St. Augustine on the culture of a failing empire

As the flaws of the Western Roman Empire became too great to sustain, St. Augustine wrote:

'So long as it [the republic] survives,' they say, 'so long as it prospers, rich in resources, self-confident in victory, or, better still, secure in peace, what difference does it make to us? What matters is that there is money to be made to support our lavish style of life, and to give the stronger their hold over the weaker; that the poor treat the wealthy with compliance, to ensure their daily bread--the poor depending on the patronage of the wealthy for a quiet life, the wealthy calling on the poor for support to boost their public standing. Popularity should accrue not to those whose policies promote public welfare, but to the big providers of public entertainment.

Law should not be rigorous; low indulgences should not be proscribed. Rulers should not bother themselves with getting virtuous subjects, simply quiescent ones. Territories should view their rulers not in the light of moral educators, merely as economic managers and purveyors of satisfactions. It does not matter if they do not seriously respect them, so long as they treat them with a calculating and subservient fear. No one should be liable to court proceedings if he has not infringed or done harm to the property, real estate, or physical safety of another person without consent; but everyone should be free to do with himself, his dependents, and consenting associates exactly what he likes.

Sexual satisfactions should be freely available on the open market for those who want them, especially those who cannot afford to maintain facilities privately. Domestic architecture should be expensive and ornate, to accommodate large and lavish parties where anyone may game and drink all day and night, if he pleases, till he brings it up or sweats it out. The sound of dancing should be heard in every neighborhood, and theaters should be humming with excitement at their coarse amusements and their various brash entertainments.

Should someone disapprove of this perfect contentment, he must expect to meet public hostility; and should someone attempt to reform or abolish it, the spirit of popular freedom must know what to do with him: shut him up, pack him up, beat him up! Religion ought to make a case for itself by guaranteeing and perpetuating these conditions of life for the greatest number of people. Let the gods have all the worship they want, and all the games that they want, to enjoy them with (and at the expense of) their worshipers, just so long as they ensure this satisfactory state of affairs against threat from enemy, plague, or disaster.'

-City of God Book II Chapter 20

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Perhaps excepting the shameless worship of strength and the poor man's servile compliance before the wealthy, all these vices are clearly dominant today.

Materialism, hedonism, libertarianism, even therapeutic deism. These are not ideologies but vulturous habits of mind that come at times of cultural disaster.

Their only unity comes in alliance against reformist critics.

The West has seen them before. Let us hope their age is coming to an end.

(via the Distributist Review)

On flattering and supporting one's enemies

The Frenchman Louis Dutens writes from 1806 on France before the Revolution:

“Formerly I went frequently to Paris: I saw often many of those who were called ‘the philosophers’. It was particularly at Madame Geoffrin’s, Baron d’Holbaek’s, and d’Alembert’s, where they principally assembled. It was there that they silently planned the destruction of religion, of the clergy, the nobility, and the government. From the year 1766, I said to the Bishops who were connected with them, ‘They detest you’; to the great noblemen who protected them, ‘They cannot bear the splendour of your rank, which dazzles them’; to the Farmers-General who upheld them, ‘They envy your riches’. These continued, however, to admire, to flatter, and to support them.”

To view one's mortal enemies as harmless and misguided pontificators is one of the many perils of life.

There is a type of magnanimous patron who seeks out his philosophical opposite. He thinks the iconoclast will remain a fringe character, like a unique exotic pet.

In many cases, this is excusable. How many coffee shop communists never take action?

Yet to love one's enemies truly, one must acknowledge the extent of their ill will.

Then one must recognize that indifference towards their increasing power and influence is no act of love, for them or for one's own.

(Quotation via Deogowulf)

U.S. Catholic history, blogged

Recently New Advent has been linking to the blog of Dr. Patrick McNamara, Church historian and assistant archivist at the Diocese of Brooklyn.

His posts feature brief profiles of important figures, historical summaries and also original sources.

To start with, here is Dr. McNamara's description of colonial America's Maryland Tradition in American Catholicism, "a tradition that stressed interfaith harmony, public service, and an attachment to such American principles as religious liberty and separation of Church and State."

A brief foray across the Atlantic touches upon Joseph de Maistre and his ultramontanist views on the papacy.

McNamara reports on Brooklyn's anti-Catholic riots of 1844 using a period newspaper article. Priestless parishes are not a new phenomenon, he adds, explaining that they were common on the American frontier.

For the Civil War period, McNamara informs us of Father James Sheeran, chaplain of the failed Confederacy and author of the mournful poem "Conquered Banner." The Catholic Encyclopedia article on the priest begins with this precious description: "He inherited from his parents, in its most poetic and religious form, the strange witchery of the Irish temper."

