty is neither a mora adhere to error, nor a right supposed to error, but a natural right of the human person to civil liberty, that is to say, to immunity in religious matters, within just limits, from external constraint on the part of the civil power (#2108). Civil liberty does not substitute for the ernest obligation of everyone to seek the truth after the proper human manner in which truth is to be sought.
In short, the social teaching in the Catechism is one of the clearest points wherein reason and revelation meet each other in a harmonious whole wherein openness to truth and openness to God are essential to understand our openness to one another.
12) From Social Justice Review 86 (September/October,1995), 143-48; also Social Survey, (Melbourne), 44 (July, 1995), 165-74.
LIBERATION THEOLOGY: AFTERTHOUGHTS Normally speaking, we would not expect an esoteric topic like "liberation theology" to be of particular professional interest to young officers of the United States Marine Corps. But a series of historical and political circumstances, among which the very word "Sandinista" is unfortunately connected, has made this consideration explicable. Some of these circumstances had to do with certain operations of the Marine Corps in the Caribbean area earlier this century; others have to do with understanding particular problems that might arise again in the general Latin American-African area. Thus, liberation theology has become a topic that is of some importance for the well-rounded understanding of a military officer who recognizes that his duty to his country and to his corps, even to his God, includes his understanding of significant political and religious issues.
I am pleased to learn that you are willing to reflect in your busy schedule on this unexpected topic and its possible meaning. Some concern is felt in your curriculum that military operations might involve issues that apparently arise from religion. Many matters in the Mid-East have to do with Islam and Judaism. Many in Latin America have to do with Catholicism and Protestantism. Many in Africa focus on Islam, Christianity, and many tribal religions. This confluence presents issues of great delicacy both for the military and for religion, particularly in the American tradition that professes to see religion and politics existing side by side with generally amicable and respectful awareness of differing but legitimate competencies.
Perhaps it is useful in beginning, however, to remind you briefly of the general American tradition that has associated chaplains with the United States Armed Forces as a normal feature of their overall well-being, a well-being that includes the individual soldier's spiritual needs and the military's sense that it is serving the cause of justice and human worth. It is recognized that issues of life and death, justice and injustice, honor and dishonor, arise with particular force in any military organization.
The profession of a soldier is a noble one with noticeable instances of it even in the New Testament. We think of the Roman Centurion, that is, a company commander in the Tenth Legion, who asked Christ to cure his good servant (Matthew, 8:5-13). Soldiers are almost always at the forefront of any civil turmoil. In the Roman tradition, the good officer was like Cincinnatus a man who on finishing his duty went back to his home and land to live a quiet, honorable life in the peace he helped to create and protect. George Washington himself consciously was associated with this tradition of Cincinnatus as any visit to Mount Vernon will testify.
As recently as February 6, 1992, to the Third International and Interdenominational Conference of Chief Military Chaplains of Europe and North America, meeting in Rome, Pope John Paul II remarked: In the Christian world there has always been a notable tradition of pastoral care to
military personnel. The Catholic Church's respect and concern for those involved
in military service is clearly expressed in the Second Vatican Council .... There we
read: "Those ... who are dedicated to the service of their country and are members
of armed forces should regard themselves as ministering to the security and freedom
of their peoples, and while they are performing this duty in the right manner they
are genuinely contributing to the establishment of peace...."
I cite this remark from the Catholic tradition both because it is largely shared by other Christian and Jewish faiths and because religion expects an honorable service from soldiers, one that is based on principle and understanding of what their military vocation is. In brief, if the churches expect soldiers to know and do their civil duties, so soldiers expect religion to know and to do its own duty to God.
Someplace in New England, I think, there is an ice cream company called Ben and Jerry's. This ice cream company apparently makes rather a big stir by donating one percent of its profits to "world peace." The humorist P. J. O'Rourke is most skeptical of this sort of thing that innocently implies world peace is merely a question of good will, good ice cream, and supporting certain self-justifying politically good causes. "Any rich man does more for society than all the jerks pasting VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE bumper stickers on their cars," O'Rourke bluntly remarked.
The worst leech of a mergers-and-acquisition lawyer making $500,000 a year will,
even if he cheats on his taxes, put $100,000 into the public coffers. That's $100,000
worth of education, charity, or U. S. Marines. And the Marine Corps does more to
promote world peace than all of the Ben and Jerry's ice cream ever made.
In the very beginning of these reflections, I want to admit that I have much sympathy for P. J. O'Rourke's rather Augustinian position on the possibilities of world peace and what actually promotes and protects it.
We will never have world peace, I suspect, unless we have both those who know how to produce wealth and those who provide some adequate and responsible defensive and coercive capability, even though these may not be all we need. The fall of Marxism has proved many things, but clearly one of the main things it proved was the validity of fifty patient years of deterrence, of credible and sophisticated means for defending one's civilization. The most successful military defense is one that never had to be used even though it had to exist to be certain it would not be used. The fall of marxism too has also proved that there are other forces at work in the world besides economic, military, and political ones.
To discuss the nature and importance of liberation theology after the changes in the marxist world cannot help but take the form of intellectual "afterthoughts." The importance and public attention given to liberation theology was almost exclusively due to its attempt to relate religion to marxism in some defensible fashion. Though there may be some obscure outposts that have not gotten the message, the underlying attractiveness of liberation theology as a phenomenon in public life, particularly in Latin America or Africa, is no longer of great credibility. If Marxism does not "work," liberation theology will not "work" unless it becomes something quite different from its initial tactics and self-explanation. Thus, at least some liberation theologians today are busy trying to liberate themselves from their origins. Whether this shift of analytic perspective is worth doing remains to be seen.
Liberation theologians thus have not surprisingly shown much more acute awareness of the limitations of this marxist background. "Liberation theologians have also modified their politico-economic views in recent years," Arthur McGovern has written.
... The new political context in many parts of Latin America has led liberation
theologians to talk about building a 'participatory democracy' from within civil
society. Socialism no longer remains an unqualified paradigm for liberation
theologians.
Though the notion of 'participatory democracy' might itself come from some of the same intellectual roots as socialism, the fact remains that liberation theology, without Marxism, is merely a search for a better social order, something that is not unique to it. On the other hand, it is worthwhile trying to understand just how and why liberation theology became fashionable and what it tried to do.
Liberation theology was an effort to explain how religion, particularly Christianity, was to be effective in the public forum, especially among the poor and needy of the world. No one, I think, can fault a good sentiment in itself. It must be clear, however, that the proponents of liberation theology did not have a monopoly on this concern for the poor, as they often seemed to claim. We do not help the poor with mere theories, however they be articulated, even with religious overtones. Nor do certain practices or institutions associated with liberation theology necessarily mean that they are helping the poor or are the best way to do so. But if we are to help the poor, as we should, we need to have the right "theory" or else we will no doubt make things worse,
My general assessment of liberation theology is that it did precisely this; it did make things worse and delayed a more proper understanding and assessment of how to produce wealth in freedom and growth in such a manner that the poor would actually be helped. If you will, liberation theology made the poor poorer both by confusing them about what might help them not to be poor and by confounding them further concerning what religion was about no matter whether one is poor or rich or somewhere inbetween. In its extreme forms, liberation theology took religion away from the poor and substituted a kind of unworkable economics and sociology. Liberation theology did not do well on its "liberation" side either. By allying itself so closely with the Marxist tradition, it seemed to undermine any notion of real political and economic, let alone religious, freedom. Ironically, liberation theology mostly spoke of justice and peace, not liberty.
