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“I am deeply shocked by the Pope's visit with Kim Davis, because he appears to be

taking her side, against settled law in Western countries, which says that public

officials may not, in their official functions, impose their private religious beliefs

on citizens whom those government offices serve. Davis had been convicted of

contempt of court for her behavior in violation of a court order. The Supreme

Court confirmed her conviction. JFK, campaigning for the Presidency, said that as

President he would be obliged to serve the Constitution, not his Pope. Does

Francis disagree with that?”

I. Probably a Catholic commentator. How did we get to this stage, where Catholics

think the legal right to homosexual marriage is self-evidently wonderful and

uncontestable, and a Pope’s defense of a poor woman’s impotent attempt to

obey God’s law on marriage is ridiculed and help in contempt? I shall try to shed

some light on this question today, but first a joke!

I. The bartender says "we don't serve time-travelers here". A time-

traveler walks into a bar.

II. If we could travel in time: 911, 1950s, Civil War, Reformation, 13th

century

III. Criterions? Prosperity, medicine. The desired destination of my

time-machine must be to that place and time that is best for my

soul.

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IV. Now, there are no time machines. Stuck in modernity, and nation

state. How are things here and now for our souls?

V. Is this the best? But isn’t this the wrong way to think about all

this? what the American Founders brought to these shores . . .

Vatican Council . . .

VI. Before we can answer these questions, we must take a step back

and reconsider. Why should we do this? As I shall discuss

presently, any social and institutional practice aiming at some sort

of common good embodies a theory . . .

VII. Alasdair MacIntyre tells us that an tradition is simply a historically

embodied argument about the Good. Now, as twenty first century

American Catholics, we are participants of several traditions,

some of which we are active and willing participants,

VIII. Catholic-Augustinian-Thomistic tradition. Enlightenment.

unwilling and passive participants, by being surrounded by it,

particularly thorough its takeover of popular culture, academia,

and law, the postmodernist tradition of “genealogy,”

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IX. Regardless of the influences of the various traditions on our

thoughts and actions, we are not at the mercy of these, and there

is only one tradition that claims our ultimate allegiance. As

Chesterton tells us, “The Church It is the only thing that frees a

man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” So let

us now examine

X. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. Politics of the soul.

XI. We seek the good together in a political community, the polis, the

city. The polis is a natural creature. Self-sufficient. Emerging from.

XII. natural law, inclination, human law, goods, virtues

XIII. Political authority, then, is legitimate, and only legitimate,

regardless of its origin. Different regimes. Prudence.

XIV. Now Plato and Aristotle and Cicero got things mainly right . . .

XV. St. Augustine. Loves determine city. Justice. “Where there is no

justice there is no commonwealth.” Right worship: “Accordingly,

two cities . . .”

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XVI. With the coming of Christ, we now have two cities. New ethics.

Sin. “Be holy as your God is holy”, new. City of God, pagan states

never states.

XVII. With Jesus’s declaration to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and

God which is God’s, we have the definitive break with the pagan

political theology. Tension.

XVIII. The philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, particularly metaphysics

and ethics, was not rejected. Impossible to please god.

XIX. Content and obligatoriness. our membership in the City of God

takes precedence over any other membership.

XX. Leo XIII in two encyclicals. The essential teaching is that the

relation of Church and state is analogous to the relation of the

soul to the body in man, as Leo states: “Whatever, therefore in

things human is of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of

its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to

the salvation of souls, or to the worship of God, is subject to the

power and judgment of the Church. Whatever is to be ranged

under the civil and political order is rightly subject to the civil

authority. Jesus Christ has Himself given command that what is

Caesar's is to be rendered to Caesar, and that what belongs to

God is to be rendered to God.”

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XXI. just as the soul and body, when separated, libido dominandi.

XXII. Best formulation: William Ward: “The Church professes to be

infallible in her teaching of morals no less than of faith. If, then,

Catholicism be true, and if Catholics have the fullest ground for

knowing it to be true, the one healthy, desirable, and legitimate

state of civil society is that the Church’s doctrines, principles, and

laws should be recognized without question as its one basis of

legislation and administration; to the Church’s authority.”

