The Strange Prudence of the Kingdom

The Gospel two days ago insists on the strangeness of supernatural prudence.

Jesus adduces two examples of worldly prudence in Luke 14. If you build a tower, you've got to make sure you have the financing to see the project through. And if you're going into battle, you need to make sure there's a reasonable chance for victory:

"Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops? But if not, while he is still far away, he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms."

His conclusion from these examples? "In the same way, everyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be My disciple."

Huh. On the one hand, it makes sense to run the numbers to carry out worldly projects; on the other hand, the lesson to be drawn from that fact is that we should renounce the basis for worldly success. Strange prudence.

The fairly straightforward examples of secular prudence are somehow meant to elucidate the extreme logic of the prudence proper to the Kingdom of God. Jesus cites the cases of the tower and the armies as proof of the good sense of the radical, total demands of Christian discipleship:

"If anyone comes to Me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple."

Here we are up against the great question of how nature and grace relate. It's not straightforward. Prudence on earth: count the cost. Prudence with regard to the big picture: don't count the cost.

The logic of the world is a logic of scarcity and appropriation. The logic of the Kingdom is a logic of gratuity. The only way to play the game of gratuity is to renounce one's claim on the world, receiving temporal goods solely from the hands of the gracious God.

Grace does indeed perfect nature. But the historical enactment of sanctification, the Kingdom growing in this world, is not a matter of simple organic development. It is a matter of revolution--a revolution, though, true to the truth of the world.

There is indeed a relative autonomy to the prudence of this world. But the supernatural whole encompassing that relative autonomy is uncanny. The prudent thing (prudence being learned from worldly experience) to do when it comes to the big picture is to be a holy fool, to be most imprudent in the eyes of the world: acknowledging the Lordship of Jesus above every other attachment; taking to one's heart the suffering of life; and renouncing all mastery over material goods or anything else one would call "mine." This is the strange truth of prudence.

In continuity with, and yet a surprising reversal of, the calculus of the world, supernatural prudence is anything but clerk-like. It is fire. Docile to the Spirit of truth and of ever-greater love, it directs the revolution of the coming Kingdom.

Let Yourself Be Loved More Than These

A couple of days ago, we had the second celebration of the feast of Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity, a Carmelite canonized just last year.

In her last days, Saint Elizabeth penned a letter to her Prioress, Mother Germaine, the one Elizabeth acknowledged as "priest" of the consecration of her vowed life and of her dying. It is a moving and prophetic act of vocational encouragement from a grateful soul. Though the words were meant for her spiritual mother in particular, I am convinced that we should all hear these words as in some way addressed also to us. The predilection of God, His election, is for all: we need only say Yes to it. 

We do not earn the love of the Blessed Trinity. That love is eternal, it throbs in ever-greater preeminence, it creates, elevates, impels, pressing into and perfusing time, wherever there is a fissure or an opening. Love wants to go on and on, become more and more, in us. As I have said before: true love, divine love, is preemptive, unilateral, and asymmetric.

So, I think Saint Elizabeth's words are meant for you, if you would be elect:

"'You are uncommonly loved,' loved by that love of preference that the Master had here below for some and which brought them so far. He does not say to you as to Peter: 'Do you love Me more than these?' Mother, listen to what He tells you: 'LET yourself be loved more than these! That is, without fearing that any obstacle will be a hindrance to it, for I am free to pour out My love on whom I wish! "LET yourself be loved more than these" is your vocation. It is in being faithful to it that you will make Me happy, for you will magnify the power of My love. This love can rebuild what you have destroyed. LET yourself be loved more than these."'

..."Reverend Mother, Mother consecrated for me from eternity, as I leave, I bequeath to you this vocation which was mine in the heart of the Church Militant and which from now on I will unceasingly fulfill in the Church Triumphant: 'The Praise of Glory of the Holy Trinity.' Mother, 'LET yourself be loved more than these': it is in that way that your Master wills for you to be a praise of glory! He rejoices to build up in you by His love and for His glory, and it is He alone Who wants to work in you, even though you will have done nothing to attract this grace except that which a creature can do: works of sin and misery...He loves you like that. He loves you 'more than these.' He will do everything in you. He will go to the end: for when a soul is loved by Him to this extent, in this way, loved by an unchanging and creative love, a free love which transforms as it pleases Him, oh, how far this soul will go!"

Regime Analysis: In Pursuit of a Love That Integrates Personality and Common Life

As the pro-life revival of the American Republic is the goal, I promised those who came to the first session of the pro-life social doctrine certificate program that I would read this book while teaching the course: 1200 tasty pages of very fine political analysis—Paul Rahe’s Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution. 

This is the first dispatch, as I climb up the mountain. 

Rahe begins by arguing for openness to the ancient/classical science of politics (exemplified by Aristotle) rooted in a lifeworld and a sentiment of existence profoundly different from our own. This would require a great exertion of moral imagination, given our tendency to judge and find wanting while perched in the rafters of history, a tendency alive in the modern style of political science:

 “To the extent that [contemporary ethnography and political science] succumb to the reductionist project that animates the various social science disciplines, their history [of the ancient world] will be little more than a pack of tricks played on the dead. The method systematically applied by all but a few modern students of these subjects deconstructs and reduces the phenomena in a fashion that disarms the past and obscures its true character. ...what poses as a rejection of all ethnocentricity is, in fact, an ethnocentricity fully victorious: the one thing that contemporary researchers are taught to take for granted and never to question is that the men and women whom they study were wrong, and deeply wrong, above all else because these individuals were unaware of their own ethnocentricity—unaware, that is, that the beliefs for which they claimed to live and for which they were sometimes willing to die were arbitrary and nonsensical, if not self-serving. Almost never are well-trained modern researchers open to the possibility that the moral and political visions guiding the communities they study are, in fact, superior to those which inspire their own research.”