Liberation theology in general was an attempt to use Marxist categories to explain how Christian ends or goals might be best achieved. Even though Marx was a determinist and an atheist in his theoretic principles, it was held that his "analysis" of capitalism was essentially correct. Capitalism was the explanation of poverty and exploitation (and often of racism, feminism, and everything else bad) in the world, particularly the Third World. In many direct and indirect ways, Lenin's book on Imperialism, which sought to explain why Marxist theory did not work out as Marx planned, has much influence on liberation theology.
Socialism or communism was said to be the proper way to establish justice and abundance among the nations. The great intellectual and mystical task, then, was to join these two apparently contradictory forces -- religion and socialism -- in one coherent whole so that the ends of socialism would be fostered by the means of religion. It was taken for granted without any empirical record that if socialism could be established, the problem of poverty and freedom would automatically disappear.
Consider, for instance, the following passage from José Ramos-Regidor in the Italian Catholic journal IDOC Internazionale in 1976, in which he is discussing the historical significance of Marx:
(This contribution) attempts to erect a new philosophy of "practice" homogenous to
the demands of an emerging construction that surrounds the struggle of the
proletariat against capitalism and for socialism. In this perspective, the new
philosophy of practice offers theoretical instruments and categories for a critical and
scientific analysis of the contradictions of capitalist society. Through the research
for a political practice at the tactical and strategic levels, it is capable of
transforming society and constructing socialism in the perspective of the new vision
of man in his social relations with other men and with nature.
As recently as fifteen years ago, then, in but one example that could be duplicated a thousand times over, it is taken for granted that the establishment of a socialism is vital and that this socialism pits the proletariat against capitalism in forming a new vision of man. The technical notion of "practice" means that the movement is ordered to action. It is a de-emphasis of thought and theory in favor of the urgency of doing something, anything, that would cause this new system to come about, hence its revolutionary overtones. You may recall, perhaps, the ringing lines of Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
To understand the controversy over liberation theology, it is necessary to grasp something of the history of Christianity with regard to the state. Liberation theology is, in one sense, an attempt to save religion from accusations that religion, to use Marx's words, was an "opium of the people." Could it be argued that Marx was wrong about religion? Could religion really be rather a means to establish a better, classless society instead of something that prevented it from coming about because of religion's pernicious alliance, it is said, with the bourgeois state? Instead of thinking of things of God and things of Caesar, as the Gospel of Matthew had indicated (22:22), we should use the things of God to achieve the ends of Caesar, now elaborated by Marx, and thereby we would be in a better position to achieve the things of God.
The modern socialist accusation against religion was that it distracted men from the service to the state and society by its teachings about everlasting life, morality, and the worship of God. If someone spent his time with religion and worship, it was implied, he could not work with his full energy in society. Religion was a kind of drug that introduced lethargy into any society. Therefore, the primary need to establish a prosperous society was to eliminate religion.
Liberation theology was an attempt to respond to this accusation not by rejecting all marxist theoretic premises and methods but by accepting from them certain notions of dependency, exploitation, class warfare, state power, and violence, not to be Christian names and purposes. Thereafter, liberation theology could argue that religion could in fact hasten the advent of the socialist society in which all of the contradictions would be eliminated and a government in favor of the poor would be established. The religious mission came more and more to look like an inner-worldly, political mission that spoke in marxist-religious terms and explained Christianity within this framework.
Liberation theology, I might add, was initially a product of certain European theologians who had much sympathy with this leftist analysis of modernity in the Hegelian and marxist traditions. Through a number of students of Latin American or African origins, the methodology and analysis of European socialist theology was transported to the Third World. There it was transformed into a movement to identify the poverty problem and address its causes. How was it possible for this transformation to take place? However indigenous marxism might appear in Russia, China, Cuba, Africa, or Latin America, it always bears these roots in European intellectual history. And this background is not all bad since it is no doubt true that if something is ever to be done about poverty, certain ideas of economics, state, freedom, and justice need to be taken from a more universal culture.
Both Judaism and Christianity within their own traditions have devoted considerable attention to the poor. The poor are indeed blessed in many ways. They are "always with us." We are all familiar with the obligation to help the least of our brethren who need a cup of water or clothing or shelter. Much of the moral code and attitude of democratic societies in this tradition has embraced and fostered this concern from the very beginning of modern culture. Many of the policies of governments and private organizations stem from this religious background. One of liberation theology's most famous slogans, that of an "option for the poor," stems from this religious origin, an origin that Marx himself could have found in his own Jewish and Christian background.
Moreover, there is in liberation theology the notion that we should not merely recognize the poor but positively "prefer" them, as the least of our brethren, in our social and political efforts. Such a preferment, of course, involves a discussion of justice. And justice is primarily a political issue. It is assumed in any Marxist-tinged analysis that the poor are poor because they are somehow "exploited" by the rich. The word "exploitation" in this analysis has come to take the place of justice. The implication is that the poor are "victims" of some sort of injustice. This sense of injustice gives a moral passion to these charges against capitalism which is said to be the cause of poverty. Consequently, if we can locate the causes of this injustice, we can redress the inequities. Not to participate in this effort is seen to be a kind of callous indifference or willingness to profit by other's sufferings.
Moreover, it seems clear that the massive injustices that apparently have caused such widespread poverty are not brought about by single individuals but they are rather the results of political or structural disorders. Religion has been too much concerned with individual salvation not with society's liberation. The problem of individual and social disorder thus is not located in the wills or hearts of individuals, as traditional Greek and Christian philosophy has maintained, but in the "system" in which they live, in this case, in the capitalist system.
Even Marx himself, of course, thought that the world had to pass through a capitalist stage to reach a classless society. But he also thought that the contradictions within this system would bring down its power by the revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat, the workers and peasants who were exploited, thus became in liberation theology to be identified with the poor. Issues of personal virtue or vice did not retain their central location but were made subservient to an analysis of social structures.
Marxism, it is well known, did not eschew violence, but indeed advocated it. In its pure form, it postulated a need to overthrow the capitalist society. Some later versions of socialism did advocate that this revolution could be accomplished by using the instruments of the liberal state. This aspect of violence created a particular difficulty for liberation theology, of course, because of the well-known Christian notion that we should turn the other cheek and that in general we should only resort to force as a last means. Indeed, Christianity itself suggested that the marxist notions of struggle and violence were not at the heart of reality. Men could often resolve their conflicts peacefully if they would.
If we look at books about and by liberation theologians up until 1989, when the Polish revolt against Marxism began the radical change within the Marxist world, they are all still writing as if Marxism would be a permanent and even winning movement in the modern world. Though few liberation theologians approved of the violence associated with various forms of communism, their attention was not particularly focused on them. Marxism itself, after all, was a product of efforts to help the poor worker. Many saw the continued existence of capitalism to be the main reason for Marxist failures and the true explanation for its violence and aberrations. Once the last capitalist system is removed, marxism would be free to achieve its ends. Peace and abundance, presumably, would result.
