Christ Stops Time: The Christian Origins of a True Politics (Or, Apparently I sound like a German guy I read in school)

I have been mulling over the relationship between the intervention of God on Earth and the effect it has on us human beings. For the sake of this conversation, I'm going to posit that we owe true politics to God. To put it another way, the origins of true political order are to be found in Christianity.

Now a person reading this may be thinking something like, "Wait a minute! Weren't there societies (like the Greeks and Romans) that existed before Christ? And didn't guys like Aristotle and Plato say a lot about politics?" Yes, to both of those. However, the experience was not as full (open to the truth) as it is for those who experience reality after Christ.

Christ's intervention into our world gave us something that we lacked prior to his coming. It gives us an anchor for our existence. It is the revelation of the Truth of Christ which provides our life with its meaning and purpose. Furthermore, it is this awareness of this meaning in the Truth of Christ which provides the possibility of an authentic politics.

Contrast the experiential openness to Truth and the subsequent anchor (or foundation) that is a result of the Incarnation with the closed or less aware experience of the Truth which was the experience of the pre-Christ(ian) communities and in this bifurcation of epochs or the rupture that was the experience of the Truth of Christ in the Incarnation, you are presented with a fullness of Being which permits a political community to emerge that is an expression of Truth. The Western Judeo-Christian tradition, then, is the humanly knowable interpretation of the ontological reality that is the Truth in Christ. Political communities and eras are inescapably manifestations of a fundamental religious Truth. We cannot escape that. Without the Incarnation, there is no full experience of politics. The communities prior to Christ are pre-political.

Evidently (according to one person I know), this kind of understanding and interpretation of the human world is similar to the approach of Eric Voegelin. That's cool.

(Old) New French Thinkers and American Catholics

I have begun to read an edited collection titled New French Thought: Political Philosophy, edited by Mark Lilla. Published in 1994, it is a diverse collection of translated essays which introduces to an Anglo-American audience a conversation in French intellectual life that, up to that point in time, had been from the American engagement with the continental traditions. Up to that time, the French imports which dominated American philosophical discourse were thinkers critical of liberal modernity and proponents of a antihumanist and historicist philosophical project. Unfortunately for the American landscape, by the time of the publication of this volume, those thinkers and philosophical projects which preoccupied the American academe had been overtaken by a group of thinkers who rejected the antihumanism and historicism (some in part others completely) and were more less critical of liberalism than the more famous and influential prior generation.

In his introduction, Lilla lightly traces the contours of the history of French philosophy. It is a story in which liberal modernity plays a prominent role, alongside history and "modernity" in the form of the residue of the French Revolution. The French encounter with liberalism differs markedly from the British and American experiences. Whereas the British and American encounters with liberalism have been endogenous or immanent, the French have experienced liberalism at a distance; theirs has been a critical and often repudiatory encounter with this sociopolitical system. This has produced a rich and variegated corpus, constituted by a diversity of approaches represented by numerous thinkers which may strike the American reader as overwhelming in its quantity, diversity and, perhaps most fundamentally, its generally critical stance toward liberalism. Whereas the American experience has been being both of and in liberal modernity, the French experience has often sat outside of a similar milieu.

The generation of philosophers introduced in the Lilla volume share a formative set of experiences in the France after the May 1968 events. These events brought about a social and political culture which was much more malleable to a liberal order. The thinkers collected in the volume are more comfortable with exploring and accepting the legitimacy liberalism than were the members of the previous generation (e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault), who were more familiar to an American philosophical audience.

I think that the Catholic can appreciate this generation of French philosophers' response to liberalism. The Catholic engagement with liberalism has been similarly contested. As it has been noted on this blog, there has been an ongoing debate by Catholics in America over the relationship between Catholicism and liberal modernity. While one group of Catholics has taken a view of the relationship between Catholicism and liberal modernity which has been positive, the other group has held a critical view of the relationship between Catholicism and modern liberal democracy.