The theologian Johann Baptist Metz calls this ideological tendency “evolutionism”: the assumption that our time (and we) are simply superior to what came before. Such an ideology makes self-knowledge impossible. And without self-transcendence, there is no hope of rescuing the American Republic. Our political science, our social analysis, cannot be self-critical unless we risk surrendering our position of superiority, humbly engaging in the grand conversation about the proper order of social life that has been going on for centuries. 

The modern world is characterized by a massive expansion of technological power. This has tended to give economics (rather than politics understood to include common endeavor, deliberation, and aspiration) the upper hand in our lives. The most powerful vectors of modern life tend to slice and dice common life. I have no nostalgia for pre-modern times. At all. But we must understand what’s going on in our world, if we’re going to have any shot at reviving society and republicanism. And that means recognizing things that the ancient political science recognizes.

Rahe quotes Benjamin Constant: “We are no longer able to enjoy the liberty of the ancients, which consisted in an active and constant participation in the collective power. Our liberty, for us, consists in the peaceful enjoyment of private independence. The share which, in antiquity, each had in the national sovereignty was not, as with us, an abstract supposition. The will of each had real influence: the exercise of that will was a pleasure intense and often repeated. ...This compensation no longer exists today for us. Lost in the multitude, the individual hardly ever perceives the influence he exercises. Never does his will leave any impression on the whole; nothing establishes in his own eyes his cooperation. The exercise of political rights, then, offers us no more than a part of the enjoyment which the ancients found there; and, at the same time, the progress of civilization, the commercial tendency of the epoch, and the communication of the various peoples among themselves have multiplied and have given an infinite variety to the means of personal happiness. ...The purpose of the ancients was the sharing of the social power among all the citizens of the same fatherland. It is this to which they gave the name liberty. The purpose of the moderns is security in private enjoyment; and they give the name liberty to the guarantees accorded by the institutions to that enjoyment.”

Constant sees what change comes with bourgeoisified subjectivity: a privatization of desire, when there was a time our desires circulated through the larger social body. And yet there is great good involved in this modern development, good that comes with increasing recognition of the singularity and dignity of each person. 

The whole question is precisely this: how do we balance the rise of the person with a robust common life?

The hope for an answer lies in the kind of profound social/regime analysis Constant displays, which depends on a non-modern way of doing political science, one that asks different questions. Every society has its characteristic loves. Modern political science tends to ignore this fact. Ancient political science put it front and center. 

As Rahe describes it: “…what really matters most with regard to political understanding is this: to decide who is to rule or what sorts of human beings are to share in rule and function as a community’s politeuma [ruling class] is to determine which of the various and competing titles to rule is to be authoritative; in turn, this is to decide what qualities are to be admired and honored in the city, what is to be considered advantageous and just, and how happiness is to be pursued; and this decision—more than any other—determines the paideia which constitutes ‘the one way of life of a whole polis.’”

Paideia/the formation of the person and his or her desires/the education of our fundamental loves: this is the most basic element of the politeia, the regime, the whole fabric of common life (what we praise and blame, our customs, our sense of propriety, our pieties, what we are grateful for, our laws, what counts as justification for a given action). We must ask ourselves: in what way are our desires being trained? Towards what?

One may hold that the ancient political science is better at social analysis than its modern counterpart without holding that the ancient way of being political was simply superior to the modern way. It is precisely my commitment to modern republicanism that requires my acknowledgment of the superiority of the ancient political science, in recognizing the urgent need for dialectics (treating every interlocutor as having something worthwhile to say, every opinion as reflecting some truth) and in illuminating social life by the fundamental shared loves of the society. 

These questions have been placed before us, starkly, by the last presidential election. Trying to find intelligibility in populist opinion, for instance, is not a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. We must understand what moves the elites and what moves the lower classes. We must love the American creed again, together, and be moved by it as the wellspring of our common action: every single human being equal in dignity, endowed by the Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But we can’t get there without a preferential love for the poorest and most powerless. We need to find the romance in solidarity.

Oneself as Another: The Fire and Revolution Entailed by Christian Ethics

If we are simply comfortable, we are not Christian.

Today's Mass readings hammer this home, with no mitigation.

Incorporation into Christ remakes one's most intimate sense of oneself--restructures self-consciousness within a new way of feeling oneself a body in the world, a person in the world (even unto Rousseau's sentiment of existence and Kant's transcendental unity of apperception).

Oneself as another, to borrow Ricoeur's phrase. To be in Christ is to-be-in-the-world in the fullness of consubstantial solidarity: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

We love ourselves, usually inordinately. Jesus counts on this basic reality: you SHALL love the others as you so automatically love yourself.

And when we obey the paradoxical command to love the other, our love of self is corrected--oneself as another, oneself as all the others.

To be Christian is to realize most radically, in body and soul, the fact that there is one body of humanity, and that we bleed when any other bleeds. And the politics of this fundamental axiom of Christian ethics is revolutionary. It is a fire, and Jesus wants it to burn. There is no mitigating the Word of the LORD:

"Thus says the LORD: 'You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry. My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword; then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.