What happened in fact was so strikingly contrary to the tendencies of liberation theology that it seems worthwhile to note them. Many elements in the mainline churches, as is well-known, have shown a remarkable sympathy for Marxist movements and causes. That this sympathy is now of particular embarrassment goes without saying. Professor Allan Hertzke of the University of Oklahoma records the following incident that gives some sense of the problem:
This is how one writer recounted his experiences on a recent trip to Czechoslovakia:
"Almost every Protestant leader that I met in Prague was bitter about the 'naive' and
'dangerous' role that liberal American Protestant leaders, especially the National
Council of Churches (NCC), played during the Communist regime." One Czech
bible scholar, who had been imprisoned, told the writer that "NCC people
consistently refused to face the inconvenient fact that Christians were being
persecuted in this country.... My colleagues and I will never forget the "NCC's
failure to recognize the anti-religious actions of the communists."
This paradoxical situation of actual Christians under actual Marxist regimes looking with dismay at the efforts to produce a Marxist version of Christianity in the name of the poor remains one of the great perplexities of this whole movement.
If we look at liberation theology in retrospect, we can remark that Marxism itself is rejected by those who have been forced to live under it. In this sense, it is a failed system. Many of the Marxist systems and movements in the free world were in fact promoted and protected by the power of the Soviet State. Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, and a thousand other places had some considerable force and influence because of the Soviet power. The notion that somehow Marxism would be the wave of the future, that it would present a way to solve inner-worldly problems, that it could produce abundance, can no longer be sustained in the light of the rejection of its very premises by people who lived under it. It turns out that in almost every case, the people in marxist regimes who were forced to live in such a system choose to reject it as quickly as they were free to do so. The widely-held notion that marxism necessarily involved widespread coercion seemed literally to be a fact.
There is a further side to which we can address ourselves in this consideration. What is the practical alternative for aiding the poor? After all, during the seventy years in which socialist societies were in power, many states did in fact learn how to be rich by using other methods and principles. Why cannot we assume that had the Third World in particular, following World War II, chosen this other method, it would not now be in the trouble it is?
What, moreover, is the religious response to the liberation theology experience? There is a spiritual and a material failure of Marxism. The material failure is, at first sight, the most obvious one. In the end, it produced a system that did now work, did not produce, did not satisfy even the basic material needs of its people let alone their spiritual ones. Marxist states, to be sure, could organize an army, with relatively sophisticated weapons, could keep internal peace with secret police and all-embracing bureaucratic apparatus.
But it was an essentially closed society and had to remain so. In one sense, technical things like the personal computer and video cameras spelled the end of any effort to enforce such a closed system, though the sobering example of China remains. But Marxism was not merely a material failure. It was a spiritual failure as well. Questions about man's relation to God, freedom, truth, and independence remained unanswered. No answers but the Marxist ones were taught, and these did not correspond to human experience. The party and the state did not understand all that man was about. Rumors of what was going on in the free world kept coming in by one way or another, by travels of scientists and diplomats, by Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, by visitors from the West and East.
Many men and women suffered and died under this system that could not explain or justify its own massively destructive deeds. Figures like Solzhenitsyn came along to recount in great and shocking detail the suffering it caused. Such dire records could no longer be explained as a necessary step to produce down the ages some more perfect society.
This spiritual and material failure of Marxism, as I have suggested, has taken the heart and enthusiasm out of liberation theology. On the Catholic side, John Paul II has specifically commented on the fact that the free market alternative to Marxism was the correct one. Even though there are things that are still wrong in capitalism, still in general it is the model to be followed when it includes a right understanding of profit, property, the limits of the state, the meaning of initiative, voluntary organizations, and juridical respect for basic human dignity and the things of importance beyond politics.
"In the recent past, the sincere desire to be on the side of the oppressed and not to be cut off from the course of history," the Holy Father has written, "has led many believers to seek in various ways an impossible compromise between Marxism and Christianity" (Centesimus Annus, #26). It is not wrong to be concerned about human liberation, a notion that initially means to be free of sin, from moral and intellectual disorder, to be free to exercise one's faculties in a proper familial, economic, and political order. Nor is it wrong to look on religion as a source of motivation and principle for a proper understanding of human life and of the motives of love and justice that would contribute to the well-being of others, not least the poor.
Josef Ratzinger has pointed out the major aspects of Christian faith that liberation theology seems most to misunderstand, These are
the transcendence and gratuity of liberation in Jesus Christ, true God and true man; the sovereignty of grace; and the true nature of the means of salvation, especially of the Church and the sacraments. One could also keep in mind the true meaning of ethics in which the distinction between good and evil is not relativized, the real meaning of sin, the necessity for conversion, and the universality of the law of fraternal love. One needs to be on guard against the politicization of existence which,
misunderstanding the entire meaning of the kingdom of God and the transcendence
of the person, begins to sacralize politics and betray the religion of the people in
favor of the projects of revolution.
By its use of Marxist categories, each of these essential points of Christianity are changed or distorted in liberation theology.
Let us take a brief look at some of these points if only to understand better the concerns that a liberation theology based on Marxist premises might entail in the Christianity it claims to interpret. Marxism was based on a view of history that conceived it as deterministic, inevitable. This meant that the things it described were necessarily to happen and were to happen with the aid of human revolutionary intervention. The kind of liberation that is fundamental to Christianity does not arise within history nor is it dependent on some human force.
The transformation of man initially depends not on man's political or economic processes but on grace and on sacraments, not on anything that man might to by himself. Good and evil are not dependent on the analysis of capitalism nor is the overcoming of evil due to some kind of analysis of economics. Politics has its place, but it is not the kingdom of God that comes about by God's purposes. The Kingdom of God is not conceived as the product of some political movement. Marxism is in this sense a secular religion that attempted to achieve the ends of God within history and to substitute for His action.
What positive thing can be said about liberation theology? What is the alternative to it? We have many voices that attempt to call our attention to something wrong in the world. We do not live in a world in which what is right always wins. Indeed, we live in a world in which, as it seems, it mostly does not. The law of history seems to testify that we often do not pay attention to something disordered in our souls or societies until some extreme crisis or aberration appears. The modern era sought to establish a productive economy and a political state based on human dignity and freedom. These objectives we associate with the industrial revolution on the economic side and French and especially American Revolutions on the political side. But no one denies that in these centuries, many violations of human dignity occurred.
During this era, mankind learned to produce new forms of wealth and distribution but it was only gradually that these forms were fully understood and applied in an increasingly just fashion. Socialism in its various forms was essentially a moral protest to the failures of this evolution. That it was not the only form of protest, it goes without saying. However, it was one that was pursued with a kind of religious and ideological zeal that gradually captured the governments and minds of a good part of the human race in this century.
Socialism somehow appealed to those who wanted a pure form of justice and a powerful state that is an instrument in producing and granting to all the products of mankind's genius. However, it did not understand many basic elements of human motivation and dignity. It overestimated the state's effectiveness and underestimated the notions of interest and religious motivations as well as of voluntary organizations and independence.
The alternative to liberation theology is a kind of market capitalism that has largely learned the essentials of productivity and of the needs of human freedom within this effort. A market system based on property, profit, innovation, a fair legal system, and a recognition of the limits yet legitimacy of the state is the alternative that most conforms to human dignity. One might argue that the main cause for the downfall of Marxism and the main failure of liberation theology was their failure to notice properly what was going on in the post-World War II era particularly in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Germany, and a number of other states that rejected the socialists model. Much of the Third World, unfortunately did not reject this model and condemned themselves to a kind of stagnation and state absolutism that has kept their people in poverty and tyranny.
