David Schindler on John Courtney Murray and Religious Freedom

Via the Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club, we find a link to David Schindler's essay from the Winter 1994 issue of Communio, Religious Freedom, Truth & American Liberalism: Another Look at John Courtney Murray. He examines the most influential Catholic defender of the American Experiment, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, SJ. His thesis:

My contention is that liberalism just so far draws us into a con game: inviting us to dialogue within the (putatively) open and pluralistic market of religions, all the while that it has already, hiddenly, filled the terms of that dialogue with a liberal theory of religion. The liberal appeal to religious pluralism hides its own "monism"; the liberal appeal to religious freedom hides its own definite truth about the nature of religion. My proposal is that Murray, despite his intentions to the contrary, has disposed Catholics to share in this paradox of liberalism. The disposition has been created by two of his central theses: that the religion clauses of the First Amendment are "articles of peace" and that religious freedom is best understood for purposes of political order first in its negative meaning, as an immunity from coercion, and thus first as a formal notion empty of positive religious content.

The essay is chock full of insight. Here's a brief mention of the difference between Continental and Anglican separationism:

Continental liberalism understood the separation of church and state to imply the irrelevance of religion to the public order; Anglo-Saxon liberalism, on the other hand, distinguished between two kinds of societies, the church and the civil order, in a way that left intact the Catholic insistence on the public significance and necessity of religion.

Reminiscent of G.K. Chesterton's dictum that all political disagreements are essentially theological, Schindler persuasively argues that the separation between State and Church in itself is not an example of government neutrality on theological questions, but presupposes certain premises of Western Christendom. In a passage that has telling implications for our attempt to install liberal democracy in Iraq, Schindler writes:

But the matter is not so simple as this seems to indicate, for Murray's position here in fact leads to a dilemma. If really tied to a theological dualism, then his "articles of peace" interpretation already implies "articles of faith": it already and in principle favors those religious worldviews which subscribe to such dualism. If, on the contrary, his "articles of peace" interpretation really means to remain such, then Murray must detach it from his own theological dualism (i.e., from any definite theological content). Similarly with respect to Murray's primary definition of religious freedom: one cannot claim that such a definition is strictly formal-juridical ("freedom from"), while at the same time insisting that such a definition carries some implication of positive openness to God and the transcendent order ("freedom for"). Formal agnosticism in and of itself does not carry any positive implication of theism. Either the juridical definition remains purely formal, in which case one cannot rightfully claim that it implies positive openness to God; or the juridical definition does carry the implication of positive openness to God, in which case it does not remain purely formal.

This charge of equivocation on Murray's part might be judged trivial, were it not the case that American liberalism has traded on just such an equivocation. Liberalism characteristically insists that it is merely offering a formal-juridical freedom to all religions, while at the same time it (tacitly) mediates its appeal to freedom via a definite theoretical (if typically unconscious) dualism. The non-triviality of this maneuvre becomes especially clear when we note its implications with respect to any non-Western (or non-liberalized) religion—with respect to any country where a traditional (or non-dualistic) worldview still predominates. In countries, for example, where certain forms of Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, Native American-Indian, or African religion still prevail, an invitation to adopt the juridical notion of religious freedom amounts to nothing less than an invitation to adopt the theological dualism of liberalism—albeit, again, only in the name of a purely formal commitment to the principle of freedom.

Relative to the non-trivial nature of Murray's equivocation, then, my first point is that it is in any case important to be accurate in one's description of what one is doing; and what Murray's liberalism does in effect is invite other countries to adopt a religious freedom, not which leaves a traditional religion intact but which on the contrary requires transformation of that religion: requires that it subscribe to an alternative religious truth. In exporting something like's Murray's sense of America's *novus ordo seclorum*, what one is doing is just that: exporting a new *order*, which always already carries an alternative religious worldview. Failure to be clear about this implies nothing less than the paradox of imparting a truth about freedom unconsciously and blindly—and just so far *unfreely*.

Schindler's section titled Secularism: America's practical atheism is especially troubling, for it is very on-target:

Note again the theoretical implications of Murray's primitive conception of religious freedom as an immunity from (coercion by the state), or again of the religious clauses of the First Amendment as absent of any definite-positive content of religion (religious truth). As we have seen, this conception of religious freedom as a matter of principle grants primacy to the negative rather than to the positive in man's relation to God. In so doing, it effectively replaces an understanding of the human act as constitutively oriented to God with an understanding of the human act as not constitutively oriented to God: "indifference" to God is placed (logically) before positive relation to God. Such a maneuver by implication changes the first and most proper meaning of religion: religion, insofar as its positive content is concerned, is now something which by definition is yet to be "added" to human nature.

[...]The distinctive claim of America, according to Murray, lies in its affirmation of the human act as juridically neutral toward, hence formally empty of, God. The human act in its basic structure, for purposes of the constitutional ordering of society, is understood to be silent about God (cf. "articles of peace"). But this means that, when theists go on to fill this silence with speech, they must now do so precisely by way of *addition* and in their capacity as *private* members of society. Non-theists, in contrast, have merely to *leave* the state's formally-conceived human act *as it is*, namely, in the primitive emptiness which has already been accorded *official-public* status. Worldviews that favor silence about God in the affairs of the earthly or temporal order therefore always retain an *official-public* theoretical advantage over worldviews that favor speech about God.

Murray's project thus seems to lead to a privatization of religion. By this, I do not mean that Murray himself endorses privatization: clearly he does not. I mean, with Bradley, only that Murray's position contains an equivocation: affirming premises ("articles of peace") that entail privatization while otherwise defending the contrary. Recognition of nature's constitutive relation to God, in the way sketched here, clarifies the properly theoretical ground for the reservations recorded by Bradley.

Relative to Murray's distinction between liberalisms, then, my intention is not, at least not in the first instance, to call into question the legitimacy of the contrast Murray draws between nineteenth-century Europe's overt closure to God and the American Founding's apparent openness to God. The point is rather the more qualified one that America's peculiar (openness to) theism, in the ambiguous sense in which Murray interprets it, remains, for all of its explicit intention to the contrary, still consistent with a certain "a-theism." In place of the overt and aggressive atheism of Europe, America in fact (again, assuming Murray's interpretation) officially affirms a covert and more passive a-theism, the peculiarity of which lies precisely in its ability to coexist with, indeed, to dwell within, a certain intention of theism.

To clarify this paradoxical assertion, we can usefully recall the argument developed by Will Herberg, in his classic _Protestant Catholic Jew_,[20] regarding what he termed the "American Way of Life." Herberg defines the "American Way of Life" most succinctly as "secularized Puritanism" (81). According to him, religion and secularism in America have a peculiar way of turning into each other. Protestant-Puritanism, for example, and secularism both accept some significant sense of God's separation from the affairs of this world. To be sure, they do so for opposite reasons. Puritans intend to subordinate all of their earthly life to the transcendent God; but, precisely to secure God's transcendence to protect, as it were, against premature eschatology—, they are nonetheless prompted to draw a clean line between the earthly ("natural") and the heavenly ("supernatural") realms, thus breaking these two realms into separate fragments. The sincere *religious intention* of the Puritans is thus undercut by a logic of God's transcendence, which, however unwittingly and paradoxically, can rightly be seen to coincide with a *logic of secularism*—which, for opposite reasons and with opposite intentions, also keeps God distant from "worldly" affairs.

According to Herberg, in sum, America's dualism is such that the order proper to this world remains logically a-theistic. Here is where Puritanism, Deism, and secularism can all come together, albeit out of vastly different motivations: what they all share is a conception of God as first distant and hence separate from the world.

Murray's position, in my opinion, does not provide any principled protection against secularism or atheism of the sort described by Herberg; on the contrary, it provides an exact theoretical foundation for the latter. Murray's interpretation of the religion clauses as articles of peace, and his understanding of religious freedom as first a freedom *from*, under-gird a sense of God's transcendence of this world, or again a sense of a dualism between earthly and heavenly realms, that leads logically to Herberg's "American Way of Life."

Regarding the current situation in America, then, public opinion polls seem to indicate a strong continuing presence of religion in American life: over ninety percent of Americans say they believe in God, a decisive majority believe in the Bible as the inspired word of God, and so on. But similar evidence of religiosity was indicated by the empirical data of Herberg's time (the mid-fifties). Indeed, the purpose of his book was to explain just how this apparently widespread religiosity could nonetheless coexist with what were indications also of massive secularism (consumerism, materialism, and the like). His explanation is clear: religiosity and secularism in America share an inner logic or framework of reality, such that religion is disposed as a matter of principle to invert into secularism. Religion and secularism thus coexist, and indeed can grow directly rather than inversely in proportion to one another, because they are largely but different sides of the same coin.[21--a very provocative footnote -kjj]

Herberg thus differs from those today who, appealing to empirical studies, insist, in a Murrayite vein, that America remains "incorrigibly religious." To be sure, those who thus defend the thesis of America's continuing religiosity, at least those on the Right, typically acknowledge, as Herberg did, a growing secularism in the culture manifest, for example, in abortion and moral relativism. But, contrary to Herberg, they do so all the while restricting this secularism to a certain group within the culture. The majority of Americans remains religious; it is what is termed the "new knowledge class"—the educational elite which dominates the media and the academy and the court—that has become increasingly aggressively secular. The presence of secularism in this influential elite creates the impression of a prevailing secularism all out of proportion to what actually exists in the mainstream culture.