We also learn that General James Longstreet was a Catholic convert.

Given its sad history, it is not surprising that the largest group lynching in U.S. history took place in the South. But the action's victims were not blacks, but Italians.

They had been officially acquitted of the murder of an Irish-surnamed New Orleans police chief in 1891.

Obviously the Catholics of the U.S. labor movement cannot go unmentioned. Let Mary Kenney represent them.

Then there are the "modest proposals" of Brooklyn's Monsignor William McGuirl. In his tongue-in-cheek 1917 St. Patrick's Day address at the Waldorf Astoria, he asked the Irish to petition Congress to enact a law prohibiting any immigration for three decades, "except for the Irish."

"For thirty years none but Irish need apply."

The monsignor called for a boy in every family to be named Patrick or a girl to be named Patricia, so that "the virtues of the great old Saint might be perpetuated by psychology." Further, he advocated that incoming immigrants from Eastern Europe or Italy to be made to take the name of Patrick.

McNamara reproduces the full text of President Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 address to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The president, the first to speak at a Catholic college's commencement, used the opportunity to promote Celtic literature. He claimed he had grown "particularly interested" in it in the preceding three years, adding:

I feel it is not a creditable thing to the American Republic, which has in its citizenship so large a Celtic element, that we should leave it to the German scholars and students to be our instructors in Celtic literature. I want to see in Holy Cross, in Harvard, in all the other universities where we can get the chairs endowed, chairs for the study of Celtic literature.

Noting the revival of old Norse poetry, Roosevelt predicted an “awakening to the wealth of beauty contained in the Celtic sagas.”

Dr. McNamara also discusses black U.S. Catholics such as the twentieth century's Sister Thea Bowman

Further, there is an account of the inspiring heroism of Congressional Medal of Honor awardee Father Joseph T. O'Callahan, S.J.. When he was serving on the carrier U.S.S. Franklin, a March 1945 Japanese attack devastated the ship.

His award citation reads:

...calmly braving the perilous barriers of flame and twisted metal to aid his men and his ship, Lieutenant Commander O'Callahan groped his way through smoke-filled corridors to the open flight deck and into the midst of violently exploding bombs, shells, rockets and other armament. With the ship rocked by incessant explosions, with debris and fragments raining down and fires raging in ever increasing fury, he ministered to the wounded and dying, comforting and encouraging men of all faiths; he organized and led fire-fighting crews into the blazing inferno on the flight deck; he directed the jettisoning of live ammunition and the flooding of the magazine; he manned a hose to cool hot, armed bombs rolling dangerously on the listing deck, continuing his efforts despite searing, suffocating smoke which forced men to fall back gasping and imperiled others who replaced them.

The battleship U.S.S. O'Callahan was named in Father O'Callahan's honor.

Let's end with McNamara's appreciation of Myles Connolly's short novel Mr. Blue. Comparing Connolly's creation to F. Scott Fitzgerald's, he writes:

I have come to realize that the character of Blue must also have appealed to us all, and to countless other readers, because he was a uniquely American personality. As Myles Connolly wrote him, J. Blue was the man that the ambitious Jay Gatsby might have become had he steered by a higher truth than the sound of money in Daisy Buchanan's voice.

Dr. McNamara was a great help to me in writing my first freelance essay for Our Sunday Visitor, in which I discussed the place of bishops in the public square.

In Dr. McNamara's remarks, published in the April 19 edition, he explained how intense public engagement by bishops produced the New Deal-foreshadowing Catholic Miracle. However, he said the divergence between Catholic life and American culture has increased in recent decades, as evidenced in the rise of an anti-clericalism new to the U.S.

My thanks to both Dr. McNamara and OSV editor John Norton for their help with the piece.

Apollo 8's 1968 Christmas Message

Forty years ago, broadcasting from lunar orbit, the astronauts William Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman read the first ten lines of Genesis in a live television broadcast.



Writing from the good Earth, forty years later, I too wish a Merry Christmas to you all!

Kraft im Recht: Metternich on political philosophy

The blogger Deogolwulf has posted to his blog what he claims to be the first complete English translation of Prince Metternich's Political Testament.

The text itself is directed to historians, advising them which archives are pertinent to the statesman's deeds and giving them a few autobiographical notes.

"I made history and therefore did not find time to write it," Metternich says, offering a few reflections on the French Revolution and Napoleon and the Revolutions of 1848.

Yet he also discusses political science, taking as a starting point his adopted motto "Strength in Right" (Kraft im Recht). He praises political gradualism and ordered liberty while condemning ideology and revolution.