"'If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people, you shall not act like an extortioner toward him by demanding interest from him. If you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge, you shall return it to him before sunset; for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body. What else has he to sleep in? If he cries out to me, I will hear him; for I am compassionate.'"(Exodus 22:20-26)

It is right there, no wriggling out. If we are going to play gotcha with other people's politics, then we orthodox Christians will submit to the gotcha of these stern commands, which implicate everyone (right, left, and center): none of us has even begun to honor this revolution of love in our politics and economics and interpersonal actions--not in a culture of abortion and consumerism and obscene inequality and hardness towards the refugee.

Christian existence is fire and revolution. And that means it will cost us: "And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the Word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit" (I Thessalonians 1:6). None of the first evangelizers, and no authentic evangelist, ever mitigates the fact: receive the crucified Word, all joy is in it...and you will suffer in this world for that Word.

But be not afraid: Jesus, that Word of love, has overcome the world.

A Note on Wilbur's Version of "Finnegans Wake"

To conclude, for now, remembrance of the American master, Richard Wilbur, here is one of his most brilliant pieces.

It is a poem of almost impossible synthesis: hilarious, urbane, bathetic, pathetic, poignant, strongly and delicately beautiful, traversing the tragicomedy of human history. It is Wilbur's Finnegans Wake:
Everyman flat on the floor, dreaming and babbling like a young Augustine, of woman and of everything on the outside of possession. This is eros, the biography of the world, and there is hope in it.

A Voice from under the Table

by Richard Wilbur

(to Robert and Jane Brooks)

How shall the wine be drunk, or the woman known?
I take this world for better or for worse,
But seeing rose carafes conceive the sun
My thirst conceives a fierier universe:
And then I toast the birds in the burning trees
That chant their holy lucid drunkenness;
I swallowed all the phosphorus of the seas
Before I fell into this low distress.

You upright people all remember how
Love drove you first to the woods, and there you heard
The loose-mouthed wind complaining 'Thou' and 'Thou';
My gawky limbs were shuddered by the word.
Most of it since was nothing but charades
To spell that hankering out and make an end,
But the softest hands against my shoulder-blades
Only increased the crying of the wind.

For this the goddess rose from the midland sea
And stood above the famous wine-dark wave,
To ease our drouth with clearer mystery
And be a South to all our flights of love.
And down by the selfsame water I have seen
A blazing girl with skin like polished stone
Splashing until a far-out breast of green
Arose and with a rose contagion shone.

"A myrtle-shoot in hand, she danced; her hair
Cast on her back and shoulders a moving shade."
Was it some hovering light that showed her fair?
Was it of chafing dark that light was made?
Perhaps it was Archilochus' fantasy,
Or that his saying sublimed the thing he said.
All true enough; and true as well that she
Was beautiful, and danced, and is now dead.

Helen was no such high discarnate thought
As men in dry symposia pursue,
But was as bitterly fugitive, not to be caught
By what men's arms in love or fight could do.
Groan in your cell; rape Troy with sword and flame;
The end of thirst exceeds experience.
A devil told me it was all the same
Whether to fail by spirit or by sense.

God keep me a damned fool, nor charitably
Receive me into his shapely resignations.
I am a sort of martyr, as you see,
A horizontal monument to patience.
The calves of waitresses parade about
My helpless head upon this sodden floor.
Well, I am down again, but not yet out.
O sweet frustrations, I shall be back for more.

Richard Wilbur, American Poetic Master: Requiescat in Pace

For some time, Richard Wilbur, one of the greatest of American poets, had fed me as I set out on my poetic seas. But he conjured for me a new channel, or portal, or atmosphere, when I read his "In Limbo."

I know long-ish poems tax the concentration of most, and one of my goals is to entice more to become readers of poetry. So, I try to lower the price of admission. That's my feeble attempt to justify only reproducing the last two of the poem's five thrilling stanzas:

"Someone is breathing. Is it I? Or is it
Darkness conspiring in the nursery corner?
Is there another lying here beside me?
Have I a cherished wife of thirty years?
Far overhead, a long susurrus, twisting
Clockwise or counterclockwise, plunges east,
Twin floods of air in which our flagellate cries,
Rising from love-bed, childbed, bed of death,
Swim toward recurrent day. And farther still,
Couched in the void, I hear what I have heard of,
The god who dreams us, breathing out and in.

"Out of all that I fumble for the lamp-chain.
A room condenses and at once is true--
Curtains, a clock, a mirror which will frame
This blinking mask the light has clapped upon me.
How quickly, when we choose to live again,
As Er once told, the cloudier knowledge passes!
I am a truant portion of the all
Misshaped by time, incorrigible desire,
And dear attachment to a sleeping hand,
Who lie here on a certain day and listen
To the first birdsong, homelessly at home."

Magnificent. As besot as I am with the iamb, of course I love Wilbur for his metrical commitment. But here I received something more: an expansion of poetic sensibility, enabling me to write a poem that was my first in blank verse (if one brackets the concluding couplet) and, more importantly, one moving in a conceptual, emotional, and memorial space to which Wilbur had given me access. He made me more ambitious. That first little poem of mine, fully under Wilbur's spell, written at Redeye Roasters in Hingham, with "In Limbo" sounding through me, was this:

The Rapture

The mornings are different here, or rather now:
Less interrogative the mourning dove
In calling after the beloved’s name;
Less frequentive the fog in paradox
Of cool and sensuality, the beck
And breathing promise of the bridal veil. 
I wake, and no one’s there. I wake from dreams
I never can remember, or no longer
Do, into a light oblique yet more acute.
What have I wakened to? What will I find?
Once love was all before—have I been left behind?