XXIII. In sum: READ: Men are political animals, meaning that they are

born into political community of their very nature. Man has an

end that is part of his very nature, eternal happiness, which

includes a natural happiness that is ordered to the supernatural

one. Both natural and supernatural happiness can only be

attained with the help of others in a well-ordered social and

political life of various hierarchical authorities and social

groupings—family, town, city; parish, workplace, school,;guild,

sodality, and confraternity--one ordered by and to the good, both

natural and supernatural, whose laws, practices, and institutions

embody the natural law and aim at the common good, which is

full flourishing of human beings in lives of virtue, love of God and

neighbor, and contemplation of God. The city is a natural

creature, and thus it must be ruled by and ordered to God. Its

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authority is a participation in the divine authority of providence,

and it is only legitimate and worthy of obedience and

participation when it is actually ordered by and to the common

good, when its laws reflect and embody the natural law, and

when it accepts its limits, the ordering of temporary affairs for the

sake of heavenly ones. Man does not have a natural end per se,

but only supernatural one with a natural component, and the

city’s ultimate purpose is to help men get to heaven, to care for

their soul, as Socrates was right to claim, to help men attain their

supernatural end. For this purpose, there is a necessary union of

Church and state, and the state, as well as all other non-ecclesial

social and political practices and institutions, are under the

authority of Christ in everything, and so of His Church, in all those

matters that pertain to the Church’s temporal and spiritual

authority, in faith and morals, the sacred, and in declaring and

securing the ultimate purpose of man’s existence. Christ is the

King over both persons and states, and all authority derives from

His universal kingship, and must answer to His will, which has

been made manifest in the teachings and laws of the Catholic

Church.

XXIV. Modernity: no longer holds . . .

XXV. READ: I would like to just outline the main differences between

the modern liberal conception and the Catholic-Thomistic. And I

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will conclude by describing the predominant strategy of Catholic

intellectuals to engage late-twentieth century modern liberalism

in its American form, and why this strategy failed and was

doomed to failure.

XXVI. pre-modern and modern politics can be seen in the contrast

between pre-modern and modern ethics, The three components.

XXVII. Nominalism, no essence of man. rejection of one component. just

because! Combine this Enlightenment rejection of Plato and

Aristotle’s metaphysically-based ethics with the rejection of the

authority of the Catholic Church in the Protestant revolt, and we

can see the political manifestation of these two errors, one

philosophical and one theological, in the emergence of the social

contractarian, rights based, secular nation state, in the late 16th

and 17th centuries.

XXVIII. Metaphysics, ethics Rejection seem in Machiavelli, etc.

Architects, Hobbes Locke.

XXIX. What are the main features of this new, revolutionary institution?

Modern man is no longer conceived of as a political animal. Go

through features. When God creates something, it is God’s. But

when man creates something, it is man’s.

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XXX. Absolute sovereignty over its citizens. Consent. People are free to

believe in God and practice whatever religion they like, but.

Civil/private.

XXXI. READ: In the modern, liberal, secular, rights-based, contractarian

nation-state, on the other hand, the state is a creature of the will

of men, under no antecedent cosmic and natural and divine

authorities, ordered not to the attainment of man’s good, but his

rights and liberties. It’s authority is absolute in this regard, with all

other social bodies, including the Church, under its authority in

the political, public, civic sphere. Man is left alone to determine

his own conception of the good, which he may live out privately

and socially, but not politically.