"I have always regarded preconceived systems as the product of leisured heads or the outburst of emotional minds," he writes.

"Not in the struggle of society towards progress, but rather in progression towards the true goods: towards freedom as the inevitable yield of order; towards equality in its only applicable degree of that before the law; towards prosperity, inconceivable without the foundation of moral and material peace; towards credit, which can rest only on the basis of trust — in all that I have recognized the duty of government and the true salvation for the governed.

I have looked upon despotism of every kind as a symptom of weakness. Where it appears, it is a self-punitive evil, most intolerable when it poses behind the mask of promoting the cause of freedom."

His remarks on Montesquieu's system of checks and balances are of interest to any student of the U.S. Constitution. He calls it

...a conceptual error of the English constitution, impractical in its application, because the concept of such a balancing is rooted in the assumption of an eternal struggle, instead of in that of peace, the first necessity for the life and prosperity of states.

Those who complain about the "divisiveness" of American political debates, just before they realize the relative insignificance of these disagreements, should recognize that the object of their dislike is in fact the proper functioning of the country's constitution.

Metternich continues: "Without the foundation of order, the call for freedom is nothing more than the striving of some party after an envisaged end. In its actual use, the call inevitably expresses itself as tyranny."

This is quite the antidote for free-floating cries of "Freedom."

Upon reflection, we see the defense of order is not merely institutional conservatism. Rather, it is at root an exercise in contemplation.

The single-minded man of only one principle may dismiss the need for both general wisdom and concrete knowledge, as he holds his principle may be applied universally by anyone regardless of her circumstances or personal quality.

Those who counsel our monomaniacal friends to curb such enthusiasms lack this nescient luxury of fanaticism.

The narrowly principled reformer must only know his principles. These may be listed in a brief manifesto without significant distortion, like constants set for a computer program. Contrariwise, the defender of the present order must perceive and praise the many goods targeted by the would-be revolutionary.

An opponent of feminism could find herself defending a multitude of concrete habits and customs: the patronizing behavior required from polite men on dates; the ban on women in combat; the benefits of unequal pay in the workplace.

A proponent of feminism must only defend and assert one idea, an intangible often left undefined in relation to any ideal or real order.

It is little wonder why traditional conservatives applaud the Permanent Things. They have so many things to consider.

Another fall of man: Alypius and the gladiators

A tragedy of pride and bloodlust from Book VI of Augustine's Confessions:

[Alypius] had gone on to Rome before me to study law--which was the worldly way which his parents were forever urging him to pursue--and there he was carried away again with an incredible passion for the gladiatorial shows. For, although he had been utterly opposed to such spectacles and detested them, one day he met by chance a company of his acquaintances and fellow students returning from dinner; and, with a friendly violence, they drew him, resisting and objecting vehemently, into the amphitheater, on a day of those cruel and murderous shows. He protested to them:

“Though you drag my body to that place and set me down there, you cannot force me to give my mind or lend my eyes to these shows. Thus I will be absent while present, and so overcome both you and them.”

When they heard this, they dragged him on in, probably interested to see whether he could do as he said. When they got to the arena, and had taken what seats they could get, the whole place became a tumult of inhuman frenzy.

But Alypius kept his eyes closed and forbade his mind to roam abroad after such wickedness. Would that he had shut his ears also! For when one of the combatants fell in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirred him so strongly that, overcome by curiosity and still prepared (as he thought) to despise and rise superior to it no matter what it was, he opened his eyes and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the victim whom he desired to see had been in his body.

Thus he fell more miserably than the one whose fall had raised that mighty clamor which had entered through his ears and unlocked his eyes to make way for the wounding and beating down of his soul, which was more audacious than truly valiant--also it was weaker because it presumed on its own strength when it ought to have depended on Thee.

For, as soon as he saw the blood, he drank in with it a savage temper, and he did not turn away, but fixed his eyes on the bloody pastime, unwittingly drinking in the madness--delighted with the wicked contest and drunk with blood lust. He was now no longer the same man who came in, but was one of the mob he came into, a true companion of those who had brought him thither.

Why need I say more? He looked, he shouted, he was excited, and he took away with him the madness that would stimulate him to come again: not only with those who first enticed him, but even without them; indeed, dragging in others besides.

And yet from all this, with a most powerful and most merciful hand, Thou didst pluck him and taught him not to rest his confidence in himself but in Thee--but not till long after.

Recall this passage the next time you see Ridley Scott's Gladiator. The movie feints towards concern about the mob's lust for blood, only to forget its scruples in an exaltation of violent hunger.