These "afterthoughts" on liberation theology, as I call them, are intended to serve a twofold purpose. On the one hand, they remind us that massive human problems do have to be addressed and confronted. Often, there is a failure on the part of many people, sometimes for reasons of indifference, laziness, or hatred, to assist others when it is possible to do so. On the other hand, assistance requires both a willingness on the part of the people in need to recognize that help is available and that not just any sort of help will solve the problem at hand. A deep humility and sense of truth is needed to acknowledge both of these aspects.
Liberation theology is a lesson both to the churches and to the civil societies that are engaged in problems to which liberation theology purports to address itself. The lesson to the churches is that they can be used for ideological purposes that both undermine their nature and cause them to relate to the political order in a manner very differently from the ways religion ought to conceive itself. The churches are not free to neglect the studies and understanding of the nature of wealth and its production and distribution. Essentially, we know how this is done. It is not done by any socialist position, particularly by a communist-marxist position. The effort to use this system to explain, promote, or transform Christianity has been disastrous to all concerned.
On the other hand, even the most generous and benign capitalism does not solve all the human questions and does not replace or substitute for religion. There are certain notions of work, justice, duty, loyalty, honesty that underlay the possibility of any fair society. These attitudes arise from sources other than the economy itself. A society that neglects these religious and moral purposes will not make even a market system work properly. Men and women need to know what they are and what their civil society is about before they can properly address themselves to what needs to be done. This being admitted and understood, it is possible in a way never before so advantageous in modern times to address those problems of state, market, wealth production, and respect for each differing society than ever before in t he modern era.
In conclusion, let me cite from a recent book by Professor Robert McAfee Brown entitled
An Introduction to Liberation Theology. This book is about the Peruvian liberation theologian,
Father Gustavo Gutiérrez. It shows deep interest in and concern both for religion and for the poor.
It seeks to disassociate liberation theology as much as possible from marxism without totally
rejecting it. "Liberation theology, then, stands with the losers and insists that they need not remain
losers."
"All this means," Brown analyzes this position's suggestion about how to meet the problem,
that 'a poor church must denounce the injustice manifest in the inequities between
rich and poor, and bind itself to a life of poverty among the poor....' The church
must also employ its resources and personnel to 'give preference to the poorest and
most needy sectors.' This new solidarity 'has to be concretized in criticism of
injustice and oppression'."
What would a poor man who was aware of what caused wealth make of this advice? I suspect he would, in the end, realize that here we have many kind and good hearted men and women who are sincerely trying to resolve their religious mission with regard to the poor. But they would also quickly realize that there is nothing in this whole approach from beginning to end that has anything to do with wealth production, with the production and distribution of goods and services that would eventually reach the goal that everyone seems to want. At times it almost seems that the solution of the world problem of poverty is for everyone to become equally poor and then no one will, presumably, envy everyone else.
That such a solution is not the best for especially the poor seems to be the major failure of liberation theology. It has sought to help the poor by reinterpreting religion in the light of Marx. What liberation theology needs most is liberation from its own analyses. Only in this way, it seems, can we take a fresh look at how the poor become not poor. In 1977, the English economist E. F. Schumacher wrote:
The generosity of the Earth allows us to feed all mankind; we know enough about
ecology to keep the Earth a healthy place; there is enough room on Earth, and there
are enough materials, so that everybody can have adequate shelter; we are quite
competent enough to produce sufficient supplies of necessities so that no one need
to live in misery.... We know how to provide enough and do not require any
violent, inhuman, aggressive technologies to do so. There is no economic problem,
and, in a sense, there never has been.
We do not hear this sort of thing in liberation theology. We begin to hear it ever more clearly in the papacy and other religious sources. Until we do hear it within liberation theology, I suspect, it will continue to betray its noble name. It will misunderstand God because it misunderstands the poor and how to help them.
13) From New Oxford Review, LXIII (June, 1996), 17-20.
THE FULL CATHOLIC MESSAGE
After breakfast on March 14, I was sitting in our community recreation room reading the morning paper about the NCAA basketball tournament. A friend of mine who was at a table across the room brought over a copy of The Washington Times for that morning. "Take a look at this ad," he told me, showing me a glaring, full page advertisement beginning, in very bold and large print, "Why Are Catholics So Wimpy?" Well, I confess that this question echoes a frequent theme or concern of mine -- my Does Catholicism Still Exist? brings up the point in another way. How can it ever have come about, one wonders, that anyone could ever consider calling Catholics "wimpy"? The fact is that to many wimpy is how we often appear, wimpy and wishi-washy.
Catholics boldly maintain that they stand for something distinctive but those calling themselves Catholics who likewise reject what is its official teaching are seldom challenged. Bishops in their corporate capacities have positions on every imaginable public policy but practically no particular instance of deviation from teaching or moral practice, especially by an academic or public official, is addressed, save for rare cases such as that of the Bishop of Lincoln. Usually the few bishops who try to account for departures of practice or doctrine take such flack that nothing further happens; they give up knowing the other bishops will not back them. Certainly no concerted or cooperative effort of all bishops seems on the horizon. Llewellyn Rockwell said what many think:
Christianity is now thoroughly politicized. The (Catholic) bishops and (Ralph) Reed have no trouble speaking about the importance of pro-family legislation, or the glories of religious pluralism, but they are shy about such basics as the Christian teaching on salvation. The longer the process of politicization continues, the thinner the faith gets. Political ambition causes people to water down their beliefs for the sake of gaining favor. The hazard is especially prevalent in a society with competing religions. The first stage of sell-out comes with the exaltation of political pluralism above doctrinal truth, the second stage with the denial of doctrinal truth altogether for achieving political goals (Chronicles, April, 1996).
One might note, in this context, that John Paul II's encyclical on the diversity of religions, Ut Unum Sint, took particular care to avoid this very real doctrinally minimizing tendency that Rockwell noticed.
The irony of such concerns is, I think, that there has never been a time in which the Church has been intellectually more coherent and forceful. We owe in the area of Christian intelligence an enormous debt to John Paul II. And yet, at the same time, at no time has the Church been culturally weaker. The Pope has not been followed. Nietzsche, to recall, thought Christians to be slaves and weak-souled on principle, but not even he thought that they were simply "wimpy", if there was a corresponding German word. Nietzsche thought that Christian doctrine itself, by comparison to his strong-willed, "beyond good and evil" scholar or leader, led to weakness, the turning the other cheek and all that. But wimpiness means a sort of embarrassment about what one holds. It is not just a lack of courage or knowledge, but a lack of gumption, a lack of any will to take seriously in public what one apparently stands for or, even less, to do anything about it.
The NOR advertisement was right. We do have to walk a long way to find a vibrant, forceful Catholicism presented among us in our sermons, in our media, in the way we live. The reason Mother Teresa is so effective and so much a target of the relativizers is because she is not wimpy. Except in rare cases, such non-wimpy Catholicism is not in the universities; it is not in the high schools, not in the seminaries or convents, not in many parishes, does not come out of diocesan chancery offices which are usually full of the utmost caution in things orthodox and, simultaneously, the utmost experimentalism in the things liberal or secular. Almost the only way a cleric or layman can get in ecclesial trouble today is to plead for more orthodoxy, more reverence in the Mass, even calling it a "Mass".
A vibrant Catholicism is, of course, found in the Catechism, in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, and in every parish homily of John Paul II printed in L'Osservatore Romano. Calmly, Cardinal Ratzinger speaks this forceful Catholicism. We indeed found it in Flannery O'Connor or Chesterton or de Lubac. It's in Peter Kreeft, Walker Percy, Richard John Neuhaus, Ralph McInerny, Russell Hittinger, and a surprising number of scattered young intellectuals. I think of Susan Orr, Kenneth Grasso, Scott Walter. It is in Robert Sokolowski, Robert Sirico, and Joseph Fessio.