XXXII. How did such a revolutionary change in politics and Church and

state come about? Here’s the authoritative narrative:

(READ) Only in secular modernity did man finally achieve his liberation from

oppression and ignorance, from superstition, magic, tyranny, and priestcraft, from

the dark forces of religious power, fanatical belief, and sectarianism. Man

achieved this liberation primarily through the secularization of reason, morality

and society, which was effected through the separation of religion from the

political order, church from the state. Ever-increasing religious and ideological

pluralism ensued as soon as previously oppressed men of good will were

permitted to exercise freely their reason and act on their consciences. It is

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certainly the case that when Christendom was finally broken up in the wake of the

Reformation, religiously intolerant, confessional, monarchical states emerged, but

these evolved quite quickly, historically speaking, into the secular, tolerant-

minded, pluralistic, democratic states we have today. The rise of secular society

after the sixteenth and seventeenth-century “wars of religion” (to see why this

phrase must be put in scare quotes, see the pioneering revisionist work of William

T. Cavanaughi) was rendered possible only by the removal of “religion” (a creation

of the modern state, as Cavanaugh shows, being unprecedented in its newly

depoliticized and privatized formii) from all positions of political significance and

power. Good-willed, reasonable people were ready and willing to accept the

desacralization of the state, so the story goes, after centuries of witnessing

incessant bloodshed over religion. Sequestered, depoliticized, and privatized,

religion and the sacred would now no longer cause war, divisiveness, and

oppression, and the newly liberated, autonomous, politically secular individual

could finally thrive. In the religiously tolerant, secular, pluralistic liberal

democracy governed by the rights of men, not God, the sacred would still have a

place, as well as a capacity to exert influence over politics, but now it would have

to coexist with the many competing, private sacreds residing in the same city,

now proliferating and dwelling together in peace precisely because none are

permitted to obtain societal, cultural, and political power, let alone a monopoly

on power.

In short, secular modernity was born at the moment when the archaic,

violence-inducing sacred lost its public, political hegemony and influence, having

been relegated to the sub-political, private sphere of men’s fancies and hearts.

What took its place in the public square is what should have always been there in

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the first place, the absolute right (well, restricted only by the equal rights of

others) of the individual to self-determination, to freedom of thought, action,

speech, property, and religion. Prescinding from the question of the ideological

accuracy of this just-so narrative, it can be said with certainty that in modernity

man attempted, for the first time in human history, to construct a political order

not based upon the religious or the sacred. While not denying the right of every

citizen to believe in a sacred, superhuman, cosmic, divine, transcendent power as

the true ground of man’s existence, both personal and social, the theoreticians of

the modern paradigm, people such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau,

Kant, Madison, and Marx, justified, by appeals to reason, common sense and

consent, historical inevitability, enlightened sentiment, or even the Will of God,

the replacement of secular values and rights codified in a social contract, the

general will, a constitution, or the party line for any supposed power or will higher

than man.

In The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla articulates tersely the desacralization

paradigm: “The liberation, isolation, and clarification of distinctively political

questions, apart from speculations about the divine nexus.” He continues:

“Politics became, intellectually speaking, its own realm deserving independent

investigation and serving the limited aim of providing the peace and plenty

necessary for human dignity. That was the Great Separation.”

XXXIII.The response to modernity. Popes. What was condemned.

Confession state upheld.

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XXXIV. After World War II, and especially during and after the Second

Vatican Council. Qualifications.

XXXV. READ: John Courtney Murray and Jacques Maritain were the main

proponents of this new development on Church and state and

they wrote elaborate philosophical and theological justification of

it. They began a debate the resolution of which has become much

more relevant today, even urgent, for Americans, as the

government attacks on the religious liberty of Christians increase,

the decadence and violence of culture deepens, and the American

empire of libido dominandi and perpetual war metastasizes. Were

Murray and Maritain, and Richard Neuhaus, wrong. Are the

Catholic conservatives who insist that the nation-state given to us

at the American Founding was essentially right and good, and that

if the American government and citizenry would only return to its

original understanding of religious and ordered liberty, we could

again have peace and prosperity and virtue under the good-

pleasure of almighty God?

XXXVI. (READ): The question boils down to this: Can political power

and unity be derived and justly exercised from a purely immanent

and secular source in separation from the authority and guidance

of the Catholic Church, that is, from a contract made by humans

with humans alone? I think the answer is no, that the liberal,

democratic, rights-based model of the state, and its Lockean

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conception of the relation of Church and state, as established in

America in 1787, is fatally flawed, and cannot be redeemed. Let

me conclude by trying to explain why I think this, not so much in

terms of abstract principles, but in terms of an interpretation of

recent events.