The story of Alypius, or for that matter St. Almachius, would make a greater movie.

The Renaissance: Myth?

Australian mathematics professor James Franklin assails the Renaissance Myth. An admirer of the renaissance that birthed the High Middle Ages that died in the Black Death, Franklin argues the reputation of the 15th to 16th century Renaissance is inflated. Comparing the period to both the Middle Ages and the early Modern period, he condemns the Renaissance for its negligible scientific discoveries and technological advances of the time(Copernicus excepted), lack of philosophical genius, relatively poor literary output, and its slavish devotion to the ancients.

The impact of the discovery of the New World and the newly-invented printing press, Franklin dismisses. "Both of these have been the occasion of innumerable effusions of a priorist theorising, to the effect that they opened new vistas of thought, led to the spread of radical ideas, confuted scholastic dogmas and so on. As usual, evidence that any of this happened is rarely seen," he writes. He compares the moon landing and the introduction of television as events analogous to these supposed paradigmatic moments. Both caused a splash but rarely elevated the people of the times.

Franklin argues that the undeniable excellence of Renaissance art is in part responsible for the period's reputation. The ease of observing such great art led people incorrectly and lazily to project that excellence onto the whole era.(The comments on Leonardo da Vinci's non-artistic endeavors are particularly iconoclastic.)

"The Renaissance Myth," Franklin thinks, is also the creation of anti-clerical polemicists, bad education, and Petrarch's self-aggrandizing writings.

Franklin's essay merits a deeper response, though I have to my regret forgotten most of Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence and whatever else I've read on the period. The romantic epics of Orlando comprise one set of Renaissance masterworks that Franklin overlooks. Though they are not popular even among the learned today, they enjoyed a great reputation mere decades ago.

Further, the Jesuit system of education was inspired by those universities whose 16th-century state Franklin disdains as dull and slavish. These scholars who produced so many brilliant thinkers apparently found much valuable not just in the content the Renaissance preserved, but in the era's system itself.

However, some of Franklin's criticisms surely hit their target. There really is a schoolboyish naivety in the writing of, say, Pico della Mirandola. Renaissance servility toward Aristotle and other ancient aristocratic thinkers, I wager, helped dampen the dignity of both productive labor and experimental inquiry.

Franklin also seems to have Michael Flynn's admiration for medieval science, which is a good thing. He recounts one telling anecdote about the scientific work of Pope John XXI:

Until 1300 the most actively cultivated science was geometrical optics, the leading researchers in which were associated with the Papal court of John XXI in the 1270s. The Pope was himself the author of a book on the subject (besides writing best-sellers on logic and medicine), and in fact died in the pursuit of science when the roof of his laboratory collapsed.

However, what struck me most about Franklin's critique was his attack on the early Renaissance's obsession with enumerating all aesthetic relations:

This habit of thought was peculiarly destructive of rational thinking, since on the one hand enormous imaginative effort was expended in drawing ever more striking parallels between things, but on the other hand it was essential to the exercise to pretend that these parallels were not just figments of the imagination, but were edifying just because the things compared really did mirror one another. It is not too far-fetched, I think, to compare this with Marxism. The tendency of Marxist thought when faced with, say, a scientific result, is to relate the ideology of bourgeois science to the historical consciousness of scientists and their community. Aside from the question of the truth of this, the overall effect is to divert attention from the original fact. The same is true of allegory. The facts about a thing and its actual relations with other things will be missed if the mind contemplating it is trained to look immediately for ingenious ways of seeing the thing as a sign of something else. The construction of allegorical similarities replaced the search for causal connections.

This is a good caution complementing my foray into C.S. Peirce's semiotics. Too much concern for the logic of signs and relations obscures the fact that their logic is neither scientific nor entirely philosophic, but artistic. While good poetry and rhetoric, for instance, can rely on and encourage close observation of reality, imagination is their native domain.

Poetry and rhetoric rest on the careful organization, invention, and manipulation of signs. Letting the sign overshadow the thing signified is a precursor to, if not a practice of, falsehood and idolatry.

Not Scottish: Klan Crossburnings

It is commonly accepted that the Ku Klux Klan's crossburnings derive from an old Scottish practice of burning a cross as a call to arms.

The Straight Dope examines this factoid. It decides that if the practice's Scottish origins were direct, then the cross should have been St. Andrew's saltire:

Knowing a good idea when he saw one, William J. Simmons, the founder of the Klan in its second incarnation (1915-1944), cobbled together a cross and burned it at a meeting of the newly-established Knights of the Ku Klux Klan on Thanksgiving night, 1915, on Stone Mountain near Atlanta. Flaming crosses have been a Klan trademark ever since.