I am just starting out. I wouldn't have enough steam without Richard Wilbur. Thank God for the man.

We should end with more of Wilbur's delicious words. He has been carried over the threshold beyond which the beautiful forms finally start to solidify, where "the doom of taking shape" has got one of the grand poets in two sure hands.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.

Seed Leaves

by Richard Wilbur

(Homage to R. F.)

Here something stubborn comes,
Dislodging the earth crumbs
And making crusty rubble.
It comes up bending double,
And looks like a green staple.
It could be seedling maple,
Or artichoke, or bean.
That remains to be seen.

Forced to make choice of ends,
The stalk in time unbends,
Shakes off the seed-case, heaves
Aloft, and spreads two leaves
Which still display no sure
And special signature.
Toothless and fat, they keep
The oval form of sleep.

This plant would like to grow
And yet be embryo;
Increase, and yet escape
The doom of taking shape;
Be vaguely vast, and climb
To the tip end of time
With all of space to fill,
Like boundless Igdrasil
That has the stars for fruit.

But something at the root
More urgent than that urge
Bids two true leaves emerge,
And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
And starts to ramify.

Know More, Love More: Announcing a Pro-Life and Social Ethics Certificate Program

[My September 19th "From the Chairman" blog for masscitizensforlife.org.]

We have forgotten how to live together. 

Either there will be civic reconciliation in America, or this nation will end. It has always been my conviction that the pro-life movement must be the vanguard of social progress. It is on us to know more and love more, or there will be no American future.

And the failure of this Republic would not be good for the future of the world. As Leonard Cohen sings in “Democracy”:

“It's coming to America first/The cradle of the best and of the worst/It's here they got the range/And the machinery for change/And it's here they got the spiritual thirst/It's here the family's broken/And it's here the lonely say/That the heart has got to open/In a fundamental way/Democracy is coming to the USA.”

To love something in common creates communion. And what every nation should cherish first are the weakest among us. That’s called the preferential option for the poor in Catholic social doctrine, but it’s simply the most basic human imperative. If we don’t see that, we do not have a common good that makes us a common social body. 

Therefore, the pro-life movement must always keep the flame of civic reconciliation. We have been given the gift to see the expendable ones in our consumerist society, so we must make the invisible visible to the others (the extent of the bonds of dependence and care knitting us together). We would that all see and serve together. 

But to keep this flame, we pro-lifers have to know more and love more. We have to be infinitely gentle and infinitely humble and infinitely open to the wonders beyond us.

And that’s where this new initiative from Massachusetts Citizens for Life comes in, a first-in-the-nation Pro-Life Social Doctrine Certificate Program, which I am eagerly looking forward to teaching.

The goal is to enlarge our hearts and minds with the bracing water of social ethics, imbibed in the spirit of the liberal arts. 

Our society has been infected by radical individualism for several generations, and none of us is unscathed. For detox, we need the beauty and challenge of literature and political philosophy and Scripture and American history if we are to transcend ourselves in a way that can draw all Americans into a shared circle of concern.

The program’s reading list includes: The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, Night by Elie Wiesel, The Person and the Common Good by Jacques Maritain, Lincoln by Allen Guelzo, the “Treatise on Law” from the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot. 

I can guarantee a thrilling spiritual adventure that will engage your heart and mind.

Please go to masscitizensforlife.org/certificate to register. Please prayerfully consider making a donation to sustain this vital initiative. 

Whether or not you are able to attend or make a donation, please support this unique educational opportunity. A flyer can be downloaded from the website. 

My goal as your guide on this adventure is the perfection of a pro-life republicanism, meaning the cultivation of a freedom that is virtuous and wise and overflowing with love, as Virgil describes at the end of Purgatorio, Canto 27 (in Tony Esolen’s translation):

“I’ve led you here by strength of mind, and art;/take your own pleasure for your leader now./You’ve left the steep and narrow ways behind.

“Behold the sun that gleams upon your brow,/behold the grass, the flowers, and the young trees/which this land, of its own, brings forth to grow.

“While we await the glad and lovely eyes/whose weeping made me come to you, you may/sit here or walk among them, as you please.

“No longer wait for what I do or say./Your judgment now is free and whole and true;/to fail to follow its will would be to stray./Lord of yourself I crown and miter you.”

Magnanimity, greatness of heart and mind, is all my aim, for freedom is another name for true love, for the romance of solidarity.

Solidarity is Our Song

[Rally remarks before the 2017 Mass. March for Life.]

My name is David Franks, chairman of the board for Mass. Citizens for Life. Thank you all for coming on this beautiful day.

I want to introduce MCFL’s newest educational initiative, a first-in-the-nation pro-life social doctrine certificate program.

It is a liberal arts approach to exploring the basic principles of political life, such as the common good and the dignity of the human person, in order to rebuild social consciousness from the pro-life perspective.

The program’s reading list includes Night by Elie Wiesel, The Person and the Common Good by Jacques Maritain, the “Treatise on Law” from the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, and The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot. 