But note how those who thus "regionalize" the phenomenon of secularism in contemporary America follow the assumptions of Murray. These thinkers follow Murray in making a simple contrast between European secularism and American religiosity, without differentiating further, a la Herberg, how American religiosity itself tends of its nature toward inversion into secularism. When faced with the undeniable growth of a more overt and aggressive secularism in contemporary America, they consequently have no choice but to restrict secularism largely to a distinct (influential) group within society; or otherwise to claim that this secularism stems from moral and political pressures emergent only in recent decades. In either case, these thinkers, following Murray, interpret secularism in America to be largely an aberration relative to the founding principles of the country. My argument, in contrast, influenced by Herberg, is that secularism in America is logically linked to the founding principles of America, if and insofar as Murray's "articles of peace" and formal-negative notion of religious freedom correctly interpret those principles.

Schindler follows with an acute theological analysis of the political consequences that follow, depending on how one interprets the nature-grace distinction. He concludes his charisological section thusly:

The apparently subtle difference between de Lubac and Murray on the relation between the secular and sacred thus leads in the end to two different conceptions of the civilization towards which Christians should be working: one, a civilization wherein citizenship is to be suffused with sanctity; the other, a civilization wherein sanctity is always something to be (privately/hiddenly) added to citizenship.

And indeed his conclusion to the whole piece is a welcome request for open and honest theological disagreement:

In short, what we need to do is to invite all parties in America to bring their religious theories into the clear light of day, including especially the liberal party which would claim a religious freedom without a religious theory. This is the necessary condition for beginning a truly ecumenical dialogue among all faiths, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, secular, and all others, Eastern and Western.[44] Only a dialogue of this sort can make possible a legitimate, as distinct from hiddenly liberal, kind of pluralism: make possible, in other words, the kind of pluralism which permits all parties to be open and honest about their deepest convictions, and in this already begins to realize genuine community.

Christianity is more important to democracy than is democracy to Christianity

So writes one of the Brothers Judd in this review of Robert Kraynak's _Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World. I've been waiting for some time for David Schindler's _Heart of the World, Heart of the Church_ to be available at the local academic library. Perhaps this will be just as good a book, from the same school of "Postmodern Augustinian Thomists." Note the very informative author info link in the sidebar.

What's Wrong with Quentin Tarantino

Relapsed Catholic links to an article that reveals exactly what's wrong with Mr. Tarantino and his films:

Tarantino is clearly a gifted artist. The dialogue, the technique, the artistry of Pulp Fiction are often brilliant. So what might account for his distortions of religion, nihilism, and existentialism? Distortion of the Bible is understandable (if artistically culpable) given his a priori rejection of transcendence. But why would Tarantino distort philosophies with which he is in obvious sympathy? I think the most plausible answer is in accepting his sense of the existential while speculating that Tarantino's lack of apparent 'consciousness' is due to the reality that he has never suffered."

Questions for Liberals

both Classical and Modern, from Jim Kalb.

One of the platitudes

..about liberal democracy is that it allows peaceful change of public political policy. Via the free press, we can attack our leaders and persuade our fellow citizens of the truth of our political ideas and the falsehood of others' positions. This platitude is qualified by the necessity to have dedicated and moderately well-funded fellow-travelers. Thanks to McCain-Feingold, this platitude needs even further qualification. Fox News reports: Anti-Abortion Ads Will Be Illegal. And of course, which politician is among those under attack? Sen. Russ Feingold, the very co-sponsor of the bill that limits attacks on him.

Thoughts on Oxymoronic International Conservatism

from Paul Cella at Redstate.org. Good points, all. I do worry that Mr. Cella falls into that oh-so-constraining habit of "binary thinking," however. The implication of his piece is that one is either an internationalist or a nationalist. Of course, there is at least one other possibility: localist. Of course, local concerns like self-regulation and self-government are more easily protected by the nation-state than by any world-state, so any localist tends to have more affinity for the former than the latter. Nonetheless, localism is certainly not nationalism.

Articles Various and Sundry

A Democratic & Republican Religion, putatively on the commodification of religion in American life, but not really.

Redefining Marriage Away by two Princeton professors, Robert P. George(the renowned natural law theorist and bioethicist) and David L. Tubbs, of whom I've never heard before.

Also, The New Pantagruel 1.3 has just been released. I'm worried that my initial affection for it resembles my initial, but not enduring, attraction to the punchy(though not nearly as scholarly) New Oxford Review. I let my NOR subscription lapse after perhaps two years of subscribing because its constant bitching got old fast. May The New Pantagruel not suffer the same fate.

My Comments at Southern Appeal

Can somebody clarify something for me?

If making pornography is legal, and prostitution is not, then why haven't prostitutes simply started filming their business dealings and selling videos? As far as I'm concerned, a porn star, male or female, is just a better paid, better publicized prostitute. Much like our politicians.

On A Mixed Constitution

I've been trying to track down whether the American Constitution was inspired by the theory of the mixed constitution. I've read claims stating that the separation of powers results from accepting Newtonian mechanics as the model for government, but never quite fully believed them. I always thought the original American Constitution functioned more like a mixture of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements, each serving to offset the other. Now I have found some hard evidence to back up my intuition.

First, a paper by a student who examines the influence of Polybius on the separation of powers doctrine found in Madison's works, like Federalist 10.

Second, a paper titled The Mixed Constitution and the Common Law which is even more detailed than the aforementioned text, tracing the influence of the mixed constitution from the decline of absolute monarchy through the American War of Independence. It indicates that Montesquieu was indeed of a mechanistic bent. However, he was undeniably influenced by Polybius, the originator of the idea of the mixed regime, as was Madison.

So now let's consider the American system of government as a mixed constitution. The president obviously corresponds to a monarch, the House of Representatives and Senate corresponds to the democratic elements. But what of the aristocracy? Perhaps before the 17th Amendment, which mandated the popular election of senators, rather than indirect election by the state legislatures, the Senate could indeed have been considered the aristocratic portion of the government. Now, it seems, the judiciary branch is the closest we have to an aristocratic order in the government. Of course, the independent judiciary is a development based not on the classical theory of the mixed regime, but on English attempts to develop that tradition further and provide additional checks on government for the securing of liberty.

But wait--that word "liberty"--isn't that a change from classical mixed government, which sought to secure the common good? I suppose it is, unless we are astute enough so as to define liberty as a common good. Which, all things considered, is a very good move.

A Sad Section of a Story by Auberon Waugh on the decline of English Catholicism.

(Link was broken. Thanks to Apologia's Bill Luse for alerting me.)

Even More Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

First, Excerpts from EvK-L's Liberty Or Equality depicting the voting patterns of Germans during the rise of Nazism. Catholics come off pretty good. I wonder if he also shows how many Catholics voted for the Communists, who after all were the Nazi party's main opposition. In _Leftism Revisited_ we read how a depressingly high percentage of German voters voted for one or the other of the totalitarian parties.

Second, A PDF-format article on the cultural background of libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises, which is very instructive on Central European culture and history. Here's just one example:

"And since all [Polish] noblemen were equals, they could not be ruled by majorities. In the parliament, the Sejm, the oposition of a single man--the Liberum Veto--annulled any legal proposition."

Strictly speaking, this is quite true. If a set of men are equals, the one-man one-vote system cannot respect this equality, while a one-man, one-veto system does. Imagine such a system operating in the putatively egalitarian United States!

I'm tempted...

...to lambast this talk about the unequalled Orestes Brownson given to the Unitarian Society of New Brunswick, for not mentioning that Brownson eventually left Unitarianism and converted to Catholicism. Instead, I'll be content that it may simply pique the interest of a few to peruse the life of Brownson, and perhaps end up where he did.

Soloviev's A Tale of the Antichrist

Military Contractors, a Bad Idea Restored?

Reichsritter comments at LF:

The U.S. appears to be returning to the eighteenth century practice of hiring civilian contractors to provide support services for the front-line troops. The reason armies stopped doing this is precisely because civilian contractors can be unreliable, inconsistent, and dishonest, and -- as you pointed out -- they have no compelling interest to stick around while they are being shot at.

Conversely, since the truckdrivers are not part of their unit, nor are the trucks the property of the U.S. Army, the escort has no compelling reason to stick around either.

More and more, the U.S. army is beginning to resemble a modern version of the army of Louis XV -- brutality towards civilians (even allied) civilians), a large percentage of foreigners in its ranks, the extensive use of "subsidy troops" (i.e., mercenaries), the remoteness of its regimental level officers, the assignment of high command to political appointees.

I can't believe the professionals don't see this.

www.philosophytalk.org

A web page title I never expected to see together

Walmart.com-The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Secularism as a State Religion

"Western cultures are losing sight of the critical distinction between a non-confessional state and a secularist state."

-Phillip Trower, at Christendom Awake

Precisely. I've said the same thing myself, only using "non-sectarian" instead of "non-confessional." "Non-confessional" seems to me a better term, especially in an American context where "non-sectarian" meant in the past non-Catholic, non-denominational Protestantism. See the history of the Blaine amendments.

Of course nowadays the courts have interpreted the phrase "non-sectarian" as meaning secular, which helps precipitate the mess we have today.

Onward, Christian Soldiers

A review of Richard M. Gamble's _The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation_

The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Caesar

A piece by Russian philosopher-theologian N.A. Berdyaev. Some silly remarks about the inevitable and irreversible march of history, but otherwise insightful. He comments that the Czarist theologians tended to turn the coronation into the eighth sacrament. I'll see how the monarchists I know respond to that.

If the abbeys went down, the king would never want any taxes again

On the dissolution of the monasteries

Preachers were moreover commissioned to go over the country in the early autumn, in order, by their invectives, to educate public opinion against the monks. These pulpit orators were of three sorts:

"railers", who declaimed against the religious as "hypocrites, sorcerers, and idle drones, etc.";

"preachers", who said the monks "made the land unprofitable";

 and those who told the people that, "if the abbeys went down, the king would never want any taxes again."