Just one problem. The fiery cross of Scottish legend wasn't the upright Roman cross commonly used by the Klan. Rather it was the X-shaped cross of St. Andrew. St. Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, and an X-shaped cross probably also was a lot easier to make a signal bonfire out of. But nobody ever said the Klan's big attraction was its meticulous sense of detail.

Remember, Kluxers were the Star Wars nerds of the 1920s, only violent and politically competent.

(link via Kathy Shaidle)

Why Europe mirrors "Blue State" America

The archives of Unqualified Offerings contains an exposure of the secret of anti-Americanism.

Mencius Moldbug declares:

I believe anti-Americanism is best described as an epiphenomenon of Universalism. The single most significant fact about the world today is that sixty-two years ago it was conquered by a military alliance whose leader was the United States, and whose creed of battle was this nontheistic adaptation of New England mainline Protestantism. I don't think it's a coincidence that the European ruling class holds essentially the same perspectives that were held at Harvard in 1945. The US Army did not shoot all the professors in Europe and replace them with Yankee carpetbaggers, but the prestige of conquest is such that it might as well have.

Moldbug thinks that Euro-American infighting mirrors a feud between "Blue State" vs. "Red State" government agencies. The State Department and the welfare agencies comprise the former, while the Defense Department, the White House, and the CIA comprise the latter.

The "Anti-American" European is thus "just like the San Francisco liberal who 'loves her country, but doesn't trust her government.'"

His thesis is suggestive but controversial, and it runs a gauntlet of criticism in the comments. While Moldbug's view of Europe is indubitably patronizing, his argument could offset the more dualistic arguments that Europe and America are being separated in an extreme civilizational schism.

Medieval Slavery Existed, Alas

The University Bookman once examined a new edition of Regine Pernoud's Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths. While sympathetic to Pernoud's popular history written against popular legends, Glenn W. Olsen rebuts her belief that slavery had disappeared in medieval times:

Cornelius Buckley’s poorly informed and imprecise preface to this book accepts at face value what Pernoud has to say about slavery; but Pernoud has clearly been left behind by research on this subject over the last twenty-five years. Perhaps it is sufficient to refer to the work of Steven Epstein, past and forthcoming. In brief, according to Pernoud slavery disappeared over the course of the Middle Ages. (Buckley speaks of it being abolished.) This used to be a common view, and there is some truth to it. Manumission was an act of piety, and many were indeed manumitted. The ancient slave gradually became the medieval serf. But slavery never disappeared. We find internal slave markets in France itself in the early Middle Ages, and slaving on the edges of Europe in every century. In recent scholarship, the English have finally received full recognition for the slaving they practiced all through the Middle Ages in Ireland (see Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe). Slaving flourished across the frontiers between Islam and Christendom, and we are beginning to understand how common late-medieval domestic slavery was, especially in the cities of the Mediterranean.

I'm glad Irish history still preserves us from taking anglophilic mythmaking too seriously.

You'll often find this disbelief in medieval slavery in Chesterton's and Belloc's work. They depict the low state of the English commoner as a novelty introduced by the landowners' near-monopoly engendered by Henry VIII's confiscation of monastic lands.

It's really too bad the story of Christendom's free peasants is overstated. If Merrie England didn't exist, it should have.

The Fires of Savonarola's Florence

The ferocious energy of the Renaissance republic and its most famous preacher is expertly captured in Lauro Martines' Fire in the City. With patient understanding of his subject Martines describes to a modern audience the triumphs and travails of the Dominican monk Savonarola and the political energies which he channeled--energies which, in the end, destroyed him.

In Martines' sympathetic telling, Savonarola was a fierce patriot who in 1495 helped expel the Medici from power and strengthen the new republic formed in their wake. Though a lover of liberty, he nonetheless preached clemency for the allies of the exiled rulers when tyrant-hating vengeance waxed. He also countered oligarchic tendencies among the city's elite in favor of wider citizen participation. In foreign policy he embraced the invasion of the French King Charles VIII as the scourge of Florence's enemies and Italy's flaccid believers. He even did all this without holding formal political office.

Yet first in his priorities was church reform, universal in scope but with Florence at its center. Reform was much needed, to say the least. The Great Schism had weakened religious authority. The papacy was held by the simonious decadent Alexander VI. Bishoprics were collected like so many choice financial properties and ruled in absentia, badly.

Against this established venality the righteous Savonarola spoke. Two lines from his sermons display his driven power: "I want men to be illuminated by truth. I want to fight the whole world and win."