This is a critical time in American history. We the people are divided. The American proposition to the world has become obscured—the proposition that government exists to secure the God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The future of our Republic depends on becoming reacquainted with the basic principles of political life.

One word for the most basic political principle is solidarity.

When Abraham Lincoln was a young man, he floated a flatboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where he saw slavery, naked and raw. Coming upon a street auction, trading in human flesh, Lincoln had the gut reaction of a (little-“r”) republican, who knows that government is here to secure the rights of every single human being—or it is nothing good at all:

“By God, boys, let’s get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard.”

That is the true American sensibility. It’s the pro-life sensibility: we see the unborn threatened with private execution; we see the elderly and the medically dependent herded towards various forms of euthanasia.

And through the democratic process, we are committed to hitting that thing hard.

Because solidarity is our song.

And solidarity means a revolution of spirit, a limitless expansion of heart and mind, to know more and to love more, world without end: this is what we were all made for. A communion that excludes no human being, no matter how powerless.

We are one body of humanity. We are one body of Americans, all refugees from the ideologies claiming that the state gives rights to man.

The Irish among us will appreciate my recalling the Emancipator, Daniel O'Connell, who understood that an essential moment in politics is free public speech and assembly. It is but one moment, yet it is an essential one, and becoming more salient in an age of unremitting retrenchment into private worlds.

When we come together in such public spaces for the sake of the powerless, we are standing in their place, we are being their representatives, and that’s the beginning of (little-“r”) republicanism. Political representation begins with witness for the powerless others.

Solidarity is our song. Sing its strains above these proud towers; sing gently into each heart that hates us for hitting the pro-abortion power; sing on and on, in greatness of heart and mind until every fellow-citizen, until every human, has joined the chorus; sing until we are one though we are many, one in our care of the vulnerable.

Sing, brothers and sisters; sing from that gilded dome to the leafy Berkshires till there be one commonwealth of love.

Subjectivity, and Representation of the Obscure Victim

A last-minute reminder for New England friends: the Mass. March for Life is this Sunday—and, unlike the last two years, it won't be raining!!! Please try to get friends and neighbors to come, and please pray for the Spirit to shine luminously through this public witness.

The Irish among us will appreciate my recalling the sterling Daniel O'Connell, who understood that an essential moment in politics is free public speech and free assembly. It is but one moment, but it is an essential one, and becoming more salient in an age of unremitting retrenchment into private worlds.

When we come together in public space for the sake of the powerless, the innocent whose right to life has been denied, we are standing in their place, we are being their representatives, and that's the beginning of (little-r) republicanism. Political representation begins with witness for the powerless others.

Representing the others coincides with the beginning of our own freedom as moral agents.

The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas brought out this truth, arguing that our subjectivity derives from our “subjection to the Other.”

That is, subjectivity and representation are inseparable; they arise together. Our personalities can only flourish within the republican responsibility to care for the others.

“Constituting itself in the very movement wherein being responsible for the other devolves on it, subjectivity goes to the point of substitution for the Other.” Substitution is the radical form of representation.

Christic solidarity is the deep basis for both human freedom and republican coexistence.

There's a lot at stake when we stand for the victims.

The Paper Wall, Inscribed with Broken Words

[Posted on Facebook, September 11th.]

The gift of tears. Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris’s “If This is Goodbye" gives that gift. How we need it! The song is based on the last recorded phone call of a woman trapped in one of the WTC towers. The man says to her: “Your bright shining sun/Would light up the way before me/You were the one/Made me feel I could fly/And I love you/Whatever is waiting for me/If this is goodbye.”

We are all only one second, one diagnosis, one email, one rook's move away from losing everything we thought mattered. That is not a despairing thought. It is clarity of insight into our utter dependence on the goodness of God the Father, amidst the dark storms of an encroaching night of formlessness. The Father alone can send His Word and His Love into the abyss to rescue us. Recognizing our inherent instability is an inducement to solidarity and self-abandonment in faith. It is a clarion sounding us to remember, in the deep Augustinian sense of memory as personal presence. We must remember the dead. All of them. The three thousand who died that day sixteen years ago. The three thousand who die every day from abortion in this country.

And we must remember those the standards of Western success make transparent: the depressed, the suicidal, the disgraced, the addicted, the imprisoned, the violated, the abused, the refugee, the obsolescent working man, the ones left behind in the oxbows of history.

The price of bourgeois comfort is forgetfulness of our precarious position as creatures, on the knife's edge between being and nothingness, an oblivion obtained through the scapegoat mechanism that loads our chaos, our defects, onto the ones not seen in our social circles. We tell ourselves they alone are the losers in life.

But we are all losers, if shorn of love. Love alone repatriates us to the wholesome land. Love alone justifies. Love alone changes sinners from ghosts into solid persons. If we withhold that love from others, merciful love, solidary love, we start to hollow out, while the marginalized are being filled with the fullness of God through the humiliation of Christ crucified.

Against the Theater of Nihilism: On Charlottesville and the Universalism of Human Dignity

"When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong."

--Abraham Lincoln, October 13, 1858, Debate at Quincy, Illinois

 

What saves social-media condemnation of racism from being an exercise in circular self-satisfaction, or from being a stalking horse for the denigration of other human beings in turn?