XXXVII. READ: First, I’d like to give an argument for my position based

upon philosophy and theology. After this, I will conclude by giving

an argument based upon a certain interpretation of a pattern that

can be seen in some significant current events.

SO, first the philosophical and theological argument: According to St. Thomas,

men cannot adequately understand in theory, let alone fulfill in practice, the

detailed precepts of the natural law without the help of its author, God, and its

divinely appointed interpreter, the Roman Catholic Church. With regard to a non-

sacral foundation for political order, Thomist Joseph May in the 1950s stated:

“The only true doctrine is that civil society cannot prescind from the ultimate end

[emphasis mine] both because the temporal welfare implies an ordering to the

spiritual and supernatural, and because the individual citizens are directly and

positively bound to tend to it” The Church has not changed its view on this, and

still affirms it, unequivocally! Dignitatis Humanae of Vatican II insists that it

“leaves untouched the traditional Catholic doctrine about the moral duty of men

and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ" (Sec. 1). As

Pope John Paul II often reiterated, the face of Jesus Christ is the only true mirror

in which man can fully and accurately contemplate and comprehend his own

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nature and destiny; thus, only therein can he discern the moral values and goods

most perfective of himself and the political order.

However, the desacralized, religiously pluralistic, secular state supposes

that authentic political peace is possible without the majority of citizens’ spiritual

rebirth through Baptism and the infusion of sanctifying grace that comes primarily

through the Church’s sacraments—and without the formal guidance of the

Catholic Church on fundamental moral and political issues. For as we have seen,

St. Augustine, true peace and goodness was just not possible outside the society

of Christian believers, as is suggested in De Civitate Dei in which Augustine judged

the “peace” of Rome, the exemplar of the “city of man,” no peace at all in

comparison to the true social peace that can only come from social obedience to

Christ in the city of God.

Should Christians be optimistic, then, about the prospect of genuine

common good being effected in and through a desacralized, secular, pluralistic,

contractatian state? Perhaps the answer is that we must work with what we have,

which is not bound to be supernaturally transformed anytime soon. And perhaps

the modern state simply is something essentially different from the ancient and

medieval one, that it is, by practical, historical, demographic necessity, a

historically irreversible, desacralized state. Perhaps this is as it should be, for now

the sacred has found its proper home in the Church and the mystical body of

believers, both its actual and potential members. Perhaps it is a good thing that

the human person, made in the image and likeness of God, is now the locus of

sacrality.

However, in any society, Christian or not, should not citizens attempt to

create a political order whose public culture permits not only the free practice of

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one’s religion, whatever that may be, but also, in a religiously pluralistic culture

such as ours, a political and cultural ethos most conducive to discovering and

practicing the true religion, or, if one is non-religious, the secular values most

conducive to human flourishing? It is hard to see why the pluralistic, desacralized

state could facilitate this sort of ethos better than the religiously unified, sacral

state; thus, there is a good argument that the real “power of religion in the public

sphere” must be a sacred power.

Jim Kalb characterizes liberalism as not only a tradition, but a religious tradition:

The fundamental question of political legitimacy is the nature and purpose

of authority, and thus the nature of man, the world, moral obligation, and

the human good—in other words, which religion is correct. Liberalism

cannot get by without answering that question, but it answers it indirectly,

by claiming moral ignorance. We do not know what the good is, it tells us,

so we should treat all desires the same. The satisfaction of all desires thus

becomes the unquestionable good. Man becomes the measure, human

genius the principle of creation, and individual will the source of value. The

limitations on moral knowledge on which the liberal outlook is based lead

to a definite result, and so become constituent principles rather than

limitations. In short, they constitute a religion, a fact concealed by the

moral doubt that is liberalism’s first principle. This new religion, based on

the denial of the knowability of truth, consists in nothing less than the

deification of man. To refuse to talk about the transcendent, and view it as

wholly out of our reach, seems very cautious and humble. In practice,

however, it puts our own thoughts and desires at the center of things, and

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so puts man in the place of God. If you say we cannot know anything about