This last was a favourite argument of Cranmer, in his sermons at St. Paul's Cross.

What is *this* doing on townhall.com?

A positive review of Amintore Fanfani's _Capitalism, Protestantism, and Catholicism_, examining the origins and impact of capitalism on Christian life. Fanfani, a student of economics, went on to become a leader in Italy's Christian Democrat party. (How many economists are in our parties' leadership?) According to the review, "his final thesis is that "[m]odern capitalism is not compatible with Catholic morality or any Christian, that is, Protestant sect."

I was wondering about what Michael Novak might say about this. A review from a schismatic traditionalist site reveals that he has indeed written the introduction to one edition of the work. Novak seems to have made a habit of writing belittling introductions to Catholic critiques of capitalism--his foreward to G.K. Chesterton's _The Outline of Sanity_ is notorious. Somebody once quipped that having him write the introduction to GKC's distributism was like Hugh Hefner writing a forward to a book on Christian marriage. Aren't introductions supposed to *encourage* the reader to read the work at hand?

Anyway, I hope to get to Fanfani's work eventually. American insularity and monolingualism both tend to isolate American Catholics from their brothers and sisters around the world, and I would like to learn just what kind of political reasoning a Christian Democrat uses. Too bad I made my library run hours before I learned of this book.(Current read: Claes G. Ryn's _America the Virtuous_).

Lo! Here's the IHS Press introduction to the book.

The Underground History of American Education

The Tragedy of Democracy

From an Aussie thinktank.

The Trouble with Libertarianism

God is Not an American

Notre Dame's Rev. Michael J. Baxter, CSC, a Catholic Worker-type and Notre Dame theologian who is actually a believing Catholic, pens a challenging critique of the rhetoric used by Bush and Neuhaus & co. following September 11.

For one thing, [Neuhaus' argument] casts the war on terrorism in the exaggerated terms of a struggle for freedom and justice against cruelty and fear, and thus fails to acknowledge the possibility that neither the United States nor al-Qaeda may be on the side of freedom and justice (properly understood) or that both may be given to spreading cruelty and fear. Possibilities such as these do not appear when the world is viewed through the simplistic lens of Neuhaus (and Bush). For another thing, after identifying the cause of the United States with the cause of freedom and justice, it employs a flawed argument to align both of these causes to the purposes of God. The argument is flawed because, while it is true, as Neuhaus argues, that God is not neutral when it comes to freedom and justice, it is also true that God's purposes may well be aligned with a form of freedom and justice that is represented neither by the United States nor by al-Qaeda, but rather by some other political entity or body or by the church itself.

Of course, Neuhaus and especially Bush are involved in stirring up the people and the troops for the conflict, and saying, for instance, "We're fighting for the lesser of two evils" is hardly the wording used to instill dedication and sacrifice. Baxter continues, touching on the vagueness of the deity to which Americans refer in saying "One nation under God," or "In God We Trust." This is a key insight, I think. How many Christians were eager to believe that Muslims do not worship the same God as they, but yet also have quoted with approval Jefferson's dictum that "all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" when in fact it is certain that Jefferson neither worshipped nor believed in the God of Abraham?

Baxter's essay is a worthy examination of the tenets of American civil religion. I am surprised it appeared at Free Republic, yet it is for a thread such as this that I continue to browse that increasingly emotivist forum.

It's not a Catholic work if it shows the sins of the Religious. Really!

The opera Jongleur de Notre Dame is playing at a local opera house. No doubt this is based on the story about the juggler who enters the monastery and, shamed by his fellow monks' talents displayed before a statue of Our Lady, thinks himself an inept talentless clod. Then one evening, he decides to juggle before the statue... and the statue smiles! Such sickeningly sweet pious stories are part and parcel of Catholic life. So it's quite funny to watch the director downplay the patent kitschy Christianity of the tale. (One wonders whether the opera company performed similar contortions when it presented Dialogue of the Carmelites a few years back.) Here's the director:

"But it's not overtly religious," the director said of the opera, which opens on Saturday. "Yeah, there's a miracle at the end. But it's about the importance of being honest."

or this gem:

"It's certainly not a 'Catholic' piece. In fact, there's a lot of mocking of the clergy." Indeed, there is a scene in which the monks argue over whose artistic talents are superior."

What's even more laughable is the contrast between the commercial paper's review and the Denver Catholic Register's review, titled "Upcoming opera offers lessons in humility, devotion to Our Lady.

'Caroline is being mystical,' Ernest said.
'Caroline is a mystic,' said Eleanor. 'I've always said so. She's a mystic, isn't she, Laurence?'

'Every time,' said Lawrence, very pleasantly.

'And the trouble with these mystics, the theorise on the basis of other people's sufferings, and in the end they belittle suffering. Caroline, if you'd suffered as much as I'd suffered, you wouldn't be talking like something out of this world.'

'I won't compete with you on the question of suffering,' Caroline spoke acidly, for, after all, she rather fancied herself a sufferer.

-Muriel Spark, The Comforters

Underminding the Foundation Myths of Liberalism

Jim Kalb links to an intriguing piece attacking the standard "the secular state arose as an alternative to wars of religion" thesis. A quotation:

Now the first problem with the attempt to make religion public is that it is still religion. Neuhaus, the Himeses, and McBrien all abide by McBrien's "working assumption" that "religion is a universal category (genus) and that Christianity is one of its particular forms (species)."71 Talal Asad's critique of Geertz' work provides us with a useful antidote to these universalist constructions of religion. Asad shows how the attempt to identify a distinctive essence of religion, and thus protect it from charges that it is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of "politics" or "economics," is in fact linked with the modem removal of religion from the spheres of reason and power.72 Religion is a universal essence detachable from particular ecclesial practices, and as such can provide the motivation necessary for all citizens of whatever creed to regard the nation?state as their primary community, and thus produce peaceful consensus. As we have seen, religion as a transhistorical phenomenon separate from "politics" is a creation of Western modernity designed to tame the Church. Religion may take different cultural and symbolic expressions, but it remains a universal essence generically distinct from political power which then must be translated into publicly acceptable "values" in order to become public currency. Religion is detached from its specific locus in disciplined ecclesial practices so that it may be compatible with the modem Christian's subjection to the discipline of the State.

They're not Quacks, they're Leading Scientists

Touchstone links to a blogger's encounter with James Watson, co-discoverer of the Double Helix and advocate of eugenic abortions.

Holy Ground

William Luse excerpts a novel he likes. I might like it too. More material for the Denver Catholic Book Club?

The Stephanos Project

An Orthodox site containing a few citations of the Church Fathers against contraception.

Alexander the Great, an Orthodox blogger, links to another Orthodox Christian upholding Christian orthodoxy.

Vonnegut Goofs

I have to say that's a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.(source)

Now thanks to Mr. Vonnegut we have yet another error half-educated people will repeat as Gospel truth. Confucius, in his Analects, actually formulates the negative version of the Golden Rule, "Do not do to others what you would not like yourself." Jesus, of course, says "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" in Matthew 7:12. The negative version of the rule promotes a live and let die attitude, while the positive version enjoins feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and more meddlesome deeds like idol-smashing.

From the American Conservative

For Shame, on the abuse of prisoners of war.

An Interview with Ralph Nader

The Commonplace Book of Zadok the Roman

New Blog

The Ballad of the White Horse

A review of GKC's epic.

Intercollegiate Review Fall 1975

Coming to Grips with Darwin

Philosophical Disorder

Montesquieu’s Modern State

Intercollegiate Review Spring 1975

Was the American Founding A Lockean Enterprise? The Case of James Madison

Between Language and Silence: Wittgenstein’s Dilemma

Art and Religion: Felicitous Tension or Conflict?

The Case Against Perfection

An intriguing article in the Atlantic Monthly on eugenic enhancement.

Thoughts on the Legal Profession by a Disillusioned Lawyer

and part ii

Scita et Scienda: The Dwarfing of Modern Man

Also by von Kuehnelt-Leddin

Leftism Revisited

My newest political read is Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddhin's Leftism Revisited, a survey of left-wing thought. von Kuehnelt-Leddhin was
a Catholic aristocrat from Austria--he wrote for National Review,
back when that magazine had class. His opinions are quite thought-
provoking, though rather eccentric. He sees all democratic mass
movements as fundamentally leftist, which in his view includes
nationalism, communism, fascism, and nazism.

At first, this seems overly broad. Nazis as leftists? Yet he makes
his case for this categorization, citing voting statistics in the
elections during the rise of Hitler. The non-leftist non-Nazis
voted largely the same throughout this period. The left-wing
parties, however, all went over to Hitler.

True right-wingers support the mixed governments which have aspects
of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, rather than democracy in
its pure form. (I'm still debating whether the American government
fits the mixed government type.) von Kuehnelt-Leddhin shuns the
conservative label, considering himself an early liberal in the
spirit of other Catholic aristocrats like de Tocqueville and Lord
Acton.

I myself am torn between Chestertonian democratic populism and
Waughvian aristocratic pretension. This book hasn't helped me
resolve the tension at all, alas.

Christ is Risen from the dead,
By death, he conquered death,
And to those in the grave, he granted life!

Xenophon's Philosophic Odyssey: On the Anabasis and Plato's Republic

A provocative essay analyzing Xenophon's Anabasis as a political work.

Pretentious Poem Title

"The Death of Socrates as Seen from the Perspective of the Hemlock"

Coming Soon

Working on a review of Leo Strauss' _Natural Right and History_. In this entry I claimed I didn't understand NR&H. I can understand why, seeing as I hadn't read it. I must have confused it with Voegelin's _The New Science of Politics_.

