Some obvious things

I hoped to find some further lines of meditation tying my staying on the beach with the bible studies I am doing at the moment. That's why I ended a previous post with a "possibly to be continued". But strength failed me. UPDATE: I FIXED THE LINK - LD

I wanted to tell you about the beach, the strange effect the resort where I go has on me, of a kind of gynaeceum, peopled mainly by half naked women with their children, where men were just admitted but didn't quite belong. Whether this has some larger meaning for the understanding of our society, I am not quite sure. For me, it was a reminder that, however we might mingle in all public places, so that women are now present in all the activities previously reserved to men, privately they are different from us.

Should I give you a biblical quote for this remainder, i.e. that when "God created man in his image", "male and female he created him"?

Why to inconvenience in this way the Bible for something so obvious? If not because we need to be reminded of the obvious, of what is so obvious that we don't even see it anymore?

In the meantime the LD overcame me with the burning issue of the mosque at Ground Zero, so drawing me back to the facts of the day. Away from the beach, but not from the Bible.

Are there other obvious things of which we should be reminded by reading the Bible? Plenty, but one in particular: that the Bible is not a "religious" book – at least not in the sense in which we have become accustomed to use the word religion: meaning that everybody has his own theological world view, and that doesn't impinge in the way we live in society as good citizens.

Actually the Bible deals precisely with this question: how to be "good citizens", i.e. a people capable of living in peace and justice under a Good Sovereign.

It speaks, in its own terms, of the kingdom of God, in which everybody finds in the end his own immortal life.

It's here that problems with Muslims arise: also the Quran speaks of the same thing. But it gives a very different image of what this requires. Different, and in many ways incompatible with the one indicated by the Bible.

An example: the Bible says "you shall not kill", without qualifications. The Quran apparently says the same thing. Only apparently though, because the interdiction of murder ends by being qualified and restricted just to the people who recognize the truth of the Quran itself, i.e. to other Muslims. All other people, in fact, being equally called to do it, are turned by their failure to recognize it into renegades, whose life is not worthy a dime, therefore to be killed or subjugated.

The LD asked whether Muslims can be good Americans. Well, I say yes, if they turn Christians. I don't mean with this that they should all convert, but that they should recognize the universal dignity of all men, therefore all equally to be respected in their life. Which, being contrary to the teaching of the Quran, would be already a kind of conversion.

HP

Of Mosques and Men IV: what's in a name?

The following remarks are a revised and expanded version of ealier ones written in reply to a combox query.

As revised and expanded, they stand alone as a post, and are offered in the spirit of further clarification.

The first thing that makes me suspicious in this whole affair is the proponents' apparent insensitivity.

Suppose proponents are sincere in their expressions of desire to aid in healing, reconciliation, dialogue promotion, etc., and that their choice of "Cordoba House" as a name for their project is a simple case of innocent cultural tone-deafness (I am thinking of some of those great HSBC ads): why not agree then to move a few blocks further away, as soon as the concern has been voiced?

Quite apart from the proponents' intentions, the building of an Islamic "cultural center" (by the way, the distinction between a "mosque" and a "cultural center" is silly on its face: mosques are cultural centers - akin to the ancient Greek agora or the Medieval cathedral and quite different from the 20th century Christian worship house) on such a scale, so close to the site of the 9/11 attacks, is an affront (to the victims, and to everyone who was touched by the atrocity).

In any case, the name of the proposed cultural center is Cordoba House (or Park51, a project of the Cordoba Initiative). The FAQ Page of the Cordoba Initiative offers the following explanation:

The name Cordoba was chosen carefully to reflect a period of time during which Islam played a monumental role in the enrichment of human civilization and knowledge. A thousand years ago Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisted and created a prosperous center of intellectual, spiritual, cultural and commercial life in Cordoba, Spain.

This gloss of the historical record strikes me as particularly unfortunate.

Cordoba was a city in which Christians and Jews lived in dhimmitude, i.e., as "protected" groups segregated from what we might call or recognize as political life, the life of the larger community. To invoke Cordoba is to invoke Muslim rule.

Muslim rule means something very specific: it is essentially theocratic and exclusivist.

There is, in other words, no distinction between the temporal and the spiritual - no 'separation of Church and state', as it were - by which I mean to say not that there are no separate institutions in Muslim majority nations, but that the distinction is lacking in theory or in principle.

God's revelation through Mohammad, "The Seal of the Prophets" has been given to the whole world: Islam has been proclaimed and exists de iure over the whole planet; the task of Muslims is to bring every living person into the ummah, the "community of believers" in which the rule of Islam is realized in fact.