This is not old news, however I think that the volume can act as a vehicle by which to understand the American Catholic experience. American Catholics have a closer relationship to liberalism than do these French thinkers -- not only were they born into a liberal culture but the "foundations" of their government are modern liberal. But, the American Catholic critics share with these thinkers a critical distance to liberal modernity. The Catholic critic of American liberalism can find an ally in the French thinkers for the simple reason that they both hold the modern sociopolitical order at an arm's-length.

I think that the American Catholic critic of liberalism fails because s/he is perhaps too critical of the liberal order. To the extent that the liberal order is an organic or internally-traceable historicosocial development of a political space, then I don't think that the Catholic critic has much to stand on by way of sustainable critique. Yes, he can point to the Church and the Truth that the Church protects; the critique would have to be intelligible to an American who hears it. I don't see that happening; the critical reactions seem to be too philosophically dense, and frankly too "impractical" for the American ethos.

I suspect many Catholics have read the work(s) of Pierre Manent, and other figures. The American Catholic can perform a service fr himself by being more sympathetic or open to the liberal tradition which constitues who it is that he is.

Modern Family and the Eucharist

No, not this "Modern Family"...

In the Catholic Church today among one of the many social ills that the pastors must tend to is the emerging recognition of the status of divorced and remarried Catholics in the Church today. In October, a meeting of Catholic bishops called III Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family occurred. During this meeting these leaders of the Church to discuss the "The pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelization". This is a first of multiple meetings on this issue over the next year or so. Many prominent leaders in the Church have publicly addressed this issue in what has emerged as a hotly debated topic. In many ways the challenge of how to respond to civilly divorced and civilly remarried Catholics (as opposed to those who have gone through appropriate channels within the Catholic Church) represents a fundamental challenge to multiple teachings of the Church. These teachings get to the center of the Catholic understanding of marriage, the Catholic understanding of the person (anthropology) and the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist.

Now, the Catholic view of divorce and communion is not as archaic as no doubt some would believe it to be. In fact, the Church makes clear in the Catechism that those who are innocent victims of a civil divorce are able, under normal restrictions that apply to all Catholics, to receive the Eucharist. The dilemma turns on when a Catholic married in the Church and divorced civilly then becomes married in a civil ceremony. That is a non-no for Catholics, for the simple reason that Catholics believe that a marriage cannot be dissolved. A Catholic response to a broken marriage is to observe that the marriage never occurred in the first place, i.e., the marriage annulment. An effect of this would seem to be that at as a matter of theological understanding, it is the case that anthropologically not only did that first marriage not occur, but the Catholic who marries again in the Church (as a matter of observable or experiential fact) is, actually, marrying for the first time. To divorce and remarry civilly is essentially denying this truth of marriage's indissolubility by stating through these acts that a marriage is in fact soluble and more than that it damages the institution of marriage (and potentially introduces more serious sins into the mix). The receipt of communion by divorced and remarried Catholics also is not a matter of conscience, but rather

in fact, both because it is the image of the spousal relationship between Christ and his church as well as the fundamental core and an important factor in the life of civil society, is essentially a public reality.

As a result, those who are divorced and remarried cannot receive communion except in a state of sin (h/t to EWTN which has all sorts of good stuff).

The Catholic then, in the face of this secular phenomenon of civil divorce and remarriage, is staring at a way of life or an experience of reality which seems to have crept up on it. The challenge of the secularization of marriage confronts the Catholic Church with a question of who it is and what it is to be Catholic in ways that other issues probably do not. Whereas, at least in the United States, many of the issues that the Church and its individual members confront have their origins in political matters, e.g., abortion legality or Obamacare contraception coverage, the civil marriage issue does not seem to be as neatly able to be captured within a political frame of reference. When a Catholic thinks about some of these recent controversies over political issues, at the end of the day the Catholic can have some reassurance that, while these are challenging contemporary dilemmas that "naturally" appear in a secular nation-state, the Catholic Church and its adherents can always distance itself from the problem. In fact, there is a method of interacting in order to navigate more difficult and thorny moral conundrums these kinds of political proposals present to a Catholic. There is always the possibility to create distance. But that same option does not exist when you are having to deal with your own. They will follow you, they will come to you, they will be with you.