He had no tolerance for corrupt clerics. His early polemical poems were written long before his days in Florence. Titled De Ruina Mundi and De Ruina Ecclesiae, they will appeal to those tired of laxity in the Catholic scene who will find in Savonarola the under-represented rigorist flavor of anti-clericalism. He could be writing of present-day episcopal malfeasance when he declares:

Ah, look at that catamite and at the pimp,
Dressed in purple, frauds looked up to
By the common people and adored by the blind world.

Later he advises:

Avoid all those who put on purple.
Flee from palaces and ostentatious loggias,
Speaking to the few alone,
For you will be the enemy of all the world.

What enjoyment one finds in these passages should be tempered by the observation of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: "After two hundred years of cheerful and ironic anti-clericalism the Reformation came after all, and destroyed the fabric of the Church in a number of nations."

Despite all this youthful talk of contra mundum, the monk avoided exclusive elitism in his Florentine ministry. At points, his thirst for justice and freedom and his significantly genuine patriotic piety captivated a vast portion of the city. His charisma shines through his recorded sermons. In one oft-used rhetorical device he converses with a fictional interlocutor:

-Oh, friar.... they say you are a heretic.
-Throw any low insult at me, but don't call me a heretic.
-They say you're crazy.
-Oh, now there you've said something beautiful. [As sinners] we're all a bit mad.
-Ah, but you've said the Church is a whore. O father, the Holy Church? What have you said?
-You're a fool ... go and do some more studying.

The pre-lenten Florentine carnival traditionally involved deadly rock fights among youths and debauchery among their elders. The monk's famous bonfires of the vanities attempted to subvert and redirect these energies towards spiritual renewal. Savonarola, believing their elders to be incorrigible, would send out groups of teenage boys and young men to collect "vanities" from the people. These collections, with few exceptions, were entirely voluntary. The collected dirty books, games, and luxurious clothes were then set ablaze in a vivid symbol of Lenten sacrifice.(This suggests a cheerful and productive activity for modern-day parish youth groups.)

Savonarola's popularity was not total. His efforts at moral reform provoked a backlash from among its targets. Street gamblers started accosting and threatening the zealous youths who had once driven them indoors. The wealthy hated the Savonarolan fashion police who would publicly deride and humiliate luxurious dressers. But his political and ecclesiastical opponents were the most potent of the friar's adversaries.

In June of 1497 his enemies finally secured an excommunication from the papacy. For months they had reported trumped up charges of heresy and misconduct, but they also merely repeated the man's heated attacks on papal corruption. Earlier the pope had wished Savonarola to defend his positions in person. Though a worldly man, Alexander VI seemed to fear the monk really was the prophet he claimed to be. Savonarola, who needed the protection of an armed guard in his home city, feared assassination if he were to leave his home turf. In an effort to reign in the recalcitrant frair, his monastery at San Marco was ordered to submit itself to the authority of another, more diplomatic, Dominican congregation.
This order was simply ignored, and it was only a matter of time before the papacy bowed to the anti-Savonarolan factions.

Yet even the excommunication did not end Savonarola. He denied the legitimacy of the punishment on the grounds it was based on fraudulent accusations. He began preaching again with even more anti-papal vehemence.

But his position weakened. Florence feared worsening tensions with the papacy and other Italian powers and severe domestic factionalism strained political comity. Savonarola was challenged by a Franciscan opponent to undergo a trial by fire in a city square. Though one of Savonarola's disciples had accepted the challenge and a great crowd gathered and prepared the site for the event, the great test of fire never took place. This abortive trial in some minds confirmed Savonarola as a false prophet. An angry mob beseiged San Marco, captured the monk, and turned him over to hostile elements in the city government. Accused of fraud and heresy, he was tortured. Savonarola, very intolerant of pain, soon accused himself of being a megalomaniacal fraud. He abjured all his extraordinary efforts as exercises in vanity. He and two fellow monks were hanged in May of 1498, and what vanities of their bodies remained were themselves immolated by fire.

See also: Daniel Larison's review

Mushroom Cloud Morals

The anniversaries of the nuclear strikes on Japan have come around again, providing the opportunity to distinguish between those who see ethics as a peacetime luxury and those of a more principled bent.

Andrew Cusack compiles contemporary reactions, citing at least one author featured here before.

Roger Kimball brushes aside objections.

Catholic Social Thought and the New Deal

In the Boston Review essay In Search of the Common Good Lew Daly pens an examination of the roots of the New Deal in Catholic social thought especially as interpreted through the work of Msgr James A. Ryan. At times he echoes Murray Rothbard's analysis of the liturgicalist-pietist fissures in early twentieth-century American life. Daly's particular focus, however, is the rise and fall of the common good as an objective of good government.