We are used in the West to talk unproblematically about "moderate" Muslims and "moderate" Islam. Commentators like Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Friedman have both written to the effect that the Islamic world needs its own "Enlightenment" - as though it were a simple matter of fathoming notions of equality, democracy and free inquiry (without realizing that the Enlightenment forms of these were really perversions of the classical notions, and directly tending toward the present Western ills of radical secularism, legal positivism, technocracy, but let us grant for the sake of argument that an Islamic "Enlightenment" would be a good thing) - and unthinkable that the intellectual and spiritual elements of such a cultural revolution might be lacking.

Still, any individual might, in the words of an American Farmer (roughly), leave behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, and receive new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He might, in a word, become an American, by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater.

Then, he would count himself among such as Lincoln described:

We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, (loud and long continued applause) and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

Any Muslim immigrant might see himself in the place of Lincoln's Europeans, and feel the electric cord in him, and be an American.

Whether Islam can find the intellectual and spiritual wherewithal to embrace the theoretical distinction of spiritual and temporal spheres, and so find a way to conceive itself otherwise than in irreducible opposition to Western civilization, is another matter entirely.

Of Mosques and Men III - some clarifications

More than a few correspondents have asked me to answer, point-blank, whether I support the proposed mosque construction near ground zero in New York.

Here is my reply: no, I do not support the mosque proposal.

I actually think it is ill-conceived and in poor taste, at best.

Frankly, I am rather more than a little offended at the idea.

My earlier remarks (which may be found here and here) apparently gave the impression that I am in favor of the construction.

The unfortunate phrase was, "Let [Muslims] come to lower Manhattan and prove [they can be good citizens] (- and yes, this is something all of us have to prove in America, in each generation)."

His scriptis, I do not find Rauf's idea offensive as such - offensive is the idea of executing the project in such proximity to Ground Zero, and on such a scale.

I am at pains to clarify that, despite my doubts about Islam's compatibility with Western civilization, I cannot as a Catholic (whose ancestors faced and overcame similar and comparably virulent public conviction of their religion's basic, irreducible and insuperable incompatibility with the American way of life) begrudge Muslims in America the chance to prove me wrong.

There are also several questions outstanding, such as:

1. Is Rauf, a Sufi, really representative of mainstream Muslim thinking?

2. Is Rauf, a Sufi, an effective dialogoue partner within the Muslim world, itself?

Just a couple.

There are several dozen others where those came from.

LD

Of Mosques and Men, cont'd

The loudest parties in the ongoing national discussion of the proposed mosque at ground zero in New York seem to have gravitated to one of two major positions, which may be summarily stated as follows:

1. Of course they ought to build the mosque (not really a mosque at all, but a "cultural center"): anyone who says different is ignorant, angry, prejudiced, or some combination of these, or something else bad.

2. Of course they ought not build the mosque: it is insensitive to the families of the victims for them even to suggest such a thing, which, incidentally, poses a security risk.

This is a very sad state of affairs, and a sad commentary on the health of our national discourse, for both positions are obviously misguided, irrelevant, and vascillanting between maudlin and silliness.

First of all, it would have been impossible to use government power of any kind at any level in order to stop the construction of the mosque, simply because it would be a mosque: impossible, that is, for a people who - with a straight face - profess commitment to the kind of religious liberty guaranteed in our Constitution.

So, they can build the mosque.

Should they?

Well, I certainly do think the proposal is insensitive - although I do not think it is meant as a deliberate insult to the memory of the fallen, and one of the most frustrating recurrences throughout this whole debate has been the careless use of the accusation of "insensitivity" as though mere insensitivity were the equivalent of deliberate insult.

At this point, the most telling element of the whole discussion comes into view: we used to be of sterner stuff, and the 1st amendment supposes that we are.

That amendment is given (like the rest of our Constitution) for a society of persons who are capable of political freedom because they are capable of self government and rational public deliberation of all matters intersting the common weal, including religion.

The first amendment is not given (pace Jefferson) as a wall of separation between Church and State (nor do I think the Danbury Baptists agreed with him, either); rather, it is given in order to secure the place of religion, including vigorous religious debate, in the public square -and the debate over the placement of the proposed mosque is at once literal and physical proof of this.

Does Islam have a problem with violence?

The answer to that question is in lower Manhattan.

Is Islam compatible with Western civilization?

Frankly, I am doubtful: but America is the place for the question to be raised - and calmly, reasonably, frankly and respectfully debated.

Can Muslims be good Americans?