What went wrong?

Father Paul Mankowski, SJ responds to the sexual abuse crisis.

Where have all the Rhapsodes gone?

Homer Sung Aloud, in yet another variant via Banana Republican. I prefer my own untutored version, fool that I am. I have two regrets about my classical language training:
1) We rarely read aloud. "Until it is spoken, it is not heard" and hearing is essential to linguistic mastery.
2) We never had composition assignments. How were we supposed to learn the language without writing in it?

Glory be to God for Dappled Things

The Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference was held at the local Jesuit
university this weekend, and though I missed most of the papers
presented, I did catch two excellent performances of GMH's poetry by
Richard Austin. Austin, a Shakespearean actor, has made his
readings available on CD. Here is his website.

More About Politics in Conservative Drag, How Liberal Rights are Wrong

An old FR thread on an article by Kenneth Craycraft, originally at the Intercollegiate Review

Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2004

Aquinas for the Democratic Age: A review of John Hittinger's Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory. Via TSO

Commonsense Ethics, Ralph McInerny reviews a J. Budziszewski book

Sin Makes You Stupid

The perfect intellectual operation in man consists in an abstraction from sensible phantasms, wherefore the more a man's intellect is freed from those phantasms, the more thoroughly will it be able to consider things intelligible, and to set in order all things sensible. Thus Anaxagoras stated that the intellect requires to be "detached" in order to command, and that the agent must have power over matter, in order to be able to move it. Now it is evident that pleasure fixes a man's attention on that which he takes pleasure in: wherefore the Philosopher says (Ethic. x, 4,5) that we all do best that which we take pleasure in doing, while as to other things, we do them either not at all, or in a faint-hearted fashion.

Now carnal vices, namely gluttony and lust, are concerned with pleasures of touch in matters of food and sex; and these are the most impetuous of all pleasures of the body. For this reason these vices cause man's attention to be very firmly fixed on corporeal things, so that in consequence man's operation in regard to intelligible things is weakened, more, however, by lust than by gluttony, forasmuch as sexual pleasures are more vehement than those of the table. Wherefore lust gives rise to blindness of mind, which excludes almost entirely the knowledge of spiritual things, while dullness of sense arises from gluttony, which makes a man weak in regard to the same intelligible things. On the other hand, the contrary virtues, viz. abstinence and chastity, dispose man very much to the perfection of intellectual operation. Hence it is written (Dan. 1:17) that "to these children" on account of their abstinence and continency, "God gave knowledge and understanding in every book, and wisdom."

-Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II ii, Q 15 Art. 3

Edmund Burke and Revolution

The Mystery of the Supernatural

The Old Oligarch posts some brief commentary on Henri Cardinal de Lubac's The Mystery of the Supernatural. Cornelis recommended this to me, and I almost picked it up on my last trip to the library.

Chris Rees has a Website

I met Chris Rees at the Denver Chesterton Society. He has several interesting pieces on his site, including one debunking the enneagram and a mock-socratic dialogue on metaphysics.

The Concept of Sin

Another excellent work of Joseph Pieper, The Concept of Sin, has been translated into English. A few excerpts:

"In other words, only pride --which is a word we use to describe an attitued that intends to turn away from God--makes sin in the first place into the definitive wrong that it is.

Consequently, the less the concrete deed contains the element of "pride" and the more cupiditas it has, the less the guiltiness of the action. But the more spiritual a human being is, that is, the more he has rendered himself immune to the seductions and charms of the sensible world by living a life of self-abnegation and disciplining his will, the more he can now commit the offense, the sin of unadulterated hybris and blatant pride. Only if all the powers of my being obey me does the question suddenly occur to me: whom do I myself now obey?

This leaves us with an unsettling conclusion: only a purely spiritual being could become guilty in this extreme sense. Of course the philosopher, qua philosopher, has no competence to speak of angels and their sin. Nonetheless, we can learn something of philosophical import about the essence of human guilt when theology tells us that the first sin of the angels could only have been the sin of pride."

-p. 62

"At first hearing, Nicholai Hartmann's own answer [to the question of original sin] sounds quite plausible: "There is no freedom for the good that would not be at the same time freedom for evil." But on further reflection we see how this statement introduces an impermissible simplification into the argument. Were this thesis true, then God would not be free(nor, for that matter, would the person who has attained final fulfillment, the saint in heaven--a category that only the believer can be convinced of).

In any case, in its long history the Western tradition has conceived of the problem differently from Mr. Hartmann. Thomas Aquinas speaks only as one of its witnesses when he says that to be able to sin is indeed a consequence(De Veritate 24,3 ad 2), or even a sign of freedom, quoddam libertatis signum(De Veritate 22,6), but "it does not belong to the essence of the free will to be able to decide for evil."(De Veritate 24,3 ad 2; Commentary on the Sentences 2d; 44,1,1 ad 1) "To will evil is neither freedom nor a part of freedom."(De Veritate 22,6) In other words, the inability to sin should be looked on as the very signature of a higher freedom--contrary to the usual way of conceiving the issue."

-P. 79

And here's a review from elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Name Change

The title "Velleity of Velleities" has become too insouciant for my tastes. "Philokalia" means love of beauty and, in my opinion, is the basis for all philosophy. I add "republic" to its name to denote my taste for political thought.

"Shameless Acts" Revisited

Robert P. George on Martha Nussbaum's perjury in a Colorado Supreme Court case which overturned an amendment to the Colorado constitution prohibiting special rights for homosexuals. This is a followup to John Finnis' Shameless Acts in Colorado

Spring 1971 Intercollegiate Review

"One does not have to be an anarchist or a cynic to hold that society is meaningless; no less a personage than a US Ambassador to a South American country--Mr. John Cabot Lodge--said in a recent ceremonial public speech that "society is an abstraction, only individuals are real." This latter-day nominalism is destructive and silly: society is "man writ large," and the proof is that no two communities are interchangeable--precisely because they embody experiences which make increasing sense within a given framework, which translates the reality of the world into the language of specific shared relationships."


Thomas Molnar, Tradition and Social Change

The manner in which society exists has always intrigued me. Does a given society have its own "essence," its own way of life that forms its members by its very nature? Or is it simply the sum total of its relations? Time to revisit the nominalist controversy.

The authors[of The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition] undertake to illuminate the problem that has been generated by liberal domination since the Great Depression. That interpretation has attempted to show that the only American tradition has been "liberal" and that the liberal view has been the basis for the utopianism of contemporary reform. For the liberals, the interpretation of the American tradition has created a unified myth that America stands primarily for liberty, equality, and the rights of man, making the Declaration of Independence the foundation stone of the new edifice.

[...]Our authors attack the overemphasis on the idea that the Declaration is talking individual rights, and more particularly the illegitimate use of the Declaration by Abraham Lincoln. Such a use was a derailment of our tradtion, not its proper interpretation. And this leads to the problem of definitions of equality. The authors affirm that there is no foundation for saying on the basis of the Declaration that individuals have rights that stand above the government of their community by a virtuous people.

[...]It is our constitutional morality not to have a showdown between the three branches of the government. Our system, say Kendall and Carey, cannot survive such confrontations. But the new morality of the judges does not want us to go through the laborious process of gathering the deliberate sense of the community: We march instead toward an "open society" of equality.

Francis G. Wilson, Reclaiming the American Political Tradition

Foresight, or Paranoia?

Freeper NWU Army ROTC attended a fireside chat with Cardinal George, and gave a short description on Free Republic. He declares:

His[George's] most sobering comment concerned the status of the Church in twenty years. His foresees the Catholic Church being forced underground as in China (with less physical persecution). He argued that for example, a woman sues the Church to be a priest saying it is her right. She gets five justices to agree that it is a right. The Church cannot argue legally from a sacramental standpoint, because Roe v. Wade changed the argument from institutional and community to individual rights, as such the Church must argue on the basis of rights, and here has no argument. The Five justices decree women's ordination, the result is two churches. One a state sponsored Catholic Church and the other an underground Catholic Church. His actual timeframe was ten years.

Cardinal George isn't a fringe character. He's a man of deep reasoning and analysis. I hope he's wrong.

More ISI Articles

The Guises of Philosophical Nihilism

The Death of Liberalism

Newspaper Editing at its Finest

A Los Angeles Times music critic who wrote that a Richard Strauss opera was "pro-life" -- meaning a celebration of life -- was stunned to pick up the paper and find his review changed by a literal-minded copy editor to read "anti-abortion."

Intercollegiate Review Winter 1968-69

Some articles:

Cicero and the Politics of the Public Orthodoxy by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen & Willmoore Kendell

The Science and Demonology of Politics by Ellis Sandoz, a review of Eric Voegelin's excellent Science, Politics, and Gnosticism

Darwinian Platonism?

Because Darwinism gave a new explanation for how and why each organism is so well adapted to its environment, this enormous record of convergence surely must say something as well about the environment. In other words, the fact that so many biological forms developed photosensitive cells and then eyes (or their equivalents) also testifies to the ubiquity of light, just as the fact that wings developed independently on insects, birds, bats, some dinosaurs, and so forth, testifies to the density and viscosity of the atmosphere of the earth. So too with complex brains: to be adaptive, brains have to evolve in response to the environment. In other words, if wings evolve over against and in response to air and eyes over against and in response to light, then brains must evolve over against and in response to something like “mental air.” By that admittedly metaphorical term I mean those a priori ideal structures already part of the universe that make a mathematics-capable brain possible in the first place. In other words, Darwinism is not only compatible with Platonism, it presupposes it.