My friend, who was sympathetic to the thesis of the NOR ad, wanted to know if I had ever heard of The New Oxford Review, as evidently he never had? I explained to him its origins, that years ago I had even written a couple of essays in it. (The essay that eventually grew into my The Distinctiveness of Christianity originally appeared in the NOR [September, 1978]). He said that he had never heard of the authors mentioned except for Avery Dulles. So I said something about the various authors -- Percy, Elshtain, Noonan, Kreeft, Lasch, Lukacs, Vanauken.
Now, I suppose that one should expect an advertisement for a journal to be somewhat "cheeky", as evidently Newsweek once called the NOR. The ad is pretty blunt and to the point about what bothers its editors about the present condition of Catholicism in America; namely, there is little correlation between what one reads coming out of the Vatican and what one hears in the average parish. It is almost as if there is already an American Church independent of Rome in all things but name. The Church's teachings are not systematically, fully, or accurately presented on a regular basis to the faithful. It is not a question of the laity demanding a more liberal teaching against a resistant clergy, but mostly the opposite. The local liturgy is too often a product of free enterprise and acting; the Ordo is there to be "improved" upon. Sin is rarely spoken of, or at least not the sort of sin that Christianity has for two millennia said that our salvation depended on our avoiding.
We have, with much relief to our collective consciences, invented something called social sin that pretty much allows us to go on our own way doing what we want to do provided we support the right causes and vote the right way in elections wherein the big problems are settled by majority or by Court. All moral and political things are questions of proportion and consequences, not principle. No one can have every thing right, so if anyone gets two or three out of ten, he is not doing so bad. As a theoretic not moral position, compassion for everything reigns. Someone can still run for office as a Catholic and have a clear pro-choice voting record with no fear of ecclesial reprimand. What we hear too often in our churches in fact is warmed-over liberal culture dressed up in sort of pious language, a kind of "ethical humanism" with little grounding in any absolute principles.
Popular theologians, not the Pope who maintains the opposite, tell us that we can have no unconditional moral principles. The same Pope also inconveniently tells us that all so-called social sin is rooted in personal sin. Evidently, it is not very "pastoral" to talk of personal sin. No real examination of conscience seems evident; everyone goes to communion, even those of other communions. The correlation between doctrine and sacrament or doctrine and practice is, in effect, tenuous, if not non-existent.
By chance, the week before I had read this advertisement, I had been at a Protestant-Catholic Conference here in Washington. There I met a lawyer who has been active in many pro-life issues over the years, a very articulate and effective man. I had mentioned to him that I had seen in the Milwaukee Journal an article about the new Jesuit President of Marquette. The gist of the article was, citing several well-known Jesuit respondents, that this president-elect would probably be the last of the Jesuit presidents of Marquette, and by implication, I suppose, of most Jesuit universities. The "pool" of possible candidates is said to be quite low, so Jesuits should be prepared graciously to relinquish these traditional, but highly visible, posts. About the same time I received a letter from my own province stating in essence the same thing about principals of high schools.
The issue of declining pools and lack of vocation is almost always put in fatalistic, statistical or actuarial terms, about the inevitable decline in vocations, as if some sort of fate were ruling this diminishment of numbers. I have never heard a frank discussion of why the vocations are not there. The Archbishop of Omaha's quite sensible remarks on vocations are worth citing here:
The vocation "crisis" is precipitated and continued by people who want to change the Church's agenda, by people who do not support orthodox candidates loyal to the magisterial teaching of the Pope and bishops, and by people who actually discourage viable candidates from seeking priesthood and vowed religious life as the Church defines these ministries. I am personally aware of certain vocation directors, vocation teams and evaluation boards who turn away candidates who do not support the possibility of ordination of women or who defend the Church's teachings about artificial birth control, or who exhibit a strong piety toward certain devotions, such as the rosary. When there is a determined effort to discourage orthodox candidates from priesthood and religious life, then the vocation shortage which results is caused not by a lack of vocations but by deliberate attitudes and policies which deter certain viable candidates. And the same people who precipitate a decline in vocations by their negative actions call for the ordination of married men and women to replace the vocations they have discouraged (Social Justice Review, November/December, 1995, 164).
The list of young men who are turned away from entering declining orders because they, the young men, are too conservative and too prone to Rome, is, in my experience, quite long. The Archbishop of Omaha is right; there is no shortage of vocations as such.
The gentleman, to return to my earlier conversation, replied that the clerical administration of this Church patrimony that is the university system -- it is really owned by the Catholics who faithfully built these schools -- has let the whole matter get out of hand. What is taught in these universities has little relation to what Catholicism is about. It is time, he thought, for lay administration to take over precisely to return to a Catholic university philosophy that has generally been abandoned. I suppose this view somewhat reflects the NOR advertisement's remark that "cowardly clerics, fearful of being politically incorrect or challenging the flock or offending some stray soul, keep the full Catholic message from us. In effect we're blindfolded." I am not quite so confident myself that such lay take-over would do anything more than continue the secularization of the universities, though I am willing to be proved wrong.
Practically all universities using the name Catholic today take as their practical model what goes on in other state and secular universities for all purposes of curriculum, hiring, firing, and promotion. And in those places wherein there is some effort to emphasize the "Catholic" side of education, this emphasis generally, again with exceptions, turns out to be a Catholicism that already imitates the secular standards and not that reflected in the intelligence of the Holy Father or the central Catholic tradition. What is ironic here is that one notices of late within the Jesuits at least a distinct attitude that would want this "laicization" of the universities and schools to happen. We hear talk of a broader Jesuit vocation that would include laymen and women, families even. A cynic might see here a belated Jesuit effort to imitate the successes of Opus Dei, but in another ecclesial direction! I have had at least one superior tell me that he thought Jesuits would be mostly out of higher education fairly soon except for an odd faculty member here and there.
This lack of what I call institutional "courage" to present the full teachings and practices of the faith within its own realm has long puzzled me. Why does the most brilliant and effective Pope of our time find so few imitators on the levels of episcopal or priestly leadership? I often recall Belloc's remark that as one gets older that he increasingly worries about the human side of the supernatural Church. Things are in the hand of God. And yet, one of Christianity's most recent claims is that it should be existentially, locally effective. We have seen in the past quarter century an enormous emphasis placed on "social action" by the various bureaucracies of the Church. On content examination, this social action, however, is too often less than distinctly Christian but a very close imitation of secular liberal ideas on poverty, wealth, family, population, and the extended use of government to solve human problems.
Eric Voegelin has argued that, in the last half century, the reason we see Christians so suddenly plunging into such social action and taking their criterion from the secular world is because of a loss of faith in the transcendent. The energy that should go into a Christian life aware of the transcendent is now redirected to this-worldly enterprises as if the two things were exactly the same and never conflicted with each other. Nietzsche implied somewhat the same thing. The "death of God" was not a theory but his practical conclusion based on the way Christians acted. At first, this reasoning that there is in fact a subtle crisis of faith among believing Christians might surprise us. After all, it is not a modern idea that Christianity should affect our lives and aid others. This is already in Scripture, in Augustine. What is new is the reliance on the world not reason or revelation for a criterion of what Christianity is.