Let them come to lower Manhattan and prove it: America owes Muslims neither more nor less than it owed Catholics.

LD

Of Mosques and Men

As you know, I have more than a passing interest in religions' PR efforts.

So, let me begin by saying that, if the Imam behind the Ground Zero mosque-building (GZM) proposal really wanted to "improve the image" of his religion (as an old and dear friend recently suggested to me that he might), he might offer some of his $100 million in funding to rebuild St. Nick's at Ground Zero (you know, the Greek Orthodox church that was the only house of worship to be completely destroyed by the collapse of the towers), or at least come out publicly in support of fast-tracking for the St. Nick's project (which, to the best of my knowledge, he has not done).

Just so we're crystal clear: I do not think Rauf is required by justice to do any such thing, or even by plain good manners to make the offer.

Just some considerations.

Really, though, the whole question of "image" is ephemeral, almost by definition.

The real question is whether there is, in any meaningful sense, a "brotherhood of religions", as that same old and dear friend also suggested to me the other day.

There may be some meaningful sense in which there is such a fraternity, but usually terms such as "the brotherhood of religions" are shorthand for the idea that every religion at heart promotes universal peace, reconciliation, justice, harmony and love.

Tosh.

Only Christianity does that.

Christianity also tells me that it is a sin to use or to threaten violence in order to win converts, a sin to punish people for unbelief.

Christianity tells me that these things are sins, not because they go against explicit precepts and injunctions found in the Holy Scriptures (although they do), but because they are unreasonable.

This is important: one need not accept Christianity in order to recognize that such things are wrong - though recognizing that they are wrong brings one (whether one wants to admit it or not) closer to Christianity.

Now, Islam does not work quite the same way.

Take the question of "peace":

Does Islam promote peace?

Frankly, this is a loaded question.

When English authors employ the word, "peace" they are more or less consciously wording a concept represented by the Christian political and theological authors with the Latin, pax.

Arabic is the language of Islam.

The Arabic word most often translated to English as "peace" is salaam, which is, like pax, a technical, juridical term.

In the Christian tradition, pax (peace) is the presence of "justice". Justice, in its turn, is the condition of concord in society achieved through the rule of law. Law is a dictate of reason promulgated by competent authority and ordered to the common good. Reason is a peculiarly human faculty, by the proper exercise of which human nature may attain to an understanding of Divine ordinance.

Salaam, on the other hand - and as far as I understand it - refers to the state of absolute submission to the manifest will of the one God. Now, "submission" in this case renders the Arabic word (another juridical term) islam, from which the Muslim religion has its proper name; the Arabic for "one God" is Allah, and the Arabic for "manifest will" is Qur’an, which is also the name of the Muslims’ holy book, often transliterated as Koran.

In any case, the Qur'an is the source and ultimate authority in and for law under Islam - for it is the revelation of the Seal of the Prophets, Mohammad.

Peace, according to the Muslim religion, is the absolute rule of Islam, or absolute submission to the will of Allah, as made manifest through His revelation, which is Law.

It would seem to follow, therefore, that there is no salaam where there is no islam, no "peace" outside the complete subjection of each and every living person’s will, to the will of Allah as made manifest in the Koran.

In other words, there can be no "peace" until everyone living has submitted to the dictates of the Muslim religion. Once the Law has been proclaimed, to refrain from an act of submission is, quite literally, to place oneself outside the law, i.e. to be an outlaw.

On the other hand, and as we have seen, peace in the Christian tradition (pax) is the presence of justice, which is the condition of social concord through rule of law, and that law is the perfection of reason (ratio), by which human nature participates in the Divine order.

There seems, therefore, to be little to justify translating both the Christian pax and the Islamic salaam with the English "peace".

"Law", after all, is for Christians the participation of human reason in the Divine order, while for Muslims, law is ultimately the manifestation of Divine will, a will that one cannot hope to understand and to which one must only submit.

The question whether Islam is a religion of peace is therefore not even a real question: it only seems to be capable of being raised because of an inappropriate use of a single word in English to translate two different words from two different languages, words that function as technical juridical terms in disparate and conflicting cultural systems.

I could go on.

Incidentally, that universal peace, reconciliation, justice, harmony and love are the real and exclusive teachings of Christianity (all of them together, I mean; you will always be able to find one or another of them in one or another of the world's religions), is not the reason I am a Christian.

I am a Christian because Christianity is true (N.B. the things Christianity teaches are true, but when I say, "Christianity is true," I mean something more than that - though that is a subject for another time).