So, this is not a political issue that is restricted to particular states or cultures or time periods, but rather it is an issue that stands outside of politics and sits in the area of Church doctrine and makes a demand upon the Catholic to answer what it is to be a Catholic? It is a religious matter. It is a complicated issue with divisions within the Church revealed publicly. Though I wonder, is this a uniquely modern or secular issue? This problem would likely be less acute if either the pursuit of secular, civil marriages were low(er) or the option more restricted, which would seem to demand that the Catholic Church and religion exercise a more pronounced role in the contemporary world and place a stronger imprint on the identities of modern Catholics. In effect, the existence of this problem becomes evidence of the de-Christianization of the modern era. If that is the case, then both the Catholic Church and non-Catholic Christian sects are fighting a battle which they are losing.

As a lay Catholic, the most interesting phenomenon to come from this extended public battle over the licitness of (non)reception of the Eucharist by civilly-divorced-but-not-annulled-Catholics is the centrality of the priest-as-pastor. On both side of the divide that marks the public debate, the participants have focused on the efforts to respond to the needs of Catholics who have experienced a broken marriage. The gravitas of the experience and the persons who are involved in it is recognized and respected by those who want to amend the rules as well as those who want to maintain the rules. This appears to be, at its heart, rooted in a concern of how to minister to those who have experienced or are experiencing this darkness. No doubt the secular and Catholic media will continue to publish reports that accentuate these divisions among members of the Church; during those times, it is worth it to recognize the seriousness of the issue that these shepherds engage and the sincerity, mercy and pastorality with which they respond.

The next year will be an exciting time for the Church. I look forward to keeping abreast of the internal debate and I will be grateful when the Church, in Her wisdom and with His guidance, can show the way through this dilemma and continue to show compassion, charity and mercy to those Catholics, whether civilly divorced and remarried or annulled and married again in the Church, experience the pain of a broken marriage.

Thoughts on Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt"

In his 1951 short story collection The Illustrated Man, the iconic science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. I read Farenheit 451 relatively recently and I want to "make up" for a childhood without his writings by turning to an arbitrary choice I found at my local library. Onwards and upwards. "The Veldt" (it has its own wikipedia page) has a history prior to the short story collection in which it was included. It was first published under the title "The World the Children Made", in September 1950.

The story takes place in a family home with numerous - an abundance - of "modern" technologies, mostly electronic devices which seem to alleviate members of the family from performing (or performing as extensively) household work such as cleaning, cooking and other "typical" demands. The focus is on an nursery room where the two children, Peter and Wendy, evidently spend much of their time. The room is a virtual reality room in which the person's thoughts appear (by some mental telepathic-electronic interface?) on the screen-walls of the room. The father and mother, George and Lydia, become concerned by what they consider to be an excessive amount of time in this room. The father suggests that a psychologist be called to the house to examine the children to determine if they are healthy and well. As the story progresses, the reader confronts the fact that the parents are dead and the children are living comfortably in the nursery, and the psychologist got to the house too late (these are "thoughts" on the story, not a review of it).

I am reading this story over 60 years after if first appeared and I am struck by the critical eye which Bradbury seems to cast toward consumerism and technology. While it is clear - can it be presumed to be obvious? - that Bradbury is not a technophobe or a critic of technology per se, but I do think in this short story he presents a view that can be fruitfully situated within an academic space in which Catholicintellectuals and allies have overlapped their conversations.

Critical themes seem to run through the text. First, is critique of consumerism. The parents and the children have an abundance of gizmos and gadgets that seem to be cutting edge and provide to them a kind of lifestyle that an in-your-face acknowledgment of the temptation of material things. That critique seems to be embedded within a second critique of technology that underscores the social effects of an over-reliance on modern devices which depersonalizes relationships and weakens the "typical" bonds of family and presumably other relationships that constitute the broader foundations of a social and political order. A second theme seems to be a clash between the parents and teh children. The parents and the children seem to represent not only generational divisions but also represent two stances toward technology. The parents are ambivalent toward the role of technology, even though they have for the most part embraced the role. The children have fully embraced technology, or a stance toward technology which embeds them within it. I think that Bradbury raises an additional themes of autonomy and identity in relation to technology. There is the attempt to reassert the autonomy of the person separate from technology by the parents; the children's autonomy seemed to be obscured by their connection or addiction to it. Additionally, the identity was obscured by technology. Whereas the parents again served to re-assert an identity that was separate and dominant over the gadgets and gizmos of their home, that distinct personal identity de-coupled from the technology with which they interacted seemed to be rejected by the children, who represented a kind of human identity which was closely coupled to the nursery, which represented both a consumerist ethos and a technological existence that is something toward which to exercise caution.