God, but only our own experience, you will soon say that there is no God, at

least for practical purposes, and that we are the ones who give order and

meaning to the world. In short, you will say that we are God.iii

Now, the liberal state never explicitly affirms “we are God,” for in its official

agnosticism, it does not even explicitly deny or affirm the possible or actual

existence of a transcendent being. Moreover, it insists that it leaves open the

possibility of some such being’s revealing or having revealed himself and his will

to man. Secular liberalism, that is, the purportedly non-theocratic state, simply

does not deem it necessary to recognize any such being and revelation for the

purposes of either political philosophy or political practice. It claims public

ignorance about, but does not deny outright the possibility of, an authoritative

revelation demanding personal recognition.

Yet, the believer in a being who has clearly and publicly revealed to man his will

for the political order could argue that a studied ignorance regarding the

existence of such a publicly accessible divine revelation is intellectually unjustified

and politically unjust. For a Roman Catholic, for example, the Church exists as a

public institution claiming to be the embodiment and spokesman of a publicly

authoritative divine revelation bearing directly on morality and politics. Therefore,

the Church is at least a possible candidate for a publicly authoritative social

institution. Even if one prescinds from the question of the truth of this revelation,

the Church’s claim about itself to be the authoritative spokesman for this truth is

still an objective, intelligible fact within societies, and while a political philosopher

can deny the truth of this claim, it cannot plead ignorance to the fact of the claim

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itself. Thus, in articulating any ideal political order, the political philosopher must

deal in some way with the Church’s claim to have the authority to define the

ultimate meaning of goodness and politics, by either recognizing or denying the

Church’s public authority to do so. Practical agnosticism to the very possibility of

such an authority is, in effect, an implicit moral judgment of the injustice of its

ever becoming an actual, living authority, and therefore an implicit theological

denial of the authority it indeed has (from the Catholic perspective). In other

words, the so-called religiously-neutral, secular state guaranteeing religious

liberty is no such thing. It is a confessional state, on which confesses the rejection

of the social Kingship of Christ and the supernatural political authority of the

Catholic Church. Davis Schindler writes: “A nonconfessional state is not logically

possible, in the one real order of history. The state cannot finally avoid affirming,

in the matter of religion, a priority of either “freedom from” or “freedom for”—

both of these priorities implying a theology.”

Any moral or political theory involving the question of ultimate political authority

that excludes this theological issue from its purview inevitably makes a

theological judgment, as D. Stephen Long points out: “Ethics cannot be the

province of a philosophical discourse that brackets out theological consideration,

unless philosophers assume a being greater than God giving access to goodness.” iv

Claiming ignorance or uncertainty of the truth of the Church’s claim to public

authority, or even just acting as if one were ignorant or uncertain of it by

committing oneself to a political theory and practice in which the Church’s

authority could never, without causing grave injustice, be publicly recognized, is

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effectively to make a negative judgment about the Church’s claim. In practice, it

amounts to a theological judgment against the Church’s authority, and when such

a judgment becomes part of a lived social, cultural, and political tradition, and

becomes embodied in its set of practices, one can, with Kalb, accurately call such

a tradition a religion.

Authority in society, in order to fulfill its basic function of organizing the social

activity of human individuals, must determine, authorize, and implement practical

answers to matters that are inextricably bound up with religious considerations

and commitments: life and death (What is a human being? Whom does the

government have an obligation to protect? Who speaks authoritatively on these

issues?); war (What is the criteria for conscientious objection? For just or unjust

war?); sex (Is fornication or adultery to be socially celebrated, prohibited, or

ignored?); the family (Is marriage an unchanging social and religious institution, or

is its character open to perpetual redefinition by individuals?); rewards and

punishments (What kinds of behaviors should merit societal approbation and

opprobrium?). Social and political authorities must inevitably consider and make

judgments regarding these issues; even the decision to depoliticize and privatize

these matters, leaving these questions to be settled freely by individuals, is

socially and politically significant. Thus, “secular” “non-theocratic” regimes are de

facto religious regimes, in this sense: that even if there were a way fully to

depoliticize these sorts of issues, there could never be “religious neutrality” on

the part of the state with regard to them. If there is a possibility of a God-

ordained answer to any of these questions, and if there is an institution that

claims to articulate authoritatively this answer, then societal and political

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authority must respond one way or another to this claim. In conclusion, what