LD

A farewell speech

While here on the beach, my thoughts were diverted from the gyneaceum that is the bathing resort where I go for my little swimming, or from the mess that is the Italian political situation (not to speak of the American one), or still from the more elevated thoughts my Bible studies prompt in me, by a beautiful example of style and humor published in the opinion newspaper I read.

Click and find the surprise of how a man of action can turn into words his sense of virtue.

HP

A little reflection from the beach

I'm out of Rome, in a little beach town where I use to spend the month of August.

Not to do anything special: a little swimming in the morning, and for the rest of the day what I usually do, i.e. cultivate my studies.

This year I brought with me my Bible and a few books about the Bible.

As a matter of fact, I must confess that, being an old style Catholic, I am more confident with the doctrine and the philosophical reflection on it than with the Sacred Scriptures. For what concern these, I am mostly confident with them through their use in the liturgy.

It isn't that I didn't do my amount of reading in Bible studies. And I definitely have my liking and disliking among Bible scholars. The ones I dislike make the scriptures into something speaking about those who wrote them; the ones I like make them into something of enduring significance, hence speaking of and to us.

Here it is what makes me an old style Catholic, over against the contemporary protestant like trend toward a direct reading of Scriptures: in acknowledging that such a reading needs a guide.

It is hard to crack the code, so to speak, of Scriptures: especially the Old Testament, to see how and why the New Testament makes no sense without it. Or, if it makes sense, it is because it implies it, even though its reader might not be aware of it.

The Christian reader must learn the essential imagery the Old Testament writers employ. Speaking from the beach, one example is sufficient.

On the beach the sea looks rather tame. For the Old Testament writers the sea was the untamed element par excellence. It was God who tamed it, setting limits to it.

Isn't it, such a natural image of chaos, also a nice metaphor for human passions? And though, we pretend to do away with God and at the same time to keep our passions in sufficient control to make social life possible!

Possibly to be continued.

HP

A further reply to the specification

Dear HP,

Whenever I hear someone ask whether the President really is "post racial", my concern has more to do with what a given interlocutor might mean by the term, than with anything else.

I think the more constructive question to ask would sound something like, "Is America in 2010 post-racial?" and the answer there must be: sic et non.

To be sure, it is pertinent to this discussion that America elected a black man (a mulatto or mixed-race man, if you will - but if the POTUS self-identifies as a black man, I can extend him the courtesy of following his suit) to the nation's highest office, and all through the hard fought, 15-month campaign, no one ever seriously asked whether America is "ready" for a black president.

When former President Jimmy Carter suggested that popular opposition to the proposed health care reform was based on lingering racial hatred or at least inability to accept a black president, the incumbent POTUS went on a popular national talk show and responded, saying, "I think it's important to realize I was actually black before the election."



Indeed, Obama's personal story is in many regards beautiful, in many controversial, and always powerfully moving even if it is not always compelling.

The representative power of Obama's story will, I think, bear comparison with that of one of our favorites: TR.

His scriptis, I disagree with Obama on just about every question of policy - and that is the point: his election proves that, beyond its resolution in principle, America is post-racial in at least one extremely important existential sense, but we continue to talk about it as though the issue were not resolved in principle.

LD

A specification

To LD and to whomever it may concern.

Perhaps my remark about Obama repudiating his mother and grandparents was too scathing. Not a good one. I didn't mean it as a personal repudiation, but as a racial one, and it came from these lines of an interview to Barbara Walters:

BARBARA WALTERS, "THE VIEW": Your mother was white. 

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Uh-huh. 

WALTERS: Would it be helpful or why don't you say I am not a black president, I am biracial? 

Here was Obama's telling response:

OBAMA: You know, when I was young and going through the identity crises that any teenager goes through, I wrote a whole book about this…Part of what I realized was that if the -- if the world saw me as African-American then that wasn't something that I needed to run away from. That's something that I could go ahead and embrace. 

OK, I realize, as you made me remark in a previous occasion, that being Italian I might not have the required American sensibility to racial matters. I can understand that in the USA it is enough to be half black to appear all black. And this is what Obama embraced.

What I wanted to say with my remark is that in this way he embraced racial America, and, being thus incapable to represent a post racial America, rekindled racial matters rather than assuaging them.

Sorry that I made it sound as a "personal dig", as you say. It is true that I don't like the guy, but for a political argument this is not here nor there.

HP

A few brief considerations in reply to the HP

Alright, HP: the main thrust of your point is taken.

I do not agree, and would not say, that the President has "renegaded" his mother and her parents.

He has said some moving things about his mother, on the record.