Not the happenstantial assertion of a fashionable opinion, but the reality that every single human being, from conception on, bears the ineradicable dignity of creation in the image of God, redemption in Christ, and destination to Trinitarian communion: it is that reality, characterizing every instance of the human species as such, every incarnation of the one, universal human nature, which requires the rejection of racism, without qualification.

But when positivism supplants the universal reality of natural law and supernatural fact, then even when the sum is right (condemnation of racism), the addends and the consequents will bear within them anti-human exigencies, isomorphic with racist positivism.

That is, if identity politics is one's reason for condemning racism, then we have one identitarianism confronting another, and Hegel has shown that that means a struggle to the death. There can be no peace when tribes go to war, unless one destroy the other.

The only true condemnation of racism comes from recognition of universal facts: the human, as such, must be respected and protected--universal human dignity, not identity politics.

Getting this right is essential if we are not to forget dignity in turn. Our Constitution is wholly determined by the natural-law commitments of our Declaration: EACH human is endowed with certain inalienable rights--above all, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

There are several implications:

1) We won't seek to destroy the lives of those we oppose. Of course, those who would harm must be disempowered. But they must always be loved. We certainly don't want to break another human being. That's the work of demons, not of saints.

2) We won't forget that there are no permanent enemies on earth. Our conduct in trying to restrain the criminal will be as mild as can be. This is a basic principle of ius in bello. It is a Christian and a human imperative.

3) We won't use the condemnation of racism as a means to weaponize political disagreement. That is, if we recognize the natural-law basis for giving racism no quarter, we won't assume those who vote differently are evil, because recognition of the inherent dignity of our fellow human requires us to give the best possible construction of his or her behavior. And, in politics, there are all kinds of things we will miss (from social positioning--our own and that of those we grapple with--to differing apprehensions of a world more subtle than our ability to keep up with, especially if we aren't in the habit of reading great books, imbibing great art, walking in the woods, and giving thanks for the world.) Recognition of the dignity and equality of our enemies will reinforce our so necessary humility.

White supremacy may be the stupidest ideology in the sorry roll-call of ideologies. There is nothing to be said for it. This is strangely impressive: there are all kinds of truths and moral imperatives jumbled up, say, in the murderous system of communism. No such luck with white supremacism. It asymptotically approximates (as it seems to get stupider as time goes on) that great unicorn of the history of ideas: what Lonergan would call a pure counterposition.

But meeting such lunacy with a mirror ideological positivism of another group resentment is the coming of a storm in which all cows are wet. Simple self-assertion versus recognition of universal equality and inherent dignity: one leads to the nihilistic collapse of common life; the other, to the healing of our social body.

[Because of our devotion to the dignity of all, we pray for the dead, especially for the repose of the soul of Heather Heyer, who stood before the murderousness to which tribalism leads.]

The Purification of Memory: On A-Bombs and Consequentialism

I am an unabashed believer in American exceptionalism, and I gladly recognize that patriotism is a necessary human virtue. This primal commitment augments an even more basic commitment of mine: to defend the right to life of the innocent in every instance.

It is because I am a pro-life American, devoted to the truth, that I have always taught that the nuclear strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were immoral.

I say this as the proud son of a man who flew 35 B-17 sorties during World War II, the most necessary war that has ever been fought.

The point is not to judge the soul of Harry Truman, or of anyone else. The point is to recognize that when evil is done so that, presumably, a greater good may come about, it is corrosive for the doer of the evil. When our president, the one elected to represent the nation as a whole, orders our military to carry out evil actions, by the inescapable bonds of national solidarity, we must all confront our action.

If we approve the evil, we do wrong. And we do violence to the ideals of our nation.

And if we do such a thing as pro-lifers (!), we make an absolute hash of the principle upon which hangs the most urgent and fundamental of social-justice causes: the defense of the most powerless human life.

I love America. If we are to become healthy as a people, one needful thing is the purification of memory. No more compromises with evil. No more targeting of innocent human life.

The purification of memory is a basic social responsibility, and for Christians, it means opening the floodgates of divine mercy. As the International Theological Commission notes in "Memory and Reconciliation":

"...the purpose of every act of 'purification of memory' undertaken by believers...is the glorification of God, because living in obedience to Divine Truth and its demands leads to confessing, together with our faults, the eternal mercy and justice of the Lord. The 'confessio peccati,' sustained and illuminated by faith in the Truth which frees and saves ('confessio fidei'), becomes a 'confessio laudis' addressed to God, before Whom alone it becomes possible to recognize the faults both of the past and of the present, so that we might be reconciled by and to Him in Christ Jesus, the only Savior of the world, and become able to forgive those who have offended us."

The purification of American memory is necessary for there to be an American future. We have much to grapple with, when it comes to the use of violent force: our treatment of many Native American tribes; the way black men face disparate (and sometimes brutal) treatment in all the policing that has to be done in our decomposing social body; the private, legally promoted execution of more than 50 million unborn babies...

This is the greatest nation on earth; therefore, we are more responsible. From those to whom much has been given, much is required.

A Slow, but Total, Revolution

“'Command that these two sons of mine sit, one at your right and the other at your left, in your Kingdom.'" (Matthew 20:21)

Happy Feast of Saint James the Greater! The sons of Zebedee do end up sitting on the right and the left of Jesus in a real sense: James as the first of the apostles to die, John as the last. Long or short, life in Christ is a dying to self and world, for the revelation of unconquerable love in the flesh.