John Courtney Murray and Jacques Maritain were supporting, a religiously-

neutral, secular, natural-law governed nation state, never existed, and doesn’t

exist now. There are only confessional states, and so the question becomes—

what religion is the state going to confess, and if it isn’t Christ and the Catholic

religion, what will it be?

In this final and concluding section of this talk, I will give an possible answer to

this question, and it’s not a pleasant one.

Romano Guardini has written: “The law of the state is more than a set of

rules governing human behavior; behind it exists something untouchable,

and when a law is broken it makes its impact on the conscience of man.

Social order is more than a warrant against friction, than a guarantee for

the free exercise of communal life; behind it stands something which

makes an injury against society a crime. The religious dimension of law

suffuses the entire moral order. It gives to ethical action, that is action

necessary for the very existence of man, its own proper norms, which it

executes from without and without pressure. Only the religious element of

law guarantees the unity and cooperation of the whole order of human

behavior.

And Thomas Molnar: We are thus approaching societies without the sacred

and without power. To use the words of Gauchet again, the political

enterprise is no longer justified in calling itself the concretization of the

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heavenly law. Political power is subverted in its symbolic foundation and

sacred identity. Its roots, hence its mediating legitimacy, have been

removed by a quiet revolution. Liberal democracy has proved to be a

passage from society founded on the sacred to society founded on nothing

but itself.

Rémi Brague has warned us that, “Such a contract (the secular nation state),

precisely because it has no external point of reference, cannot possibly decide

whether the very existence on this earth of the species homo sapiens is a good

thing or not.”v

I posit that what we are experiencing today in American and in the West is a

continual irruption and increasing proliferation of violent, crisis-making events

that bear the features of “The Sacred”—consider the attacks of 911 and the War

on Terror, the Sandy Hook massacre, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and the terror

of ISIS for example. Consider the reaction of the overwhelming majority of

Catholic conservatives to Kim Davis’ refusal to issue marriage licenses for gay

couples, “She should obey the sacred “law of the land”—or resign!” What we are

presented with in each of these events are impeachable narratives, an ethos of

fear and awe, the sudden unification of factions, in short, the religious-like

gathering together of all citizens in defense of the sacred State. In short, the

phenomena of the sacred is as publicly present, influential, and authoritative in

secular modernity as it ever was in the ancient “religious” world, and it is

essentially the same sacred, the collapse of the two cities into one, the worship of

the secular yet sacred modern state.

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Can modern man really live without a publicly authoritative sacred? And when

he has repudiated the traditional sacred, or perhaps has just forgotten about it, is

he bound to concoct sacreds of his own, in his own fallen and depraved image?

Listen to the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin describe the sacred character of

the 911 event:

The mythology created around September 11 was predominantly Christian

in its themes. The day was converted into the political equivalent of a holy

day of crucifixion, of martyrdom, that fulfilled multiple functions: as the

basis of a political theology, as a communion around a mystical body of a

bellicose republic, as a warning against political apostasy, as a sanctification

of the nation’s leader, transforming him from a powerful officeholder of

questionable legitimacy into an instrument of redemption, and at the same

time exhorting the congregants to a wartime militancy, demanding of them

uncritical loyalty and support, summoning them as participants in a

sacrament of unity and in a crusade to “rid the world of evil. vi

Thomas Molnar writes: Must the political order be derived from a cosmic

model (or, at any rate, from an external, transcendent reference point), or

are there valid and effective substitutes? Can unaided humanity, through

the mobilization of its faculties, create a sacred, or at least a myth,

powerful enough to convey a model? If the answer to these questions is no,

we must ask then: Can a community exist without the sacred component,

by the mere power of rational decisions and intellectual discourse?vii

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No, I say. A community cannot exist without a sacred component, and when the

traditional sacred of monotheism was rejected in modernity with the rise of the

desacralized nation state, the shrine did not remain empty.