He just does not want to make an issue of it, to which I say, "Fine. After all, you, POTUS, are the one who ran for and was elected to the office, not your family."

Let others in the media say what they will.

I am in Col. (eventually Gen.l) Chamberlain's camp.

I do not think it matters to America who your father (by extension, your mother) was - though this is different from the crucial point that one have a father and a mother, who are such before and beyond the grip of the state, but I digress...

Yours strikes me as a personal dig that 1) does not stick and 2) distracts from your main point, with which I agree, if it is as I have understood it: that Martin Luther King jr's vision of and program for achieving racial harmony is the right one, and that the is demonstrable from within America, herself.

Right?

Let me post the following, again, for our edification and delight:




LD

Two kinds of religion

This could be an interesting question to ask: how come the presidential candidate who presented himself as post-racial and post-partisan turned out to be as president not only the most partisan imaginable but also so racial that the "racist" name calling is more burning than in decades?

The easiest answer is that the presidential candidate image was a total construct: i.e. a fake.

It might be true, but it doesn't help in answering deeper questions: like those concerning the creeping civil war going on in America and in Europe.

So I don't want to focus on POTUS, but on two or three ways of looking at the racial issues.

One was that of Martin Luther King Jr.: he was a Christian, and not only reminded Americans of their being all children of God, but also called for forgiveness, as the way not to forget but to overcome past wrongs without falling into retaliations, wrongs of opposing color.

On the other side there were movements such as the Black Panthers – of which there is again talk nowadays.

A third side were the guilt ridden liberals, who recognized that racial discrimination went against the grain of their belief in the essential equality of all men, but forgot about the root of equality in God: those called by Tom Wolf radical chic, who would invite a token Black Panther to their fashionable parties.

Now it seems that with the first mulatto President of the United States (such he is, however he wants to renegade his mother and grandparents) we are thrown back to that.

Where is the fault?

Let me try this answer: in POTUS's inadequate understanding of religion, of which he has given many signs.

He has been able to gain the presidency back to the democrats by statements that recognized the importance of religion, so neutralizing the sting of the accusation moved to them by the center and the right of being all secularized and godless.

What came out, though, was that religion is nothing else for him than some kind of pious feeling concerning God and the meaning of life that whatever tradition can give. This was shown especially in his Cairo speech.

Now, that is a very partial view of what religion is about. It is, instead, also about what makes for justice among people, and can make, should justice have failed, for an appeasement.

Here there are several kind of answers, which show that not all the so called religions are the same. I'll focus on two, that more concern us.

There is the one pointed out by Martin Luther King, that of reciprocal forgiveness. Let's call it, if you like, conservative, because it requires a recognition in the tradition of an evidence of love that makes men virtuous.

The other one, let's call it liberal, doesn't demand that men be virtuous, but only that they follow the rules, by which some power from above equalizes (in the name of God or of the State) all men.

No doubt about which POTUS follows. My question is rather which is the one you would pick.

HP

Summer Hiatus

Dear readers,

Chronicles will be very slow throughout August.

Thanks to all, and best wishes for a Summer well spent!

LD

HP

Cccf's latest is of especial interest to readers from the nutmeg state.

LD

Cardinal and theological virtues for America

Dear LD,

My answer to your question about the transferability of an institutional model from one country to another is yes and no.

No, if we simply try to transfer the institutional mechanics, so to speak, e.g., regarding our Western democracies, the electoral mechanism. Yes, if we look at the underlying ideas of a political experience.

The tragedy, as you pointed out yourself, is that we too might tend to forget the latter, laying all the stress on the first. Hence the creeping civil war.

One of the few authors who had something serious – should I say scientific? – to say in political matters, the Notre Dame Scottish professor Alasdair MacIntyre, laid a strong stress on the need of recovering an ethic, which is also a psychology, of the virtues.

For whomever is reading who is not inside such matters, I am speaking of the four cardinal virtues, already identified by Plato and Aristotle: prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice; and the three theological virtues, identified by Christian theology, but I think of equal universal import as the other: faith, hope and charity.

However, MacIntyre remarks that the doctrine of the cardinal virtues was classically tied with a certain model of man fit for a certain society: that of the Greek city state, the polis. So he asks himself how could they be transferred to men of a different kind of society, thus being made universal as for example in St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa.

Now I go by memory, and I haven't verified MacIntyre's answer. It seems to me to be something of the kind: because St. Thomas makes them proper for any human intercourse, so much more if it involves people coming from different human groups. The way I understand it, this necessarily requires complementing the cardinal virtues with the theological ones.