But what I think we forget, in considering the wimpiness or worrisome loss of faith of Catholics, is the enormous fear of, or perhaps, prejudice against a coherent, persuasive Catholicism in our culture, one that is pervasive and mostly unacknowledged. It cannot be called simply innocent or ignorant. One might, in fact, argue that accommodation of so many Christians to essentially secular values has partially lulled the enemies of Catholicism in particular. If we had a Church in this country that obviously believed in its transcendent purpose and its coherence, we would be in serious public difficulties. Chesterton's famous remark that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, but tried and found difficult can be improved on. The Christianity that is not found wanting is not found easily.
The primary worry about Catholicism today is precisely its increasing intellectual coherence and plausibility. Great efforts are taken, even by Catholics, to prevent this unified and well-grounded position to be presented in any but the narrowest fora. No graduate of a Catholic or secular university today, even those of the best of wills, could pass the most minimal test about what Catholicism holds about itself, this in spite of the Catechism which has been studiously avoided in the universities and too often in the high schools, seminaries, and parishes, too little encouraged by the bishops.
There is some talk of persecution for those few who retain clear orthodoxy. I often reflect on Augustine's words: "As the end of the world approaches, errors increase, terrors multiply, iniquity increases; the light, in short ... is very often extinguished; this darkness of enmity between brethren increases...." We sometimes wonder why the Holy Father speaks so much about martyrdom, as he did in Veritatis Splendor, a document devoted precisely to the widespread deviation from the truth within the Church. And it is a Christian paradox that it is the good and the innocent who suffer most from iniquity's growth. Earlier generations of Catholics asked nothing more than to be left in peace by the state, to live their lives in this world in quiet and virtue. But it seems to be true that Catholics will be required to accept more and more of the principles of modern life at variance with that is handed down in tradition. They will not be left alone to live in peace. Neither Socrates nor Christ, to recall, were left alone, nor can their disciples expect it for long.
Josef Pieper wrote, in words that seem quite contemporary, that "it is a liberal illusion to assume that you can consistently act justly without ever incurring risks: risks for your immediate well-being, the tranquillity of your daily routine, your possessions, your good name, your honor -- in extreme instances possibly even more: liberty, health, and life itself" (Josef Pieper -- An Anthology, 1989, p. 67). Have we been living in this "liberal illusion" for so long, I wonder, that we no longer notice that we are not acting justly? that we are not taking risks because we do not in practice believe, as Nietzsche suspected?
Let me go back to the NOR advertisement, in conclusion. For all its brashness, I think that it put its finger on a widespread opinion about Catholicism today. No one can tell much difference between them and anyone else. This accommodation would be a good thing were it not for the haunting suspicion that the vibrant Catholicism that the ad intimated ought to be among us would not be at all welcomed. Ironically, our mediocrity has protected us. A Catholicism that claims to be true, that claims even that there is such a thing as good and as true, that spells it out as the Holy Father does, in clear, philosophical and human terms, will be bitterly combated. The other side of this equation, if that is what it is, is also true. An honestly, accurately presented Catholicism, one that knows about science and politics, about economics and psychology, about what is beautiful and what is true, is most appealing and attractive. It is this Catholicism that is not allowed to be offered and presented in any wide-ranging fashion. If there were any sort of real indication of that vitality leading to conversion and a more honorable way of life on a wide scale, all the forces of the culture and the state would eventually be arrayed against it.
If we read attentively Veritatis Splendor, Ut Unum Sint, Evangelium Vitae, or Crossing the Threshold of Hope, it becomes clear that Catholicism is making every effort to carry out honest and thorough considerations of what is right and true in other religions, with philosophy, science, with any source of or claim to knowledge of right living. The lesson of Marxism should always be kept in mind that however powerful the forces of evil and disorder are, ultimately they do not conform to the human condition and are in themselves weak, though they can do much damage when allied to deviant human will.
To the question, "Why Are Catholics So Wimpy?", I think it proper to remember that the real question today is not so much about the Catholics, especially clerical and intellectual Catholics, who do not believe or whose faith is weak. Rather, the question is why are the forces arrayed against Catholicism, and more broadly, truth and good itself, so weak and incoherent, and yet so culturally strong? Why is it that Catholicism is quite willing to talk with all systems on their own terms in any responsible forum, whereas every effort is made, especially academically and in the public forum, to prevent a clear and adequate statement of Catholicism? The unexpected advertisement of the NOR, for all its brashness, does alert us to the right questions and issues about the status of Catholicism in our society.
14) From Social Survey, (Melbourne), 41 (February, 1992), 15-21. ON THE PLEASURE OF WALKING ABOUT DERBY
No one will ever know whether there are answers to the highest questions unless he has first accurately formulated the very questions to which such answers might be addressed. Faith does depend on reason in this sense, while reason need not a priori exclude answers of revelation that curiously seem to be aware of the abiding questions, when accurately formulated.
A cartoon in The New Yorker puts us in a wealthy businessman's club on Wall Street.
But is life fair? Is it all right if it isn't? Whose fault is it? Ours? God's? Can we find some scapegoat for our ills -- society, say, or the environment, or the rich, or even philosophical determinism? What can we hope for? Will the world ever become perfect? When? Why not sooner? Where? Would we in our fallibility recognize it if it did become perfect? Is the world related to us? Are we the world "writ" small, as Plato said? Are fairness and unfairness due to our own choices? Are all of us but "reeds shaken in the wind?" -- to recall ironic words used of John the Baptist?
In 1980, Eric Voegelin engaged in a series of conversations with students and faculty at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal in Canada. During the course of these wonderful exchanges, Voegelin was asked the anxious question we all have at one time or another, "But what are we to do about the problems of the world?" Voegelin's response has always seemed to me to indicate a basic insight into the intellectual life. It is not an affirmation of individualism, nor of collectivism, nor is t a sort of skepticism that satisfies itself that in knowing that we know nothing, contrary to Socrates, we in fact can know nothing. Dialectics did teach Socrates something.
Voegelin's advice to potential philosophers was this:
Civilizations as such are never static because every man is a new element of
revolution in the world. Just stop being static and do something.... Nobody is
obliged to participate in the crisis of his time. He can do something else.
The first thing we dan do, paradoxically, is simply not to cooperate with what causes the crisis of the culture in the first place.
Such a response is grounded in several memories given in our tradition. In The Apology of Socrates, we recall the incident of Leon of Salamis. This notorious case was the only time Socrates, the private citizen and philosopher, was asked to act as a public official. Leon, it seems, was one of ten Athenian generals who, in 406 B.C., had failed to gather up the bodies after the Battle of Arginusai. The proud Athenians were angry and wanted in revenge to try these men for treason en masse, contrary to the Athenian law. In order to carry out their designs, they appointed five armed men, including Socrates, to go over to Salamis and pick up Leon. When it came time to depart, four citizens went to fetch Leon, but Socrates, as he tells us, "went home." He did not participate in the crisis of his time.
In Book II of The Republic, we have a not dissimilar scene with Adeimantos and Glaucon, Plato's brothers, who quietly want to hear virtue praised for its own sake. Socrates listens to these two earnest and impressive young men. Whether each will be attracted by the highest things, what each will do with his freedom and life, neither yet knows. Both know, however, that the best can become the worst. Indeed, it seems likely that this dire result will be true in the majority of cases. Socrates is astonished to listen to them vividly expound the case for injustice in such eloquent and philosophical terms. But he is even more startled to learn that they are not persuaded by their own arguments. They are attracted by the good even when they cannot defend or explain it.