What can a Catholic take from "The Veldt"? I think that a Catholic can begin a fruitful engagement with the virtues and vices. There are challenges to prudence and temperance while also examples of a form of gluttony. I think also that the Catholic can gain some traction by using Bradbury's story to engage with the themes of the conversations about technology that Catholic intellectuals have been participating in for a while now. The story provides a Catholic with a rich, fertile ground to explore and meditate on questions of the person (anthropology) and the modern technological society. Let the excavation begin.

Onward Fortnight for (Financial) Freedom! (Or Thoughts on liberalism and Catholicism)

Over the past few years, the Catholic Church has rallied itself against ostensible political threats to its religious freedom in a nationwide movement called Fortnight for Freedom. Given that over the past few years health care reform (aka "Obamacare") has been passed, gay marriage has become (more) normalized and the expansion of civil rights to that group has been codified, and the Catholic Church has not had to shutter its doors, I think that there needs to be a movement to prepare for the next existential threat to Christian autonomy. But rather than emphasize the immediate challenges to the autonomy of the theological space, the focus should shift to emphasize the necessity of accumulating sufficient monetary resources to combat the ever-possible, rarely-present, secular threat.

I say this tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek to bring to the forefront a question whose species I have discussed before in the form(s) of the ongoing internal Catholic dialog on the nature of Catholicism and liberalism. It would seem to me that what the Catholic Church and other Christian and non-secular sects have to encounter in the form of the modern liberal state presents a different kind of risk to the identity of religious practices than the kind of threat which may have existed in premodern societies. The social and political commitments that the liberal state demands of Catholics and other religious peoples is not necessarily an existential risk of the type that communities of yesterday may have presented to their opponents. It does present Catholics and other Christians with a choice, but the answer that they must give is not one that results in either a physical or a spiritual death; rather, it would seem that the liberal state demands that the Christian choose between being able to live a faith in its fullest expression or living the Christian faith in a partially-expressed way. In each case the result is that the believer experiences something akin to a spiritual amputation or even worse lobotomy.

It would seem that the challenge to the believer which is presented by liberalism is one which exerts an existential and spiritual (if not physical) crisis because against the truth of the love of and that is Christ, the modern liberal state presents nothing. Against the truth of the faith it pulls a philosophical sleight-of-hand by prohibiting the truth of Christianity to "be," instead presenting it as one option among many choices that can be chosen in this modern era (something that a few commentators have no doubt picked up on).

The Catholic is left asking a question that is perhaps worse than the choice of death: Can a Catholic (or Christian) be a Christian in a liberal state if the truth of Catholicism is not accepted by the state? I think the dilemma for the Catholic in the liberal state is captured in an NY Post article from June

Pope Francis recently emphasized that “religious freedom is not simply freedom of thought or private worship. It is the freedom to live according to ethical principles, both privately and publicly.”

The Catholic looks at the modern liberal state and witnesses an intractable and intrinsic threat to live his or her life according to the principles of his or her faith. The despair present in that realization ought not to spur only a more vibrant or vocal display of religious identity, but it should also bring into the forefront an opportunity to more fruitfully explore the dimensions and understand the Truth as an individual believer (or community of them). The same opportunity for self-and-other-witnessing presents itself to other Christian and non-Christian believers who make their homes in the modern liberal state. The option for the Christian in the face of an ontological (if not ontic-in-the-form-of-death) rejection of the truth of faith is not only to publicly witness for the faith in acts of political expression (which is often the modes by which the liberal state forces the believers to express themselves), but a non-political witness grounded in a quiet meditation and exploration of the Truth found in the scripture(s) and tradition(s) of their religious communities. To live along side of the state and leveraging the liberal state as a means to be a witness to yourself of the truth of your tradition is a demand of the liberal state that challenges Christians and other believers in fundamental and subtle ways that were not possible in the premodern era. Let us Christians take up the existential-ontological challenge to the truth of our faith that liberal modernity presents to us by turning our witness inwards and becoming witnesses to ourselves in an effort renew our faith against a community that responds to the truth with indifference or apathy. Give to ourselves the time of day for the truth of faith that the liberal state does not give to it.