From the first Mass reading: "We hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies." (2 Cor 4:7-10)

All authority in heaven and on earth is meant to serve love's coming to be in the flesh, in the body of anguished humanity. Saint Paul speaks precisely of the paradoxical contrariety required for glory to have a habitation in time.

And Jesus brings the paradoxes to their head, in terms of power and authority:

“'You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and the great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave. Just so, the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.'” (Matthew 20:25-28)

There is NO authority outside of love--self-abasing, ever-weaker love. No authority at all, the office objectively bearing authority, in the end, notwithstanding. For there is one LORD, and there are not two truths. And so Christianity is revolution and fire. It will burn up every pretension of every one of us Christians, and it will burn up every weapon turned against the weaker.

There is only one true thing urging from the invisible depths, only one Heraclitean fire: the love of Christ (objective and subjective genitive). That alone impels forward, upward, towards universal reconciliation.

This day was once for me a thing it can no longer be, but this fact, like every personal history of tortuous love, only proves the thesis of today's feast: the coming of true love is intricate and arduous, but it comes, along the river of hearts' blood.

I wrote this poem last year for the occasion. It is worth posting one last time.

The Last Anniversary

On the Feast of Saint James

O pilgrim, mark the days along the way,

The art provisioning so whimsically,

Yet modestly, the part that we must play,

Befitting tests spun tragicomically.

Quaff satin-bedded, honest tears that lens

The chalice of the astral morning glory,

And hark the trumpet creeper which portends

That there is life—and it is transitory.

Will you walk with me, and ponder riddles,

Say, how anniversaries can come to end?

The nets cannot be mended, so our little

Time must be for vines left unattended.

It is enough to revel and to mourn

As we process through laurel and through thorn.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real

What price are we willing to pay to live in reality?

It is a basic tenet of Christian spirituality that the ease of this world is a diabolical illusion. The subjectivity correlative to that illusion is what Sartre calls mauvaise foi, bad faith.

Because the good Father loves us, and wishes us to live in the reality and superabundance of limitless love (rather than in the tarted-up indigence of secular comfort), we must each be dragged into the desert, into the dark night. There we endure a desolation to subdue the truly abominable desolation of selfish existence.

That is, the real is attained only by a pilgrimage in the wilderness. A new city of love shimmers from the desert of wooing.

The loss of financial security, friends, profession, home, love, children... In His mercy, the good Father will take everything, and give us Bread for the stone of hardhearted comfort. Blessed be the Name of the LORD.

And so today's first Mass reading:

"Pharaoh was already near when the children of Israel looked up and saw that the Egyptians were on the march in pursuit of them. In great fright they cried out to the LORD. And they complained to Moses, 'Were there no burial places in Egypt that you had to bring us out here to die in the desert? Why did you do this to us? Why did you bring us out of Egypt? Did we not tell you this in Egypt, when we said, "Leave us alone. Let us serve the Egyptians"? Far better for us to be the slaves of the Egyptians than to die in the desert.'" (Exodus 14:10-13)

The Egypt of the soul is the Matrix of a social system predicated on radical appropriation, the strong using up the weak--indeed, everyone, weak and strong, meanly consuming each other.

In the first movie of the Matrix trilogy, the traitor deliberately chooses existence under the conditions of delusive fantasy rather than face the demands of the real, the demands of mission and responsibility.

And the Israelites want to return to a slavery determined by the dreams dreamed by power.

But Moses gives the prophetic word, the exhortation to faith. Though all the powers of the world threaten you with destruction, trust in God:

"'Fear not! Stand your ground, and you will see the victory the LORD will win for you today. These Egyptians whom you see today you will never see again. The LORD himself will fight for you; you have only to keep still.'" (Exodus 14:14)

An authentically consoling word.

However, it is a word that can easily be coopted by the world-system, the Egypt still in our hearts. For example, if we take it to mean that the LORD promises us temporal comfort, we have thereby given up the promontory of faith for the imperial flatlands and their fleshpots.

In my dark night, this word was given to me, and I wanted it to mean that everything I had lost would be restored. But that is not how it works. What the good LORD promises is that if we fall into His hands, if we are still, and let His purgation work its way in us, then we will not be overtaken by the infernal fantasy that was our world, inside and out. As we are purged, we are ever more totally incorporated into the consubstantial solidarity of the one suffering body of humanity thrumming with the wounded Heart of an infinite love.

He does keep this promise. If we are still, if we don't try to meet powerplay with powerplay, we will grow in intimacy with the crucified Jesus, and by this Bread of total love, this hidden manna, we will surely overcome the world--and manifest truest love.

A Common Dutifulness: On Christopher Nolan’s "Dunkirk"

There are several worthwhile films out right now, but you should make a point of seeing Christopher Nolan’s latest film, "Dunkirk," (and in 70mm, if you can). It is splendid filmmaking, in the grand style.

Nolan gives us something as visually sumptuous as a Malick film, while being more perspicuous. But this isn’t prosaic storytelling. In fact, the structure of the film is bracingly ingenious. There are three narrative sequences, each on a different timescale, which are brought more or less to coincide towards the end. Nolan, by this ever-interesting expedient, renders the complex, nigh chaotic, kinesis of the Dunkirk evacuation surveyable.

There is a relentless score cutting across all three sequences, like the speed of light in different special-relativity inertial frames, except these photons tick like a cosmic bomb. There is almost no lapse in the dramatic tension, and yet it is in no way overwrought or exhausting. This is an astonishing achievement.