It cannot be the burden of this chapter to establish the argument and grounds for advocating such a “Darwinian Platonism,” except perhaps to say that a denial of this thesis would run into the difficulty of suddenly finding that the human brain, alone of all organs and organism, is not adapted to its environment and did not evolve over against any selecting force in nature, the way air and light work for wings and eyes respectively. I should also perhaps add that arguments for Platonism , when reinforced by Darwinian perspectives, can help heal the neuralgia currently afflicting atheist Darwinians like Richard Dawkins whenever they hear the word religion. For that reason, the Platonic implications of Darwinian theory will often be resisted for just this reason by atheists, but that is to argue against the conclusion on prior grounds, not against the evidence or the logic of Darwinism.
-Edward T. Oakes, SJ, "Complexity in Context"

Father Oakes has commented on this elsewhere. Quoting Daniel Dennett:

It has often been pointed out that Plato's curious theory of reincarnation and reminiscence, which he offers as an explanation of the source of our a priori knowledge, bears a striking resemblance to Darwin's theory, and this resemblance is particularly striking from our current vantage point. Darwin himself famously noted the resemblance in a remark in one of his notebooks. Commenting on the claim that Plato thought our "necessary ideas" arise from the pre-existence of the soul, Darwin wrote: "read monkeys for preexistence."

George Orwell's Despair by Russell Kirk

Hitler's Accomplice

Fran Buber-Neumann, wife of a leading German Communist, who was thrown into a Stalinist concentration camp after her husband was purged, then (in 1940) handed over to Hitler's institution. Wife of a Jew, she happened to be a non-Jewish Prussian woman; she and dozens of Jews were delivered by Stalin to Hitler, no doubt as a friendly seal on their alliance.

-Thomas Molnar, The Robot Mentality, Intercollegiate Review March-April 1967

Catholic Theologian belittles Biblical Text

No, it's not about sodomy. Here's Michael Novak:

"In the ancient and medieval world, commerce was much despised. The desire for money was described as "the root of all evils.""

It's only St. Paul, after all. And isn't Fidelio's Rocco superior?

On Debate and Existence

This Voegelin essay is quite thought provoking. I'm still trying to decide if I agree with him that Thomistic/Aristotelian categories of being, which once clarified, now only obscure.

A few links on Leo Strauss

Strauss's Conservatism by Harvey Mansfield(Word Format)

THE CLOSING OF THE EARLY MODERN MIND: LEO STRAUSS AND EARLY MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT, claiming Strauss does not, indeed, cannot accept Early Modern philosophy on its own terms.

The Materialistic Curtain in Higher Education

The Open Society and Tyranny

There are some who see the excellence of modern civilization in a tendency toward the "open society," that is a society in which the organic view of social life which makes for a "closed society," is overcome by a new individualism, which makes it possible for men to associate as equals, and having been freed from the older ties, to enter into free relationships of a more "spiritual" nature. Man, by a kind of "naked" reason, uncorrupted by the customs and traditions of his forebears, decides the quality of his life; he is, in this view, an end in himself, and recalls the old Protagorian expression that "man is the measure." Thanks to technology and education, man can free himself from nature, which he now sees as a hindrance to be dominated, and which no longer serves as a guide to his activities. He will now shape the world to his image, and anything which obscures his goal or directs his view to those things which should measure him in his activities must be eliminated as obstructions to his dignity, rooted as it is in the extension of his own proper personality. Marx, in fulminating against religion, sees it as "but the illusory sun which moves around man as long as he does not move around himself."

According to this view, all previous societies contained ways by which some men have dominated others, the remedy for which is a new society, which permits each man to choose his own kind of life, to exercise a myriad of ever-growing rights all severed from the trace of duties, which have become superfluous(for there are really no duties we owe ourselves).

The aim is to make possible the exercise of the tyrannical life for all men. Remember that the tyrant rules, not for the sake of the common good, but for his own private good. The state is merely an extension of himself, to be ordered peculiarly to him as to its end. He is not a part of it, and therefore subject to its laws and customs, but is rather beyond them, and his own appetites and desires have taken their place.

[...] man is superior because he is indeterminate, because he can choose his own way of life, and hence is not limited to any kind of existence. There is no consideration here that the man who is unformed is inferior to the good man, that the peccability of his liberty is a precarious "dignity," a lack to be overcome by the acquisition of the virtues which perfect his powers and their exercise. In short, man is considered perfect insofar as he is, not insofar as he is good(which entails, as we have seen that he order his life to things other than himself). What in fact Pico [della Mirandola] does is to speak of man much as if he were God. God, using St. Thomas again, is by his very being good and perfect, but man, insofar as he merely is, cannot by virtue of this be called good; the powers of his being, in fact, are directed toward other things, and he will be called good if he orders his soul the way it is created. God, on the other hand, is His own end: His liberty, the measure of all things, is impeccable; all its consequences good.

But if man were as God is, he in his own being would be his own end, anything he desires would be good by the fact of his desiring it, and the distinction between the good man and bad man would vanish.

-"Tyranny, A Private Good" by Ronald P. McArthur, Intercollegiate Review January-February 1966

A Strauss-inspired reading of Locke

The so-called right of self-preservation, upon which Locke builds his entire politics, is nonsensical--because it is evolutionary not only against the traditional teachings of philosophy, but against philosophy itself. It has no status philosophically. Its status is ideological, not philosophical. The proposition that asserts it is born out of defiance of the norms of philosophical discourse, because it claims a right that has no correlative duties. Philosophy knows no such right; it is incapable of knowing any such rgiht. To put it otherwise, right-of-self-preservation political theories are all ideological, and recognizable as such because they owe their survival, in large part, to their habit of stealing terms from philosophy, giving them without due warning a new and philosophically illegitimate meaning, and using them to mobilize for political purposes the respect and reverence that philosophy, using them in their correct meaning, has won for them(as the Communists use words like "freedom," "justice," etc.). The proposition that asserts the right to self-preservation is adopted by those who appeal to it not because of the cause that can be made out for it philosophically, but because of its potential value as a weapon. And make no mistake about it: the "right of self-preservation" is the weapon that the modern politics has used for the overthrow of the traditional politics.
-Willmoore Kendall, "John Locke Revisited," Intercollegiate Review January-February 1966

Civil Liberty vs. Civil Liberties

Jim Kalb links to this article, Is American Democracy Safe for Catholicism, by Professors Gary Glenn and John Stack arguing that "civil liberties" is a vastly inferior version of "civil liberty." Here's their main argument:

The Transition from Civil Liberty to Civil Liberties
In the 1940s, while Father Ryan was both restating the Church's traditional objections to the secular liberal state and arguing that they could be prudentially accommodated to American democracy; the Supreme Court began intensively to secularize American democracy. The rubric was a new reading of the establishment clause which in principle, and eventually in practice, rendered all revealed religions, including the Protestantism which it partially resembled but which it displaced, incompatible with any significant place in public life. By "secularism," we understand "the doctrine that morality should be based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from belief in God or in a future state."(n23) This is today thought to require excluding public support from religious schools and prohibiting both religious practices in public contexts and moral teachings based on revelation when those teachings cross secular morality or secular ideas of freedom. Post-1940s democracy, thus authoritatively articulated and fashioned by the Court, appears to regard secularism as the sine qua non of liberal democracy.

We argue this mandatory public secularism is part of a new constitutional regime which the Court instituted at this time. The new regime is verbally indicated by the Court's introducing, for the first time in our constitutional history; "civil liberties" in contrast to the traditional "civil liberty."(n24)

"Civil liberty" is the language of Blackstone, common law and The Federalist. The latter speaks of it in the context of the problem of maintaining "the order of society."(n25) WESTLAW first finds "civil liberty" in a Supreme Court opinion in Marbury (1803),(n26) but not until the Slaughterhouse Cases (1872) is it given explicit judicial definition. There, Justice Field refers approvingly to Blackstone's definition, given by Senator Trumbull in the debate on the Civil Rights Bill of 1866. "Civil liberty is no other than natural liberty, so far restrained by human laws and no further, as is necessary and expedient for the general advantage of the public."(n27) Field quotes Blackstone's editor's gloss on this definition: "that state in which each individual has the power to pursue his own happiness according to his own views of his interest, and the dictates of his conscience, unrestrained, except by equal, just, and impartial laws."(n28) Thus, "civil liberty" did not privilege individual power to the extent of requiring the laws to grant it as much latitude as possible. The laws only had to be "equal, just and impartial," thereby giving as much emphasis to the restraints of such laws on an individual's power as to his license to exercise that power. The modern idea that "rights are trump" is alien to "civil liberty" but is the cutting edge of the new "civil liberties" regime.

Under the old "civil liberty regime," religion was permitted in public life, including ritual public prayer, which survives to this day in the opening of each day of Congress and the Court, and the public school Baccalaureate Service and graduation prayer, found unconstitutional as late as Lee v. Weisman (1992).

The grounds for the old 'civil liberty' regime's solution to the problem of the relation of religion and government was publicly advocated at the Founding by James Madison.

In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests and in the other, in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government.(n29)

This Madisonian regime publicly assumed that "religious rights" included influencing public policy through truck and bargaining among the multiplicity of sects. Speaking for the Constitution's advocates, he argued that this system would so limit any particular sect's influence as generally to produce "justice and the general good."(n30)

This public religious pluralism permitted legislatures to work out pragmatically the relation between religious belief, churches, and government without conforming to a constitutional theory of what the outcome should be.(n31) This regime, constitutionally in place from 1789 until the 1940s, also permitted public schools to have a character forming function which warranted "impartial governmental assistance of all religions."(n32) Thus McCollum's publicly supported religious instruction was consistent with the old public religious pluralism.