The Dilemma of Faith and Reason? (Or Thoughts on Leo Strauss)

I have been preoccupied with a question that I think as a Catholic I take for granted. This is the complementarity of faith and reason (aka revelation and philosophy). St. John Paul II dedicated an Encyclical to addressing this question, and perhaps most famously St. Thomas Aquinas provides to us Catholics a model of both the feasibility of the feasibility of the synthesis and the power of the synthesized product. Yet, the alliance of the two is not a settled debate.

The German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss addressed this dilemma in his own way throughout his long and prolific academic career. In one essay on the subject, he writes about the productive tension that is at the bottom of Western society which is the insurmountable clash between the two. Strauss sees in faith and reason a conflict between a mode of living which, it would seem, is relentlessly skeptical to the point of nihilism (nothing is held sacred)- or perhaps is relentlessly experiential and empirical? - quest that is the philosophic life; and faith is seemingly an "obedience" to a God-given law. It is out of this conflict between these two camps that our civilization springs.

Catholics are divided over Strauss (and for that matter so are conservatives). I tend to sympathize with those "Straussians" who view the Straussian view of faith and reason relatively positively. As a commentator (to which I link above) remarks, Strauss offers much from which Catholics can learn. I don't think that Catholics have much reason to disagree with him. While he is not a theist let alone a Catholic, he seems to hold views on faith and reason that are hospitable to Catholicism. In his essay (linked above) he does not claim that philosophers cannot engage with theology, nor does he claim that believers cannot engage with philosophy. He simply marks the boundaries of their respective territories and seems to argue that they need to remain within those boundaries. That does not seem to be too radical a position to take. That faith - or to be a person of faith - demands a submission to a kind of authority which would be anathema to philosophy or the philosophical life is not terribly surprising. Nor is it all that damning of a claim made about either one of those ways of knowing. This does not seem to be a terrible restriction of either one of those modes but rather it is an acknowledgement of something that at the end of the day makes sense. How can I be a philosopher if my quest has an answer already predetermined, that being the truth of God found in the Truth of the incarnation or the Word that is the Christian faith? On the other hand, how can a believer possibly accept the truth of the faith if, according to Strauss' understanding of philosophy it would seem that he simply can't this action called philosophy even though he has discovered the truth in revelation? As Strauss writes in the essay, philosophy is a "way of life" that is "animated by a peculiar passion, the philosophic desire or eros, not as an instrument or department of human self-realization." It is a relentless quest which while aspires to "wisdom" (or knowledge of the whole is how i think he puts it) may not ever reach that. For Strauss the dilemma between faith and reason offers to a person alternative ways to live. Truth is a matter of living not just a matter of knowing. Both philosophy and theology (or as Strauss refers to the alternative, the bible), make radical claims upon the human person in his choice to live. The choice between philosophy and faith seems to be for Strauss an existential dilemma, and that is something that Catholics I think should respect and recognize. I notice that I often get caught up in the institutional trappings or legalistic rules of the faith - and even faith as a form of knowledge - but it is useful and humbling to remember that to be a Christian is to be a person who chooses to act. And an important element of the Truth of Christianity is bound up in or manifests itself in the way one lives his or her life. There is a potentially inherently humbling awareness that accompanies the often unconscious or t least passive acceptance of the truth of the faith, which only becomes more powerful during those times that a believer is aware of the choice he has made. It is an inescapable choice between two ways of life and I think Strauss can capture the gravity of that choice in a way that Christians can appreciate.