Limiting capitalist acquisitiveness, securing a living wage for the working class, and instilling social solidarity between workers and owners were goals which found support among activist clergy inspired by papal encyclicals and the Catholic working class. Daly takes particular aim at the concept of a secularist New Deal:

The Catholic press had little doubt that the New Deal’s vision of social justice was rooted in Christian thought. As Commonweal magazine urged readers to recognize, Roosevelt’s triumph in 1932 was “likewise the Catholic opportunity to make the teachings of Christ apply to the benefit of all.” The Christian journalist and editor Stanley Hoflund High, who organized the interdenominational Good Neighbor League to mobilize religious support for Roosevelt in 1936, similarly argued that “the fundamental objective of what we call the New Deal is religious.” This is the first time in modern history, he stated, “when a Government in any nation has set out to give practical application to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.”

At a minimum it should be clear that the common good of New Deal liberalism involved much more than the bland commitment to self-sacrifice proposed by Tomasky. Indeed, it was in many ways a product of extraordinary developments in religious thought (if not “religious faith”). We cannot ignore or deny the religious roots of that ideal if we want a revival of the common good to motivate significant changes today.

By way of contrast Dorothy Day, another American devotee of Catholic social thought, found the New Deal to be an unacceptable compromise. In her view its programs locked workers in place, keeping them from another key goal of the papal encyclicals: ownership of economically productive property for the lower classes. Here she is on Social Security:

Security for the worker, not ownership; security for the industrialist, the owner, not confiscation--that is what Beveridge plans and Wallace plans of permanent employment lead to.

There is more vision, more Catholicity in that plan of the Auto Workers Union, CIO, to buy one of the Ford plants for reconversion and make prefabricated homes for workers. At least this is a step in the right direction toward ownership and responsibility.
The Servile State

Day aside, the collapse of the New Deal coalition marked the decline of Catholic influence on the national scene. As Daly writes:

Sexual freedom, extreme secularism, and other agendas of the new social liberalism did not merely replace the common good as a normative framework. It shifted the whole framework of rights from the worker and his family and community, viewed as something in need of protection, to the detached individual of liberal philosophy, regardless of economic position or need. Essentially, the common good was supplanted by individual liberation, and what remained of it in public discourse was little more than empty rhetoric (think “compassionate conservatism”).

While the economic individualism of the Right undermines its declared support for "Family Values," the lifestyle individualism of the left compromises its efforts at economic solidarity.

Scientific Historical Fiction

Via Mark Shea, an enjoyable story of historical fiction that fleshes out the medieval predecessors of modern science:

If you stand on the mountain peak of any great age and gaze toward the past, you may spy in the purpled west the jagged range of another great age. And make no mistake: those distant peaks mark as great an age as any, and there were giants on the earth, men whose names ought never be forgotten:

Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux; Blanche of Castile and Good King Louis; Hildegarde of Bingen, “the Sybil of the Rhine.” Robert of Chester, Adelard of Bath, Peter of Cluny. They are all “of” somewhere, but they go everywhere. Abelard has returned to teaching and at his aged feet sit Arnold of Brescia and John of Salisbury. Young Eleanor of Aquitaine is the Queen of France and patroness of the troubadours. Oh, those were names to conjure with!

Michael Flynn's Quaestiones Super Caelo Et Mundo

The Long Tradition of American Catholic Dissent

Bill Cork records embarrassing and venal antebellum defenses of slavery made by American Catholic bishops in the face of a plainly-worded papal condemnation.

The Life of Vincent McNabb, OP

More on Vincent McNabb:

The full extent of Father McNabb's own charity will of course never be known. What he did privately remained private even after the public death that we will shortly be considering. One known instance may have to suffice. In another rotting block of flats close to Camden Lock lived an old bed-ridden woman. For months, possibly for years, someone came regularly to talk to her, to tidy the room and to scrub the floor. A few weeks after Father McNabb had died, a group of people living in rooms near to the womans were discussing who would do the job as the old lady who had come to do the work before had evidently stopped coming. Only the bed-ridden ladys best friend knew that this lady had in fact been Father McNabb, on his way to Parliament Hill, dropping in for an half-hour-or-so to see the old lady.

Or another story:

On a more serious note, he once attended a public meeting on the subject of the Mental Degeneracy Bill then passing through the House of Commons. After listening to various medical experts explaining how they would certify as degenerates, and as a result sterilise, many types with whom Father McNabb was familiar in his pastoral work, the good friar stood up and, having been called to speak by the chairman of the meeting, bellowed: "I am a moral expert and I certify you as moral degenerates!" He stormed out of the meeting to rapturous applause and the meeting broke up in disarray.