It was this traditional "civil liberty" regime which Murray in 1960 thought compatible with Catholicism because that democracy both permitted and presupposed "the coexistence within one political community of groups who hold divergent and incompatible views with regard to religious questions-those ultimate questions that concern the nature and destiny of man."(n33) Murray further denied that the First Amendment religion clauses embodied any theory. Rather, he maintained that they are better understood as "articles of peace," that is, practical formulations the concrete meaning of which is negotiated from time to time in legislatures and school board meetings, and renegotiated as circumstances change--democracy as government by the people as one might once have conceived of it.

In contrast to this "civil liberty" regime, which permitted widely differing views of what religion is, as well as what its relation to government should be, the secular regime the Court began instituting in the 1940s attributed 'to the religion clauses a new substantive theory that seems to require all Americans to understand religion as a private matter lacking either public encouragement or consequence.(n34) The seed of this secularism was planted by the Court's declaring in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), without evidence or precedent, that the establishment clause mandated government neutrality between religion and nonreligion.(n35) The first blossoming was finding unconstitutional government sponsored religious instruction in public schools as a means to combat growing juvenile delinquency in McCollum (1948).(n36) The mature fruit became visible for all to see in finding unconstitutional publicly sponsored prayer and Bible reading in public schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington v. Schempp (1963), respectively.(n37)

The Court's replacement of constitutionally permitted public religious pluralism with constitutionally mandatory public secularism is part of the new "civil liberties" regime which the Court began instituting in about 1940. The novelty of this regime is indicated superficially by its name. Although now a preeminent category of constitutional law, WESTLAW shows "civil liberties" first used as a term of art in a Supreme Court opinion only in 1940.(n38) It first occurred in a Supreme Court case as the proper name of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1938. However, "civil liberties" was not yet an accepted term of legal art, according to then Professor Felix Frankfurter. It was only "a very loose expression" used in communication with "the laity."(n39) "Civil liberties" appeared only twice in Supreme Court cases prior to 1938 and in neither is it the Court's language. In the first case (1892),(n40) it is part of a 1701 quotation from William Penn. In the second case (1904),(n41) it occurs in a military order which was part of the evidence in the case.

"Civil liberties," as it developed after 1940, differs decisively from traditional "civil liberty" by intensified license to individual choices and desires as against other constitutional goods. "Civil liberty" had privileged "the general advantage of the public" (Justice Field [1872] citing Senator Trumbull [1866] quoting Blackstone [1776]) or "justice and the general good" (Federalist, No. 51 [1788]). "Civil liberties" privileges individual rights and that probably generates constitutional secularism. "Civil liberty" permitted governmental support for religion and relied on the competition between, and compromise among, the multiplicity of sects to prevent injustice. It did not define justice as requiring constitutional equality between religion and nonreligion. When the Court instituted that equality in Everson (1947), it redefined injustice to something like exposing an individual to government supported religious activities with which that individual did not agree. Thus one atheist's right not to have to listen to the traditional Baccalaureate' prayer is constitutionally superior to the community's determination that such prayer is for the "general advantage of the public" (Lee v. Weisman, 1992). If an individual's choice constitutionally trumps the legislatively determined "general good," then public secularism apparently, or at least plausibly; follows.(n42)

Secularism may even more sharply contrast "civil liberties" with "civil liberty" than does the intensified individualism from which it springs. For while Professor Tribe thought "extraordinary" Clarence Thomas's reasoning politically on the basis of the Declaration's theological content, under the "civil liberty" regime even Jefferson thought it proper to state for America that we are "endowed" with rights "by our Creator." And elsewhere he asked "can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?" And because slavery violates them "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep for ever . . . . The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."(n43) Nor did Lincoln think the Declaration's theological argument "extraordinary." Indeed, at Gettysburg he declared that America was dedicated to the Declaration's proposition "under God."(n44) Similarly; Frederick Douglas cited the Declaration and quoted Psalm 137 "By the rivers of Babylon . . . ," declaring "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie."(n45)

The "civil liberties" regime transformed secularism from at most a common social opinion(n46) into a constitutionally obligatory theory.(n47) Tocqueville had foreseen that, as equality becomes more absolute,"trust in common opinion will become a sort of religion, with the majority as its prophet."(n48) However, "Christian morality" was still the common American opinion of his day and still "the first of their political institutions." Yet he foresaw that if Christian morality ceased to be an "impediment, one would soon find among them the boldest [moral and political] innovators and the most implacable logicians in the world."(n49) He did not foresee that the justices of the Supreme Court would become the hierarchy of the new equality-inspired religion,(n50) or so far mimic Catholicism as to claim "infallibility" in teaching doctrine. "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final."(n51) Tocqueville may have foreseen better than he knew in finding Catholicism even more compatible with American democracy than is Protestantism.(n52) Catholics' faith in papal infallibility need only be transferred to faith in the infallibility of "common social opinion" and the Supreme Court.

By 1960 the original Madisonian regime had not yet been completely overthrown by the new judicially created secular regime. The Court, in particular, had backed off from its 1947 McCollum decision under attack from many religious sectors, and even the New York Times. It did so in 1953 by finding constitutional an ever so slightly different plan for public encouragement of religious instruction.(n53) However, the subsequent bans on governmental encouragement of prayer (1962) and Bible reading (1963) in public schools visibly established public secularism as authoritative. Public secularism's exclusion of religious practices as such from a place in public life has now worked its way through a score of subsequent cases.

Kenneth Craycraft(see below) argues that Madison's encouragement of a multiplicity of sects was meant to weaken religion, meanign that religious is a sham. These professors make a good argument that our civil liberty was in fact part of the Amercian republic from the beginning, and only recently marred by unfortunate court decisions.

"A Very Scary Person"

Peter Sean Bradley called me that here, after I hazarded a guess at what a "stavrological concentration" was. I'm still laughing.

A Couple of Links on Religious Freedom

First, Separation and Its Discontents summarizing Kenneth Craycraft's The American Myth of Religious Freedom. The author of the review essay veers towards the Lefebvrist thesis on Dignitatis Humanae, so I can't give the article my full endorsement. However,I read Craycraft's book at the very beginning of my forays into political philosophy, and I think his thesis still has some hold on my mind today. I took away two main points from his work: (1) liberalism views religion through the prism of voluntary associations; religion is good only if it is freely chosen by the autonomous individual. It is unscriptural(See Jn 15:16), pelagian, and if applied consistently would forbid infant baptism and religious education for children. (2) liberal theories of religious liberty are always state-centered: the government decides what constitutes religion and liberty, not the Church.

Next, John C. Rao's article Why Catholics Can't Defend Themselves argues that pluralism is a fideism.

Finally, a quotation from the current First Things:

Liberalism was originally a theory of the state based on representative democracy and individual rights--a theory that was compatible and even harmonious with religion. There can be powerful religious justifications for such a system. But contemporary liberalism is much more than a theory of the state and its limits. Whereas the older liberalism required the state to allow individuals to pursue, within certain bounds, their differing understandings of the objective good for man, the newer liberalism requires individuals, at least in their role as citizens, to be entirely subjective in their understanding of the good. That is, in the newer liberalism, the supreme good, at least for all public purposes, is personal autonomy--a person choosing for himself, without any objective constraint, what shall be good and what shall be evil.
-Robert T. Miller, "A Jury of One's Godless Peers"

Craycraft and probably Rao would argue that this subjectivism is inherent to the liberal project, dating back to Locke. A reconsideration of that argument is in order.

The House of Habsburg, Defended

Archbishop Chaput Praises Marcus Aurelius

And declares the necessity of being open to wisdom:

The more secular we become - both as individuals and as a country - the less we care about the true, the right and the lasting. And here’s the reason: We don’t really believe these qualities exist. Philosophy today is an ailing discipline because our idea of "wisdom" has detached itself from higher, permanent truths about the human person. Wisdom has shrunk down to mean "common sense based on experience." But wisdom is much more than that. It’s the moral memory of a culture. The more we reinterpret the past according to this or that political agenda, the less coherent our memory becomes… and the more irrelevant "wisdom" (like the content of the Bible) seems. Our moral vocabulary becomes confused. We begin to see and judge everything in terms of its utility right now. In other words, what’s useful and productive is seen as good. What isn’t, is seen as bad.

Speaking of Beauty

Take, for example, the line of another Marxist critic, Frederic Jameson, now plying his trade at Duke University, who asserts that "the visible is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination." Now it is true that pornography is the premier sign of the decadence of late capitalism, and the fact that liberalism can offer no moral or legal objections to it is a sure indication that liberalism is far more complicit in capitalism?s dynamic than are non-libertarian schools of political conservatism, paleo-, neo-, or whatever. But only a Marxist utterly hung up and scandalized by disinterested contemplation could equate all gazing with consumption of pornography.

-Edward T. Oakes, SJ

What is not forbidden is mandatory!

From the Boulder Valley School District:

Many American schools have sponsored pro-gay speakers, allowed pro-gay art displays, and sanctioned clubs called "Gay-Straight Alliances." But Colorado's Boulder Valley School District is going a step further, advancing new curriculum standards that would require students to "demonstrate" their acceptance of homosexuality.

Among the skills the district has proposed as essential to a proper education: Students would have to demonstrate they can "provide peer support" for homosexual classmates; students would also have to demonstrate they can "advocate for a school environment free of ... homophobia."