An objection might be raised here. Even if it were a delusional mistake to

try entirely to desacralize politics and power, did not secular modernity bring us

the freedom of religion, the rule of law, civil equality, and representative

government, that is, unquestionably beneficial institutions and practices unheard

of in the pre-modern world? We can say with certainty that modern liberal

democracy, insofar as it has provided the political, legal, cultural, social, and

psychological space for the free exercise of reason and conscience, and as it has

helped men to flourish physically through its scientific, technological, and medical

advances is a considerably good thing. But what is the price we have paid for all

these secular advances? Was the dethronement of the traditional sacred from its

rightful place at the heart of society, culture, and politics worth it?—“What profit

a man if he gain the whole world but lose his very soul.

One way to characterize the sacred is that which is considered absolutely

good, under, around, in obedience to, and in pursuit of which men order their

individual and corporate lives. Insofar as secular liberalism denies that such a

metaphysical, ethical, and spiritual good, if it even exists, can or should have any

public authority in civilized society, it is delusional and hypocritical. As Alasdair

MacIntyre writes:

Initially, the liberal claim was to provide a political, legal, and economic

framework in which assent to one and the same set of rationally justifiable

principles would enable those who espouse widely different and

incompatible conceptions of the good life for human beings to live together

22

peaceably within the same society. Every individual is to be equally free to

propose and to live by whatever theory or tradition he or she may adhere

to, unless that conception of the good involves reshaping the life of the rest

of the community in accordance with it. . . . And this qualification of course

entails not only that liberal individualism does indeed have its own broad

conception of the good, which it is engaged in imposing politically, legally,

socially, and culturally wherever it has the power to do so, but also that in

so doing its toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public arena is

severely limited.viii

Since secular liberal culture is, according to MacIntyre, founded upon a particular

conception of the good, namely, the sacral good of the privatization and

desacralization of all claims to truth, and a particular doctrine of truth, the

irreducible plurality of conceptions of the good/sacred; and since the publicly

authoritative rhetoric of liberal culture includes a denial of having any substantive

sacred conceptions of its own, what liberalism amounts to is an institutionalized

religious sacred—but one that indoctrinates citizens into disbelieving in its very

existence as such. Just as the puppeteers in Plato’s Cave must ensure that the

shadows they cast on the wall in front of the shackled slaves are never seen by

them as shadows, else the cave be identified as a cave and the prisoners break

their chains in revolt, the “secular” state must never be exposed for what it really

is, a sacred power exercising hegemony over all competing sacreds, which it has

effectively privatized and neutered. Thus, its own sacred dogmas become

unimpeachable, unquestionable, uncontestable, and, most importantly, invisible.

It judges all beliefs and actions in accord with these dogmas, and executes its

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definitive judgments through its terrible liturgical violence and murderous ritual

scapegoating, masked by the language of rights, democracy, freedom, security,

diversity, equality, and tolerance. Orwell, eat your heart out.

All political orders require a mechanism for engendering and preserving

unity, and the sacred has always been the source and engine of this unity. It is no

different in our “modern” day. At the shrine of Charlie Hebdo, for example, “free

speech” became God, but a god with no substantive core, no divine identity, and

no supernatural content. It is a cunning idol, nevertheless. It commands only

toleration, and it promises only freedom. Yet it tolerates—and encourages—only

blasphemy and ridicule of precisely those competing sacreds it seeks to vanquish,

the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, and the sacred personages of Mohammad

and Christ—and it persecutes any who dare to critique its sacred nihilism. The

desacralization, profanation, and degradation of Christianity and Islam is, since

Charlie Hebdo, the official meaning of “free speech.”

I. 911 and the Satanic Sacred

Although Charlie Hebdo was quite a sacred spectacle, 911 was the

exemplar of secular modernity’s sacred. I have discussed this claim in more depth

elsewhereix, but for now it is sufficient to point out its uncanny resemblance to

traditional sacred mythology, ritual, and sacrament.