Nolan had the good sense to keep this movie under two hours, though his subject matter (the near-catastrophe of losing the entire British Expeditionary Force to the German military at the beginning of World War II) could easily have justified a far longer film, a modesty I wish would catch on—the action sequences in too many films are prolonged in an undisciplined manner. This is a very lean movie.

Because it is so astringent with regard to warm emotions (only Kenneth Branagh and the scenes on the civilian yacht Moonstone moderate that astringency during the course of the movie), the catharsis, when it comes, is truly cathartic.

Above all, we are moved to tears by Branagh’s and Tom Hardy’s simple warrior courage and the Moonstone sailors’ citizen resolve and immense decency. We are pressed to consider: can our nation ever muster up such common heroism and simple humanity, as the Brits did, as we once did?

At the end, we hear Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech read from a newspaper by one of the soldier-survivors. We hear Churchill call to America:

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

In her finest hour, America heard the call, and we rose to the challenge that, by itself, sufficiently justified our existence as a nation. In this very different hour of grievance-tribalisms across the political spectrum: could we do such a great thing again? One people, united, exercising civic and other human virtues?

It made me weep to see it in so living an image. Please God, we will see this nation some day produce such an honorable citizenry again.

Towards the conclusion of the film, we see that the soldiers feel shame for having been beaten. Many of these men who in a fair fight on the battlefield would have been courageous, became desperate and craven in the attempt simply to survive. There’s always the question: Would I have done better? Would I have been like the Branagh character in placing others before myself, or Hardy’s Spitfire pilot, or the civilians on the Moonstone? How earnest is my pursuit of virtue? How much flesh will I commit to the good of my neighbor, and to the common good?

The Political Theology of John the Baptist

[Posted on Facebook yesterday.]

Happy feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist! It's not the most common happening to celebrate back-to-back solemnities, but with the Sacred Heart yesterday, these are great days of grace.

It seems to me that the Church wishes to emphasize the political theology, as it were, of John the Baptist's mission. In the entrance antiphon and collect for Mass today, as well as in one of the antiphons of lauds, is repeated the fact that John is sent from God "to prepare a people/nation fit for the Lord."

We have the call of Jeremiah in the first reading from matins, in which the Lord says,

"See, I place My words in your mouth! This day I set you over nations and over kingdoms, to root up and to tear down, to destroy and to demolish, to build and to plant. But do you gird up your loins; stand up and tell them all that I command you. Be not crushed on their account, as though I would leave you crushed before them; for it is I this day Who have made you a fortified city, a pillar of iron, a wall of brass, against the whole land: against Judah's kings and princes, against its priests and people. They will fight against you, but not prevail over you, for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD."

The prophet, filled with the Spirit, constitutes the true polity, over against the injustice of human power, the spirit of self-serving ("a fortified city...against Judah's kings and princes"). This spirit is also to be found in any one of us who would prop up self by scapegoating others, whether that be demonization of the "other" by the right, the left, or the middle.

There is also the fact that the second reading emphasizes the Davidic context of John, which isn't the most obvious thing. It is an excerpt from the address given by Saint Paul in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch (his first recorded oration), itself presenting a political theology, one of comprehensive power:

"God raised up David as King; of him God testified, 'I have found David, son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will carry out My every wish.' From this man's descendants God, according to His promise, has brought to Israel a savior, Jesus. John heralded His coming by proclaiming a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel; and as John was completing his course, he would say: 'What do you suppose that I am? I am not he. Behold, One is coming after me; I am not worthy to unfasten the sandals of His feet.'" (Acts 13:22-25)

Paired with the corresponding speech in the first half of the Petrine/Pauline diptych that is the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Peter's Pentecostal address, in which David is also featured, we have a dual vision of the Kingdom of the resurrected Christ. On the one hand, this Kingdom is a mighty work of the Spirit bringing history and nature, with all of the promises of God encoded therein, to inner, and supernatural, fulfillment. In this light, it is not reducible to political configurations. On the other hand, this Kingdom does in fact have a political history, and therefore places all politics under its measure.

The human person and the societies made up of human persons are not reducible to the state and its arrogant power, whether wielded by technocratic elites of right or left. The state ought to serve the natural end of man, which is intrinsically open to the ultimate end of man in the New Jerusalem. That natural end is gentle virtue, contemplative and responsible, open to supernatural direction by the Holy Spirit, lived out in a body politic of reconciling love.

The gentleness is essential. This is the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart after all.

The preparation of the Kingdom was John's whole life. He was a pure blade of flame in the service of divine love. His baptism of repentance was not performed for the sake of a further self-enclosure of "the elect," of "Israel." His repentance was true repentance, which burns for a universal Kingdom. It says, "LORD, take from me all self-will. Leave me with only the desire to serve Your mission, to form a people who can actually begin to love. But first, I must begin to love. I must decrease; You must increase."

Let's end with the first reading from Mass today, a memory of Isaiah's commission as a prophet, from chapter 49:

"Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength, yet my reward is with the LORD, my recompense is with my God. For now the LORD has spoken, Who formed me as His servant from the womb, that Jacob may be brought back to Him and Israel gathered to Him; and I am made glorious in the sight of the LORD, and my God is now my strength! It is too little, He says, for you to be My servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and restore the survivors of Israel; I will make you a light to the nations, that My salvation may reach to the ends of the earth."