"Buy boots you can walk in. Walk in them. Even if you lessen the income of the General Omnibus Company, or your family doctor; you will discover the human foot. On discovering it, your joy will be as great as if you had invented it. But this joy is the greatest, because no human invention even of Mr. Ford or Mr. Marconi is within a mile of a foot."
-Vincent McNabb

Looking for Ockham's Razor

via Lex Communis, an essay arguing that the medieval scholastic William of Ockham never said "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity," tracing the geneaology of the idea.

I am under the impression that under medieval nominalists' principle of parsimony, which shirked multiplying seemingly unnecessary entities such as Aristotelian essences, the only necessary cause was God. A fire lights dry wood? No inherent properties in the fire or the wood are necessary to explain the phenomenon. God did it, and it is only the constancy of his will that makes this fire-lighting a regular coincidence.

I doubt that this interpretation of Ockham would be welcomed by those who invoke his name today.

Unintended Consequences are Inescapable

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it.
-George F. Kennan
Quoted by Mark Danner, Iraq: The War of the Imagination New York Review of Books
via Mark Shea

Thou Hast Conquered, O Galilean!

Matt at Literate Catholics Unite notes this little gem from Pope Benedict's Deus Caritas Est:

"A mention of the emperor Julian the Apostate (+ 363) can also show how essential the early Church considered the organized practice of charity."

Julian the Apostate's death marked with a cross!

"Nenikekas Galilaie" indeed.

Christian Charity and Austerity: Evangelical Witnesses to the Pagans

Robert Royal of the Faith and Reason Institute gave a nice lecture last night at the Archdiocese of Denver. (recording available in .MP3)

Springboarding off of his new book, The God That Did Not Fail, he gave a pretty typical lecture about faith and politics. For the most part, it was right out of George Washington's Farewell Address. Secular order requires and presupposes transcendent, indispensable religious support. Natural Law ethics allow us to make rational arguments within this secular order while remaining energized by the spiritual life. Plus the theory helps us Catholics shmooze with Evangelicals!

I was concerned about Royal's near-complete focus on philosophy and political matters, so in the Q&A period I noted that music and movies have far more influence than explicit philosophical systems and laws in the state or national capitols. He missed the point of my question, and made a few weak suggestions about censorship, so I endorsed supporting artistic movements in addition to, or even rather than, political ones.

I have been worried about what Claes Ryn pegged as political philistinism, political intellectuals who draw "attention and respect away from efforts whose relevance to politics [is] not immediately obvious." A lecture on Christian arts--the non-ghettoized forms, especially--would likely attract a much smaller audience. For us, alas, ethical speechifying and politics seem a broader, more common activity than other forms of cultural engagement. Both rest upon the use and abuse of the written word. Yet Christianity, being an incarnational faith, cannot thrive on such disincarnated verbiage. The vision is lacking and, well, you know the rest.

But like many a tiresome questioner, I am critical about the lecture Robert Royal did not give.

To return to focus, the best part of Royal's speech came when he referred to antiquity and the rise of Christianity. He cited the witness of the pagans:

"The impious Gallileans support not only their poor, but ours as well. Everyone can see that our poor lack aid from us."
-Julian the Apostate

"We now see the people called Christians drawing their faith from parables and miracles, and yet sometimes acting in the same way as those who practice philosophy. With their contempt of death and of its sequel is patent to us every day, and likewise their restraint in cohabitation. For they include not only men but also women who refrain from cohabiting all through their lives; and they also number individuals who, in self-discipline and self-control in matters of food and drink, and in their keen pursuit of justice, have attained a pitch not inferior to that of genuine philosophers."
-Galen

Just yesterday Amy Welborn was talking about the decline of fasting. Its capacity for Christian witness should not be overestimated.

Robert Royal expands on these ancient authors and the evangelical life which attracted their remarks:

"...I mention this because I am distressed. I was at a conference at a Catholic university a couple weeks ago and the sociologists who do these surveys about what the church is going to look like in the future say that one of the developments in the world is that young Catholics don't believe there is any difference between Catholicism and other religions, that everybody is pretty much the same. And if that's true, that's really unfortunate. It means that we don't have that kind of witness, either by charity or by our philosophical self-control. I think if we had either of those, better both but even either, the New Evangelization would be a lot easier."

Amen.

(I have a relatively high quality digital recording of this speech, interested parties can e-mail me)