Calling faith, hope and charity "theological" doesn't mean that they depend on a religious doctrine, which only confers them their ethical validity. It is quite the reverse: they are rooted in any human intercourse, and therefore it's them that measure the religious and political validity of a doctrine, its "catholicity".

Now, back to America. Two things.

First: one of my teachers, Will Herberg, strongly stressed America being a land of immigrants: i.e., coming close to realize the situation envisioned by St. Thomas, where naked human intercourse demands the full set of the four and three virtues.

Second: it wasn't, though, made by the convergence of peoples of any kind whatsoever (as POTUS suggested in a speech of his) but of peoples who, for all their ethnic differences, somehow knew of the virtues required by the American experience.

That's why some peoples seem fit for America, like, more recently, Koreans or Vietnamese; while others seem unfit, like, alas, Islamics (with all the due qualifications of the case).

Your work on America, dear LD, is important, and needs to be carried on, precisely because both liberals and conservatives tend to think in abstract terms, detached from the core of the American experience. This needs to be unearthed in its most characteristic manifestations, to bring it consciously to philosophy.

HP

On Plato and the Closed Society: conversational indirections occasioned by the HP

Dear HP,

Yes, it is true that I have written that book. I had almost forgotten all about it. I suppose I really ought to get rolling in the search for a publisher.

Who wants a book that makes no policy prescriptions, and writes out of a place that is before and beyond the ground on which the liberals and the conservatives grunt and spit at one another?

It is a serious question, earnestly asked.

You will recall that, at the recent public scrutiny of my effort, Fr. Flannery questioned whether the notion of the city as a man writ large and of society as the cosmos writ small - a guiding idea for me and, so I argue in the book you mention, for what I call, "America" - is really central to my defense of America as really and adequately responsive to man's natural aspirations.

In raising the question, Fr. Flannery pointed out that neither the political societies that were the consitutive elements of the United States, nor their several constitutions, nor the federal constitution, could reasonably be described as similar to the constitution of the ideal city as discussed and presented in the Republic of Plato, in which the supposedly guiding notion has its origin.

I roughly and readily replied that, if one reads Plato as the source of metaphysical doctrines and political prescriptions, then his objection is unanswerable; I went on to suggest that, fortunately for me, there is another way to read Plato: as a dramatizer of the philosophical moment - by which I meant that Palto's works (re)create the drama (in the strict, etymological sense of the word) of realizing that one is a disciple in a way of life called friendship in wisdom; I was content at the time of the raising of the question to escape the strictures of the former way of reading, but I failed to address how it is that, if one reads Plato in the latter way, then it is at least possible to see expressions such as Publius', "Government...[is]...the greatest of reflections on human nature, (Federalist #51)" as more than dappling allusion, but as a sign that America's way of thinking about the basic questions of how we do and ought to order our lives together, is really in the tradition of thinking, the roots of which are in and through Plato.

This kind of thinking will have consequences.

It might, for example, press upon us the serious hermeneutical question whether - as Popper would have it - Plato is an "enemy of the open society (whatever that is)" or whether America really is an "open society" if it is really in the way of Plato.

While I would never discourage anyone from pursuing that question, nor would I suggest that my work could not be brought to bear on such a question, neither would I pursue it myself, as couched - my work is not inspired by such a question.

I am rather interested in the question, around which which your posts have been teasing, whether it is not true that governments are given for societies of men - and societies are not all the same, certainly not equal - so that a government, which protects life and secures property adequately and even admirably for one society, may do disastrous disservice to another if the elements of the former society's government are simply and merely counterfeited and placed over the latter society.

I am interested in the question whether societies of men are capaable of choosing good government by reflection and choice - which Publius asks America pretends to answer; I am interested in the further question: what does the thinking of America have to teach us about the (way toward an) answer to the problem?



LD

How liberal conservatives can be

The LD has written a book that we hope to see soon published, The soul of a nation, where he investigates the political philosophical meaning of the American experience: meaning, what in the shaping of the American body politic can be of universal philosophical significance.

Now, it seems that there are two principles in America being played one against the other, both going back to some of the key words of the Declaration of Independence: equality and liberty or freedom.

The stress on the first or on the second seems to define the opposing parties of the creeping civil war I speak about as, in common parlance, progressives or liberals and conservatives – with the first relying on the state to assure equality, while the second look at the individual with his natural place in civil society to preserve freedom.