Other standards would require students to explain the health consequences of "heterosexism," and identify "diverse groups in American society ... by culture, ethnicity, age, sex, religion, sexual orientation ... "

-World Magazine

Thomas Molnar on Existentialism

Let us note that already in The Seven Storey Mountain Merton spoke of the culture of our world as "rotten, spurious, empty... not worth the dirt in Harlem's gutters." The point here is not whether these violent denunciations are justified or not: it is, rather, that the American authors quoted, Jewish or Catholic, couch them in the language of Hegelian-Sartrian dialectics, and speak of guilt not in terms of personal responsibility, but, true to their masters in thinking, as if guilt were a collective burden,l borne by a class or a race before the judgement of History.

Existentialism and the American Intellectual, Intercollegiate Review, September 1965

Be still, my beating heart

Intercollegiate Review Archives are now on-line!

Michael Novak Smackdown!

Litigation and Natural Law

Russell Hittinger on Judicial Interpretation of Natural Law:

"[...] preoccupation with judicial appeals to natural law can easily fall into the trap that Aquinas himself discussed. Recall that in the passage cited earlier Aquinas pointed out that insofar as a judge proceeds case by case the laws are apt to be disconnected. The business of a judge is litigation, and, on the whole, litigation is not the best context for taking stock of what the natural law requries: (1) litigation gives the judge little time for reflection; (2) it moves along according to adversarial procedures, which are not the best way to develop a systematic position on the moral quality of laws; and (3) the interests of the various parties are usually narrowed so drastically that it is difficult to find generalizable principles for the common good.

-Russell Hittinger, "Natural Law in the Positive Laws," The First Grace

A Soldier's account of the destruction of Monte Cassino Abbey

The monastery was not responsible for all the calamitous things happening to the Allied infantry and machines of war moving about in the valley or on the slopes around it. But the men over whom it held so much sway, firmly believed that the Abbey indeed was being used by the enemy. Nothing could convince them otherwise. It was the ideal artillery observation post and the Germans would be stupid not to use it as such, so they thought. Setback after setback finally influenced General Bernard Freyberg, Commander of the 2nd New Zealand Division into believing that the only way to throw the valley wide open was to destroy the Abbey from the air, to obliterate the enemy observation points there. He was sure that every move his men made, the Germans observed from their vantage points in the Abbey, and so after much wrangling in the caravans of the mighty it was finally agreed that the only way out of the impasse was to bomb Cassino and the Abbey.

On the cold, but clear windy morning of February 15, 1944, 143 B-17 Flying Fortresses came over at 18,000 feet, followed a quarter of an hour later by waves of Mitchell and Marauder medium bombers. In the short span of no more than twenty minutes 576 tons of bombs rained down on the huge building and on the surrounding slopes and also on the town of Cassino itself. For all of its massive construction of stone the Abbey was blasted and churned into a smoking hell of rubble and dust. It was learned not long after, that there'd been only a dozen monks and close to 1000 civilians inside its walls. The Italian peasants and Cassino inhabitants still remaining, had sought refuge from the fighting going on around their homes. Not a single German soldier, it was found, had been inside the Abbey. When the last bomb had fallen and the last numbing blast's echo had faded away into the hills and valleys, over 300 people lay dead beneath the huge mounds of rubble. The wounded exceeded three times that of the dead.

It has been proven since, that the few Germans who had entered the Monastery in the weeks before the bombing, had gone in to arrange for the transfer to Rome for safekeeping all art works, books, and religious documents. It was only after the Monastery had been reduced to rubble that the Germans took over the ruins and utilized it in their defence system. And as those of us who've read the books about the battles fought here know, the enemy utilized it to the utmost. In retrospect, they'd gained through a great Allied high-level blunder what proved to be an outstandingly strong fortress position. Once the building was destroyed the Germans had no qualms about using the ruins for defensive purposes. In the months that followed, the Allies were bled white trying to dislodge the enemy from the ruins and the surrounding heights, with little to show for their efforts. Only in the fourth and final battle which began one hour before midnight on May 11th did success finally come. Even then, the Monte Cassino Abbey, or the ruin thereof was not wrested from the paratroopers until seven days later when the Poles firmly planted the Polish Eagle flag in the rubble.

von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is much more skeptical of the allies' account of the abbey's destruction than this soldier. See below.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn on Monarchy and War

We spoke already about the indoctrination of draftees, which,
naturally, becomes important in a time of war. An even greater evil
is the fact that, since the recruits are taken from the population at
large, the people itself has to be indoctrinated, in other words,
made to hate the enemy collectively. For this purpose, modern governments
invoke the support of the mass media, which then inform
the populace about the evil of the enemy (with little or no regard
for the truth). The attack stresses the wickedness and inferiority of
the hostile nation and the evil deeds committed by its armed forces,
which consists of cowards, a low breed recruited from a fiendish
people.

* * * * * *

Curiously enough, it was the Third Reich (although planning
aggressive wars) which desired to ban aerial warfare except on
well-defined battle fronts. In 1935, the Germans, wanting a pact
outlawing war on civilians in the hinterland, suggested this to Great
Britain, which at that time had a Labour government. However, the
offer was rejected on the ground that all efforts to humanize war
would make wars more acceptable, and would thus be a blow to
the noble cause of pacifism.

* * * * * *
One of the worst and most idiotic feats was the U.S. army’s
destruction of the ancient Italian monastery of Monte Cassino. The
Allies had been informed that there were no German troops inside,
but since the building remained intact, a hue and cry was raised in
the United States that to spare the monastery would be yielding to
“Roman Catholic interests” at the cost of American lives. “Our
Boys” would have to die to please the Pope! Finally, the military
yielded to bolster the “home front.” The vox populi should not be
thwarted, and a political decision, not a military decision, was made.
The old building went up in flames, thus making it safe for the
Germans to occupy the ruins, whereas to defend a huge building
under artillery fire would have been suicidal. Now the American
soldiers faced an enemy much better entrenched and more fully
protected by the rocks of the destroyed abbey. No falling walls
could bury them. The Allied losses became much bigger, as did
those of the poor betrayed Poles who had to fight with them, but
public opinion was satisfied: the war was fought democratically.

Yet, what did the American soldie rs think of such irreparable
losses of architectural beauty? An officer stationed near
Benevento, asked whether he had any misgivings, replied to an
American journalist, “There’s nothing what can be done about it.
Italy is just lousy with clerical monuments.”

* * * * * *

One of the worst results of the democratization of wars was—
and remains—the difficulty in terminating a war by peace, or, at
least, by lengthy periods of peace. In a partially or fully democratic
order, having fought with conscripted soldiers, one is governed
largely by representatives of the people who do not think historically,
but politically. Of history, economics, cultural mentalities, and
geography, they know nothing. Moreover, they think “personally,”
not dynastically. What do they have primarily in mind? The weal of
their grandchildren and great grandchildren? Or the winning of the
next election? Furthermore, the returning soldiers, if they have been
fighting on the winning side, want to see the fruits of their suffering,
so they yearn for a “peace” with maximum gains for their country.
(Mercenaries thought otherwise. They had their next job in mind.)

* * * * * *

Yet, to make people happy (after one’s own fashion), sometimes
requires a little and occasionally even a lot of pressure. In
February 1914, Mr. Wilson thought that the Mexicans would be
much happier if, politically, they imitated the United States, which in
turn had imitated France.71 This worried Sir Edward Grey, the British
Foreign Minister. Between him and American Ambassador
Walter Hines Page, a curious dialogue developed. The theme was
Mexican reluctance to adopt a full-fledged democracy, which the
United States, after all, had fostered and abetted in Mexico even
before they had supported Benito Juarez, the murderer of Emperor
Maximilian.72 The exchange of opinions went as follows:
Grey: Suppose you have to intervene, what then?
Page: Make ’em vote and live by their decisions.
Grey: But suppose they will not so live?
Page: We’ll go in again and make ’em vote again.
Grey: And keep this up for 200 years?
Page: Yes. The United States will be here for 200 years
and it can continue to hoot them for that little space till
they learn to vote and rule themselves.

* * * * * *

Monarchy had several great advantages. First of all, one could
expect a monarch to be psychologically88 and intellectually prepared
for his task. Considering the intellectual preparation of some
leading politicians for their task, we can only throw up our hands in
horror, as often their looks and their gift of gab alone got them into
office. A second asset is (or rather was) their international rela-
tionships and their lack of local ties.89 Number three is the fact that
they owe their position to no party, faction, interest group, estate, or
class, but only, to use the words of Bossuet, to “the sweet process
of nature.”90 The fourth advantage is that monarchs had the
chance to act historically. In democracies, where the primary task
is to win elections, and where instability with nicely spaced changes
is even a matter of pride, a constructive foreign policy is well-nigh
impossible.91 Monarchs were in office until they died, at which time
they left their realms to their sons or nearest relatives. They could
act historically, not politically, in a way without a time limit. Hence,
their various “Political Testaments.”

This has been aptly demonstated by Professor Hans-Hermann
Hoppe in an essay which likens the democratic procedure to a
small child wanting his wishes fufilled immediately, and protests in
tears if there is a delay or a negative reaction. A monarch, as a
member of a dynasty, can plan for the distant future, even for generations.
92 Yet, it would be most erroneous to believe that a return
to monarchy, even a Christian monarchy, would solve all of our
problems. Recall the praise the great monarchist Charles Maurras
bestowed on this form of government: “Le moindre mal. La possibilité
du bien. (The least evil. The possibility of something
good.)”