Then too, there is the account in the New Testament of the Rich Young Man (Luke, 18:18-27). He is not unlike Adeimantos and Glaucon. He questions the philosopher. He wants to know
about the highest things. He keeps the Commandments from his youth. He asks Christ what he
must do to be perfect. In a response not unrelated to Plato's Fifth Book of The Republic where all
temptations are removed from the Guardians, Christ tells the wealthy young man that he must go,
sell what he has, give it to the poor, and follow the Lord.
Nobody is obliged to participate in the crisis of his time. At Agincourt, Henry offered to pay passage home for those of his soldiers who wished to return to England before the battle. The Rich Young Man went away sad. He could not anticipate what exciting journeys he might have taken had he stayed with the Lord, just as those who returned to England could not in their old age recount what happened on that St. Crispin's Day. But if the crisis is itself rooted in an ignoble cause, we should leave it, we should go home, even from Salamis or Agincourt.
In Nobody's Perfect, Charlie Brown, a book with obviously Platonic overtones, Charlie is reading from a scientific report in the morning newspaper. Lucy is looking away, rather bored. "It says here," Charlie begins, "that the force of gravitation is 13% less today than it was 4 1/2 billion years ago...." Lucy, on hearing this otherwise useless bit of information, suddenly turns on Charlie to snap, "Whose fault is that?" "Whose fault is it?" Charlie somewhat taken aback protests; "it's nobody's fault." His moral placidity before fate sends Lucy into a rage. While Charlie forlornly listens, looking down at the paper,s he yells, "What do you mean nobody's fault! It HAS to be somebody's fault! Somebody's got to take the blame!" Finally, she opens her mouth wide, throws up her arms, and screams at Charlie, turning him upside down, "FIND A SCAPEGOAT!" The world isn't fair; it's ill made. Somebody will pay.
"Civilizations are never static because every man is a new element of revolution in the world." Somebody has to be at fault because of the 13% decrease in gravitation in 4 1/2 billion years. The young potential philosophers want to hear truth and justice praised for their own sakes.
Two of the most significant words in the English language sound almost alike -- to "wonder" and to "wander." The first word, wonder, suggests something about our minds, about the extraordinary fact that we want to know, that we are satisfied when we do know. It is its own sort of pleasure, as Aristotle told us. No where is this fact about ourselves stated more clearly than in the conversation in Book III of The Republic. To the same Glaucon, the young and potential philosopher, who is not sure what good he will choose with his mind, Socrates says, "Isn't being deceived about the truth bad, and to have the truth good? Or isn't it your opinion that to affirm the things that are, is to have the truth?" (413a) To these profound questions, Glaucon admitted, "What you say is correct." We do not wonder simply to wonder, but to know the truth and to affirm it.
"To wander," on the other hand,has spacial overtones. It touches on aim and aimlessness.
Another cartoon in The New Yorker took us to a psychiatrist's office.
Many of the things I will recount here originated from students. Indeed, in the pursuit of knowledge, the chance to teach regularly is a grace. It continues the opportunity to reflect on great ideas, books, and people for a second and third and hundredth time, because someone new is always before us to listen for the first or second tome to realities whose freshness has been dulled only by our own familiarity with them.
For Christmas one year, I received from a student I had several years ago, a copy of the Penguin Classics' translation of Madame de Sévigneé's Selected Letters. As I was preparing these reflections, I recalled that a friend had sent me from England several years ago an earlier French Edition of Madame de Sévigné's letters. I looked through it again. My French edition was published in Paris in 1812, a wonderful well-made book even yet. I read a bit in the French letters. Madame de Sévigné's letter from Bourbilly, Lundi, 16 Octobre 1673, to her daughter reads:
Enfin, ma chère fille, j'arrive présentement dans le vieux château de mes pères. J'ai
trouvé mes belle prairies, ma petite rivière et mon beau moulin, à la même place où
je les avois laissés. Il y a eu ici de plus honnêtes gens que moi; et cependant, au
sortir de Grignan, je m'y meurs de tristesse.
This letter was not included in the English edition, but it serves to remind us not merely of wandering and returning, but of the effect that place, especially a happy place that we have loved, can have on our souls. If we are sad, it is sometimes not because life is not fair but because life is so dear, the lovely fields, the streams, and the beautiful mills of our youth when we realized that often our parents were more honest than we.
The famous Western novelist, Louis L'Amour, wrote a most interesting book entitled, The Education of a Wandering Man. L'Amour seems to have read every book he could get his hands on during every moment he could get free. He made long lists of the books he read beginning in 1930, when the first three books he read were by George Santayana, followed by Josef Conrad's Selected Stories and Friedrich Schleiermacher's Soliloquies.
I have a certain affinity with such an enterprise, I must confess. I think that education in
the highest things, as I tried to show in Another Sort of Learning, is largely a private enterprise.
As a way to truth, I would not exclude prayer, to be sure, nor would I neglect the fact that we might just meet good men and women wherever we are, in any time and place, in our wanderings about this world, people who can tell us more than any mere philosopher or academic. we are called, in fact, by st.Peter in his Epistle "wayfarers and pilgrims"; and at the end of the Synoptic Gospels, we are said to have a mission, to be sent along a way, to all the nations, to the ends of the world. That there is indeed something to be said to all men, in all times, in all cultures, is the ground of the claim of universal civilization itself.
Thus, as Aristotle also hinted, it might just be possible to find the truth through those who
live particular and good lives, like the parents of Madame de Sevigne in Grignan. L"Amour wrote,
to the same point, "I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university
can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and a guidance. the rest one has to do for
oneself."
In Leo Strauss' essay, "What Is Liberal Education?" he noted that the "greatest minds ... are
extremely rare. We are not likely to meet any of them in any classroom. We are not likely to meet
any of them anywhere. It is a piece of good luck if there is a single one alive in one's own time."
But why is this essay about Derby? about the pleasure of walking in Derby, about education in wonder and the learning of a wandering man in a particular place and in a particular time? On Friday, September 19, 1777, Dr. Johnson and James Boswell set out in the Rev. Dr. John Taylor's post-chaise for Derby, North of Birmingham.
On the way, they stopped by Keddlestone, the Seat of Lord Scarsdale. A fine house was found there. "I was struck with the magnificence of the buildings; and the extensive park, with the finest verdure, covered with deer, and cattle, and sheep, delighted me," Boswell wrote. He found there wonderful old oaks and a fine gravel road and ponds and a lovely Gothic church. Thinking of this magnificence, not unmindful of the Rich Young Man, which he himself was, Boswell confesses that this "grand group of objects agitated and distended my mind in a most agreeable manner. 'One should think (said I,) that the proprietor of all this must be happy'."
Samuel Johnson was listening intently to this account. With great profundity, he replied
to Boswell, "Nay, Sir, all this (vast property) excludes but one evil -- poverty."
The party proceeded on towards Derby. The post-chaise seemed to have been a speedy one.
Johnson, not unlike the subsequent drivers of Porsches on the German Autobahns and Corvettes on
the Los Angeles Freeways, liked to drive very fast. Boswell records him as even admitting that "If
I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman; but she should be one who could understand us, and would add
something to the conversation."