While certainly not friend of the state, I feel a certain embarrassment when I see how some conservatives defend their case as one of liberty versus tyranny. Also because, in the reconstruction they make of the casus belli, there would be nothing particularly interesting in the American experiment that the LD examines. The culture war today in America between liberals and conservatives would be the same that had been going on for centuries, through European history, all the way back to the supposed origins of Western civilization in Greek philosophical reflection on politics.

Already then, Karl Popper suggests, the opposition of principles took shape following Plato's envisioning a city (non a state) ruled by a philosopher king, to which, we are told, Aristotle opposed a vision of a city of free citizens.

Strange pairing of thinkers follow in such a reconstruction of political philosophical history: that of Plato with the anti-Platonist Thomas Hobbes, on one side, and of Aristotle with John Locke, who can't be certainly classified as an Aristotelian, on the other.

Actually Plato and Aristotle, for all their differences, go together in their emphasis on the virtues required of men for a good ordering of the city.

Equally together go Hobbes and Locke, to the point that the second can be seen as having done nothing more than gilding the Hobbesian pill. While Hobbes is brutal in his expressions, requiring a sovereign – it doesn't matter whether "single or assembly" –, Locke appears much more suave, when he definitely grants sovereignty to an assembly.

The trouble is that in any case the sovereign has the power of making laws, thus bringing order to an otherwise disordered world.

What embarrasses me is how "liberal" is this whole historical reconstruction, although in a sense of the word closer to the Nineteenth Century usage than to that of the century just passed.

The whole progressives versus conservatives opposition is no older than two centuries or two centuries and a half.

The much older question about which America represents a novel experiment is another: that of the relation of politics and religion.

Here America has parted from Europe. For liberal European states, to keep religion out of politics means to make it publicly irrelevant, preserving for themselves the education of the citizenry. In America, instead, it is politics that has to be left out, so to speak, of religion. Save for a Europeanizing cultural elite, that wants to affirm the subordination to the state of civil society with all its cultural-religious manifestations.

Essential then to the American experiment is, as the LD reminds us, that tradition of virtue which from Greek philosophy passed into Christian theology. Which is, we could claim, universal, thus making possible to keep Church and State separate, without destroying society.

HP

in verba Mansueti Impudentis de civitate Dei et terriugena

These remarks being a reply to the Humbly Presumptuous in the Matter of the city of God and the earthly city:

In the very first, thanks, HP, for your exposition of what is for us a (or one side of the) basic problem of that noble way of life that men used to call philosophy.

You will recall that I wrote a little book at the beginning of the century (as yet unpublished - I am not sure who would want it just as it is), which I was happy to title, Sighing for Jerusalem: the political nature of virtue in the two cities of St. Augustine's De civitate Dei.

In that book, I dealt with a fundamental, even if overlooked fact: namely, that in his book (twenty-two books, really, which Augustine described famously as his magnum opus et arduum), the great Bishop and Doctor of the Church from the now buried and all but forgotten city of Hippo - buried, I hasten to add, under a massive urban sprawl in the northeast corner of Algeria - faced the question whether Christian religion is suitable to the morals of a republic.

More preciesly, he responded to the assertion that Christian religion is not suitable to the morals of a republic, arguing instead that Pagan religion cannot (nor could it ever) sustain the morals of the Roman republic (by which he meant also the vast empire accrued to the city through the centuries), and that Christianity could do so for Rome or any republic worth sustaining, insofar as it is verus cultus veri Dei, the true worship of the true God.

I will have more - much more - to say about what the phrase, "the morals of a republic" really means, though that discussion will have to wait for another post; my concern at present is with the origin and scope of the creeping civil war.

First, a very little history, in very broad strokes:

Augusine seems to have convinced enough people of the contrary, to make the next thousand years (at least) of history in the West an effort to order society according to his vision and adapt the vision to social circumstances without warping either into unrecognizability.

Augustine, in other words, gave us something between an artist's impression of and a blueprint for what came to be called Western Civilization, the principal unit of which was the res publica christiana - an intellectual, cultic and spiritual union of the Christian principalities in the world.

The Peace of Westphalia is generally given as the death knell of the res publica christiana as a coherent civilizational idea, though it is important to note that it is in no wise necessary to receive this wisdom absolutely and without qualification.

Indeed, wherever cultural notions of catholicity, i.e. ideas of universal validity and transcendently grounded and ordered authority, continued to exist, the anthropological elements of the res publica christiana survived and even thrived, even as the institutional political trappings of it withered.