Still, a monarch as member of a dynasty can plan for the distant
future, even for generations. In our times, in which the globe
has been transformed into an immensely complex scene, the abyss
between the Scita and the Scienda, the actual knowledge of voters
and candidates compared with the necessary knowledge, unavoidably
widens all the time. And since the required knowledge among
those active or passive in the democratic process is minute, only
sentiments, sympathies, and antipathies, pleasing and unpleasant
factors, are now effective. Hence, democracies act like rabbits
jumping in all imaginable directions, into unwanted wars,93 idealistic
crusades, and undesirable, fatal peace arrangements. From childhood,
monarchs were prepared for their duties. They “inherited”
their profession as traditionally as craftsmen did theirs. The son of
a tailor became a tailor, and so forth. These tailors produced sometimes
bad garments, occasionally excellent ones but usually passable
ones. So, too, with monarchs. Yet dentists, lawyers, cobblers,
farmers, or plumbers could not have produced any clothes whatever,
only monstrosities. Hence, the decline of Europe, already lasting
more than 200 years, which also means that one should not forget
the already mentioned fact that monarchy compromised with
democracy during the nineteenth century, and thus acquired merely
a psychological role in the twentieth.

94We have to bear in mind that democracies boast of their instability and
their dislike for expertise. The real “hero” in democratic folklore is always
the “successful amateur,” not the expert, which implies that knowledge
and experience have no value.

JPII on Suffering

Man " perishes" when he loses "eternal life". The opposite of salvation is not, therefore, only temporal suffering, any kind of suffering, but the definitive suffering: the loss of eternal life, being rejected by God, damnation. The only-begotten Son was given to humanity primarily to protect man against this definitive evil and against definitive suffering.

* * * * * *

Every man has his own share in the Redemption. Each one is also called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished. He is called to share in that suffering through which all human suffering has also been redeemed. In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.

* * * * * *

Those who share in Christ's sufferings have before their eyes the Paschal Mystery of the Cross and Resurrection, in which Christ descends, in a first phase, to the ultimate limits of human weakness and impotence: indeed, he dies nailed to the Cross. But if at the same time in this weakness there is accomplished his lifting up, confirmed by the power of the Resurrection, then this means that the weaknesses of all human sufferings are capable of being infused with the same power of God manifested in Christ's Cross. In such a concept, to suffer means to become particularly susceptible, particularly open to the working of the salvific powers of God, offered to humanity in Christ. In him God has confirmed his desire to act especially through suffering, which is man's weakness and emptying of self, and he wishes to make his power known precisely in this weakness and emptying of self. This also explains the exhortation in the First Letter of Peter: "Yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but under that name let him glorify God"

* * * * * *

Suffering as it were contains a special call to the virtue which man must exercise on his own part. And this is the virtue of perseverance in bearing whatever disturbs and causes harm. In doing this, the individual unleashes hope, which maintains in him the conviction that suffering will not get the better of him, that it will not deprive him of his dignity as a human being, a dignity linked to awareness of the meaning of life. And indeed this meaning makes itself known together with the working of God's love, which is the supreme gift of the Holy Spirit.

* * * * * *

[...]It only means that the Redemption, accomplished through satisfactory love, remains always open to all love expressed in human suffering.

* * * * * *

A source of joy is found in the overcoming of the sense of the uselessness of suffering, a feeling that is sometimes very strongly rooted in human suffering. This feeling not only consumes the person interiorly, but seems to make him a burden to others. The person feels condemned to receive help and assistance from others, and at the same time seems useless to himself. The discovery of the salvific meaning of suffering in union with Christ transforms this depressing feeling. Faith in sharing in the suffering of Christ brings with it the interior certainty that the suffering person "completes what is lacking in Christ's afflictions"; the certainty that in the spiritual dimension of the work of Redemption he is serving, like Christ, the salvation of his brothers and sisters. Therefore he is carrying out an irreplaceable service. In the Body of Christ, which is ceaselessly born of the Cross of the Redeemer, it is precisely suffering permeated by the spirit of Christ's sacrifice that is the irreplaceable mediator and author of the good things which are indispensable for the world's salvation. It is suffering, more than anything else, which clears the way for the grace which transforms human souls. Suffering, more than anything else, makes present in the history of humanity the powers of the Redemption.

* * * * * *

The parable of the Good Samaritan, which --as we have said--belongs to the Gospel of suffering, goes hand in hand with this Gospel through the history of the Church and Christianity, through the history of man and humanity. This parable witnesses to the fact that Christ's revelation of the salvific meaning of suffering is in no way identified with an attitude of passivity. Completely the reverse is true. The Gospel is the negation of passivity in the face of suffering.

-Salvifici Doloris

Roger Scruton on Communitarianism

Conservatives would agree with the burden of Etzioni's message. But they would point out that much of the damage to the sense of community in America has issued from liberal reforms that Etzioni and his followers seem to endorse. Communitarians regard sexual conduct as a private matter and liberal legislation on such matters as essential. They are "caring" people who do not wish to disturb or interfere with anybody's chosen life-style or to take an "authoritarian" attitude toward the problems that freedom creates. Although they are wary of the attitude that places me and my wants at the center of the universe and regards others in terms of their potential contribution to my own fulfillment, they are equally wary of the spirit of community as it tends to show itself in ordinary people. For the spirit of community is vigilant. It stands in judgment over the acts and omissions of individuals and seeks to impose a common morality, a common culture, and a common respect for basic social norms. Human beings may need to live in communities, but there is a cost attached to doing so--a cost that the modern liberal is not always prepared to pay.

Communitarian Dreams

Of course, the Constitution doesn't have to be a liberal fiefdom. But it becomes so just as soon as its interpretation is detached from the tacit endorsement of the community that first invented it. Judges like Robert Bork, who interpret the Constitution in terms of the civic aspirations of the Founding Fathers, restore it to its true place, as the foundation of American society. Such judges give to communities their true and deserved place in our scheme of things. And that is why every effort is made to keep them out of the Supreme Court by those for whom the purpose of the Constitution is not to safeguard the inherited community but to protect the modern urban solipsist.

Community, Yes, But Whose? A Reply

Suffering is Good?

For the real issue here is not so much the plurality of religions and the heightened sensitivity to cultural and religious imperialism. Much weightier is what church proclamation says validates the claims of the historical Jesus: that he plumbed the depths of the world's sufferings. That is today's Provocation. St Paul says, "this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Corinthians 4: 17). But as Balthasar readily concedes in the fifth volume of the Theo-Drama, "To someone who is really suffering, Paul's words on the relationship between earthly suffering and heavenly joy are hardly to be endured." And yet, with St. Paul, and based on his own theology of Holy Saturday, Balthasar will go on to claim that suffering is something good. In a modern utilitarian world, whose ethic is largely based on a pleasure-pain calculus, such words will provoke outrage. But Scripture does not flinch from boasting of suffering. "I consider that the sufferings of this present age", says St. Paul, "are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Romans 8: 18)

-Edward T. Oakes, No Bloodless Myth

Imaginative Origins of Modernity: Life as Daydream and Nightmare by Catholic University's Claes G. Ryn

At 4am on November 12 1915, a woman named Anna Bollinger gave birth at the German-American Hospital in Chicago. The baby was somewhat deformed and suffered from extreme intestinal and rectal abnormalities, as well as other complications. The delivering physicians awakened Dr Harry Haiselden, the hospital's chief of staff. Haiselden came in at once. He consulted with colleagues. There was great disagreement over whether the child could be saved. But Haiselden decided the baby was too afflicted and fundamentally not worth saving. It would be killed. The method: denial of treatment. Catherine Walsh, probably a friend of Bollinger's, heard the news and sped to the hospital to help. She found the baby, who had been named Allan, alone in a bare room. Walsh pleaded with Haiselden not to kill the baby by withholding treatment. "It was not a monster - that child," Walsh later told an inquest. "It was a beautiful baby. I saw no deformities." Walsh had patted the infant lightly. Allan's eyes were open, and he waved his tiny fists at her. Begging the doctor once more, Walsh tried an appeal to his humanity. "If the poor little darling has one chance in a thousand," she pleaded, "won't you operate to save it?"

Haiselden laughed at Walsh, retorting, "I'm afraid it might get well." He was a skilled and experienced surgeon, trained by the best doctors in Chicago. He was also an ardent eugenicist. Allan Bollinger duly died. An inquest was convened a few days later. Haiselden defiantly declared, "I should have been guilty of a graver crime if I had saved this child's life. My crime would have been keeping in existence one of nature's cruellest blunders." A juror shot back, "What do you mean by that?" Haiselden responded, "Exactly that. I do not think this child would have grown up to be a mental defective. I know it."

After tempestuous proceedings, the inquest ruled: "We believe that a prompt operation would have prolonged and perhaps saved the life of the child. We find no evidence from the physical defects that the child would have become mentally or morally defective." But they also decided that Haiselden was within his professional rights to decline treatment. No law compelled him to operate on the child. He was released unpunished, and efforts by the Illinois attorney general to indict him for murder were blocked by the local prosecutor. The doctor considered his legal vindication a powerful victory for eugenics. "Eugenics? Of course it's eugenics," he told one reporter.

Haiselden became an overnight celebrity, known for his many newspaper articles, his speaking tours and outrageous diatribes. In 1917, Hollywood came calling. The film was called The Black Stork. Written by Jack Lait, a reporter on the Chicago American, it was produced in Hollywood and given a massive national distribution and promotion campaign. Haiselden played himself in a fictionalised account of a eugenically mismatched couple whom he advises not to have children because they are likely to be defective. Eventually, the woman does give birth to a defective child, whom she then allows to die. The dead child levitates into the waiting arms of Jesus Christ. It was unbridled cinematic propaganda for the eugenics movement; the film played at movie theatres around the country for more than a decade.


Hitler's Debt to America

That's an utterly surreal line about the film's victim levitating into the arms of Christ. Either a terribly confused Christian wrote that scene, or it was a deliberate ploy to sway Christians into the eugenics fold. Probably both.