When the post-chaise finally arrived in derby, Johnson and Boswell were immediately shown through a "manufactory of china." Boswell thought it pretty, but too expensive. He figured he could get the same services made of silver, so why bother about porcelain? Finally, to continue our theme of wandering, Boswell had a chance to see the local sights. "I felt a pleasure in walking about Derby such as I always have in walking about any town to which I am not accustomed," Boswell reflected.
There is an immediate sensation of novelty; and one speculates on the way in which
life is passed in it, which, although there is a sameness every where upon the whole,
is yet minutely diversified. The minute diversities in every thing are wonderful.
The "minute diversities" and the general constancy of human nature across time and space are both recorded here. The particularities of human existence are, indeed, "wonderful," as Boswell remarked. The same sentiment exists in Dante, in St. Paul, in Aristotle, in Plato, and perhaps originally in Herodotus.
One of the joys of teaching, as I said, of being invited to join Phi Beta Kappa late rather than early in life, is that students, over the years, will have given me books I might not otherwise have seen or read. Students seem to know books or essays their somewhat odd professor will especially like, how I am never quite sure, but they are usually right. Years ago a graduate student saw a copy of Boswell's Life of Johnson in a used book store in Miami. He bought it for me for a couple of dollars because I had read something of Johnson in class. I still read a little of it almost every day. Its charm has not lessened. Life is too short to comprehend it all, I think.
A young lady who is now in the Journalism School at the University of Missouri, after an Interview she later published in a student newspaper, sent me a copy of T. H. White's The Once and Future King. This was a book I did not know. She assured me that I would like it. Early in the book, under the instructions of Merlyn the Magician, Kay, the future King, and the Wart, his young friend, are being taught to hunt. They are hunting rabbits. Each has six arrows. One Thursday afternoon Kay manages to hit a rabbit. They clean it with a hunting knife. As they prepared to go home, the boys had one further exercise.
This is how White describes it:
Every Thursday afternoon, after the last serious arrow had been shot, they
were allowed to fit one more hock into their strings and to shoot the arrow straight
up into the air. It was partly a gesture of farewell, partly of triumph, and it was
beautiful. They did it now to salute their first prey.
The wandering -- that is the sign of the human being, not only that he can shoot the rabbit for training and for food, but that he can shoot an arrow into the air and see that "it was beautiful." The wandering about the fields leads to the wondering about how beautiful things can be. At the end of need and necessity lies freedom and loveliness.
Another student gave me a copy of a book that is not exactly a summary of The Closing of the American Mind, but it does have a certain educational charm. It is Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I am quite sure that this proposition is not true, if only because I never went to kindergarten. Too, many of the best things I know I seem to have learned only lately, things like the presence of oleanders and what lies at the End of Lone Mountain.
Perhaps we should recall Aristotle's wonder here, that the things that are best to know are not necessarily those we "need" to know, but those we find most enchanting because we do not need them, things existing for their own sakes, especially one another. The final question I always ask of myself and of my students is simply, "what do you do when all else is done?" Unless we can broach an answer to such a question, our lives will necessarily be incomplete and not a little sad. The arrow shot into the air, I think, has something to do with the right answer to this question.
Fulghum recounted this story:
There was a famous French criminologist named Emile Locard, and fifty
years ago he came up with something called Locard's Exchange Principle. It says
something to the effect that any person passing through a room will unknowingly
deposit something there and take something away. Modern technology proves it.
Fulghum's Exchange Principle extends it: Every person passing through this life
will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this
"something" cannot be seen or heard or numbered. It does not show up in a census.
But nothing counts without it.
Actually, that reflection reminded me of a passage from E. F. Schumacher's A Guide for the
Perplexed, a book I read frequently with my classes. In it, Schumacher remarks that when we look
at a class or at other human beings, without in the least denying our corporeality, all the really
important things about them are invisible to us. We have to cultivate our inner lives to be able to
understand what is going on within someone else.
One day a couple of years ago, a tall young man came by my office. He word a rather scraggly beard. Somehow I felt I knew him but I could not place him. I do try to remember my students but when they go away and suddenly appear years later at your door, now more grave and mature, you have to search for their names and personalities. I asked him what he had been doing. "Wandering over Europe," he told me. He had been to France and Germany and I do not know where all during the previous year. Finally, he spent about three months on Mt. Athos, that extraordinary complexus of monasteries in the Orthodox tradition on the most famous spiritual heights of Eastern Christianity.
As a result of this visit, later, during an annual retreat I made at Los Gatos, in California, I read the English Cistercian Basil Pennington's book on Mt. Athos, a wonderful book. In any case, I asked this former student why he had wandered so about the world. "It was that book you assigned," he told me. "What book?" I asked. "The Schumacher book -- you see, I am Greek. It was the first time I ever read anything that made me wonder what this greek tradition meant and how it was deeply meaningful and valid." Schumacher's profound unease with his own education at Oxford, its failure to address the things that were really important, still had its effect.
The final book I was given about which I wish to comment was given to me by a perceptive
young graduate student from Mexico City. It is a book I had often meant to read but never did.
The book was Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World.
No doubt, de Rougemont's thesis is, to conclude, that it is the Incarnation that saves the world, marriage, and passion. Gnosticism has pervaded much modern thought and literature. The primacy of death over life that de Rougemont studied does conform a suspicion that I have long had that the purpose of philosophy and the university in general is to prepare us to ask the right questions. We are question-making beings, and this is as it should be. Yet, as I said in the beginning, we must prepare our souls. If we are question-making beings, we are even more answer-receiving beings. We cannot have one without the other without, ultimately, contradicting ourselves.
We live in an ideological time that has proudly assured itself that no answers can be given, that there is only power and exploitation and contingency. No proposition is more questionable or less questioned than this. It is not true that there are no answers. What is true is that there are many answers we are not prepared to recognize because we have not formulated the proper question to which they are answers. What is true and likewise ominous is that we can choose not to question because we do not want to hear certain answers since they would require us to change our lives. Plato said that a lie in the soul is the worst of evils.
"Or, isn't it your opinion that to affirm the things that are, is to have the truth?"
"Sure, life isn't fair, but that's all right."
"Nobody is obliged to participate in the crisis of his time."
When commissioned to participate in an illegal act, Socrates "went home"; when invited to be perfect, the Rich Young Man went away sad.
"What do you mean it's nobody's fault?" Who is responsible for the 13% decrease in gravity in 4 1/2 billion years? What if the answer is nobody?
Why do chickens cross the road?
"The greatest minds are extremely rare. We are not likely to meet any of them in any classroom."
"Every Thursday afternoon, after the last serious arrow had been shot, they were allowed to fit one more nock into their strings and to shoot the arrow straight up into the air. It was partly a gesture of farewell, partly of triumph, and it was beautiful." The highest things in their beauty are done for their own sakes after we have done the things we need to do. When all else is done, and we are responsible to know "what is to be done," to use Lenin's phrase, we begin to see that everything ends in beauty and glory.
"I felt a pleasure in walking about Derby such as I always have in walking about any town to which I am not accustomed...."
To these recollections I can only add that we should not fail also to be surprised, such is the purpose of our intelligence, by those faces and localities that we have come to know. The loss of these very things, when they are no longer incarnate among us, will cause that sadness of heart that Madame de Sévigné recalled. And finally, the faces we know and the old streets new to us, along with the beauty of the un-serious arrow shot straight up into the air on a Thursday afternoon, the answers to the deepest questions properly addressed to the love of what is in the Western world, in any world that is.
Endnotes:
|