As one of my favorite thinkers, Eric Voegelin, has written:

The corrosion of Western civilization…is a slow process extending over a thousand years. The several Western political societies, now, have a different relation to this slow process according to the time at which their national revolutions occurred… The American Revolution [emphasis mine - LD], though its debate was already strongly affected by the psychology of enlightenment, also had the good fortune of coming to its close within the institutional and Christian climate of the ancien régime. Western society as a whole…is a deeply stratified civilization in which the American and English democracies represent the oldest, most firmly consolidated stratum of civilizational tradition. - The New Science of Politics: an introduction

In the United States of America (and I would include contemporary Europe as a rejection of one vision of America in favor of another vision of America - i.e. as a reply or a response to one or another side of the promice of America, even as America is a reply to the problems of Europe in Modernity), we are perpetually at risk of losing sight of the older anthropological vision out of which our particular political institutions grew and for which they were peculiarly built to suit.

We tend in this day to derive our freedom from our institutions, and we forget that those institutions were given for a certain kind of men. In the words of Publius:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.- The Federalist #55

We need to recover our sensibility of and our sensititvity toward this basic tension in our nature both personal and popular - otherwise we risk losing both.

LD

City of God and city of men

The few readers who might have followed our blog probably remember one of my fixed ideas: that we live a creeping civil war. That's why we called the blog "Chronicles from the front".

I am not sure how clear I have made who the sides of this war really are.

Of course there are external enemies, who eventually one day hijack some airplanes and go to crush themselves against New York skyscrapers and the Pentagon. But they wouldn't be so strong, if we weren't so divided.

Reading news of the day I feel therefore continuously pressed to come back to my painful fixation.

The Church is under attack because of the sins of her ordained members. By whom?

Well, I'd say by the servants of the Emperor: i.e. by the state's governing bodies, whether legislative, judiciary and executive.

Our history teaching never makes clear enough why the roman emperors were against Christians. And yet the answer should be pretty simple: because they refused to deify the human community to which they willingly belonged, because they thought that there was a higher community of all men in God to whom it went their full allegiance.

Thus Christianity became the warrant of men's freedom, our freedom, against the self-divinization of the state, pretending to exhaust the full compass of human life.

Was the Church always up to it? Of course not, because the distinction of church and state is not a severing of men in two halves, so Christians are at the same time members of the one and of the other, always tempted into making of the Church a state, or of the State a church. The story of this distinction, with all that it involved, is that of Western history.

Men are always again tempted into making their world into the world. It happens therefore that in the name of an "open society" (cfr. K. Popper, The open society and its enemies) society is actually closed in the confines of a state: the worldly state of public things (status rei publicae: hence simply the state) in the western world of the last centuries.

To this the Church opposed herself. Until it came a time when it was said: we Christians have to learn to dialogue with the world, learn again to address it.

This was the hopeful message communicated by the Vatican II. Which leaves me with a paradox to account for: while the last Ecumenical Council announced itself as a recasting of the Church's eternal truths in a new language more apt to modern times, her capability to address people of these same modern times appears to be weakened.

Was it perhaps because it wasn't made explicit enough that there is a creeping civil was always going on, i.e., to say with Saint Augustine, between the "city of God" and the "city of men"?

HP

From the Archdiocese of St. Louis...

We have this statement from Archbishop Robert J. Carlson:

Money qute:

Since the first century, the Church has addressed the moral evil of abortion and the killing of a defenseless baby in the womb. People who are casual about the sin of abortion and who choose to view it as a political issue rather than the serious moral issue that it is are guilty of violating the Fifth Commandment. You cannot be "pro-choice" (pro-abortion) and remain a Catholic in good standing. That's why the Church asks those who maintain this position not to receive holy Communion. We are not being mean or judgmental, we are simply acknowledging the fact that such a stance is objectively and seriously sinful and is radically inconsistent with the Christian way of life.

As I said at Fr. Zuhlsdorf's place (to whom, a tip of the hat, (/:-)), This is an excellent statement, and deserves to be circulated as widely as possible, as an example of how to balance the ad intra and ad extra aspects of the message.

One the one hand Abp. Carlson makes the Catholic position very clear to Catholics, and amkes it clear that he is speaking to the faithful, directly and specifically, saying: this is what our Church teaches on these matters, now and forever.

Then, in paragraph 6, the archbishop explains that the Catholic teaching is not incompatible with the requirements of citizenship.

He wraps it up very well, too.

Well done, indeed!

CCCF: "Guttmacher's Wrong...Again°

Juan O'Callahan at the CCCF blog continues his signal service.

Go see: GUTTMACHER'S CALIFORNIA DATA CANNOT BE CORRECT

I continue to encourage bloggers to support the Cccf in every possible way.

Best,

LD