James Allison, an eminent theologian and expert on the thought of René Girard,

the latter of whose oeuvre amounts to the complete unmasking of all non-

Gospel-centered cultures as murderous, ritual scapegoating mechanisms, has

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given the most penetrating account of the 911 event as the nexus of satanic

sacred power in the West. It is worth quoting in full:

And immediately the old sacred worked its magic: we found ourselves

being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless act had

created a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giving meaning to it.

All over London I found that friends had stopped work, offices were closing

down, everyone was glued to the screen. In short, there had appeared,

suddenly, a holy day. Not what we mean by a holiday, a day of rest, but an

older form of holiday, a being sucked out of our ordinary lives in order to

participate in a sacred and sacrificial centre so kindly set up for us by the

meaningless suicides. . . And immediately the sacrificial center began to

generate the sort of reactions that sacrificial centers are supposed to

generate: a feeling of unanimity and grief. Phrases began to appear to the

effect that "We're all Americans now" -- a purely fictitious feeling for most

of us. It was staggering to watch the togetherness build up around the

sacred center, quickly consecrated as Ground Zero, a togetherness that

would harden over the coming hours into flag waving, a huge upsurge in

religious services and observance, religious leaders suddenly taken

seriously, candles, shrines, prayers, all the accoutrements of the religion of

death. And there was the grief. How we enjoy grief. It makes us feel good,

and innocent. This is what Aristotle meant by catharsis, and it has deeply

sinister echoes of dramatic tragedy's roots in sacrifice. One of the effects of

the violent sacred around the sacrificial center is to make those present feel

justified, feel morally good. A counterfactual goodness which suddenly

takes us out of our little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences.

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And very quickly of course the unanimity and the grief harden into the

militant goodness of those who have a transcendent object to their lives.

And then there are those who are with us and those who are against us,

the beginnings of the suppression of dissent. Quickly people were saying

things like "to think that we used to spend our lives engaged in gossip

about celebrities' and politicians' sexual peccadillos. Now we have been

summoned into thinking about the things that really matter." And beneath

the militant goodness, suddenly permission to sack people, to leak out bad

news and so on, things which could take advantage of the unanimity to

avoid reasoned negotiation. . . . What I want to suggest is that most of us

fell for it, at some level. We were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance

for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we

belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and

solidarity. What I want to suggest is that this, this delight in being given

meaning, is satanic.x

All human beings “delight in being given meaning,” but the meaning given

to the masses through the 911 and Charlie Hebdo events is as meaningless as it is

idolatrous and psychopathic. Charlie Hebdo informs us that those who aren’t

comfortable with public, state-supported mockery of other citizens’ religious

beliefs are equivalent to murderous terrorist fanatics. Through 911 and the War

on Terror that followed, the United States, as the metonymic Twin Towers and

the World Trade Center, was transformed into a suffering and resurrected God,

scourged and crucified by the forces of pure evil that “hate our freedoms,” but

brought back to life by Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et.al., as mediators of the

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immortal righteousness of the American people. Our priest/warriors inaugurated

an endless “shock and awe” crusade against the demons of this world, one that

not only “keeps us free” but also effectively manages to separate the sheep from

the goats, the saved from the damned—“Either you are with us, or you are with

the terrorists,” the divinized oracle uttered. The meaning of 911, thus, is this: the

definitive, once-and-for-all, divine confirmation of “our” exceptional

righteousness, and, concomitantly, the inexorable, irredeemable wickedness of

the “other,” defined by magisterial fiat as anyone not willing to worship American

power. Of course, Americans had some faith in the truth of this meaning before

911, but only on 911 was that faith confirmed and vindicated, seemingly by God

Himself, using as his divine sign demonic planes crashing into our tallest shrines,

while the pontifix maximus placidly meditated on his sacred scriptures, The Pet

Goat, read upside down in an elementary school temple.

Cavanaugh writes: For Marvin and Ingle, death in war—what is commonly

called the “ultimate sacrifice” for the nation—is what periodically re-

presents the sense of belonging upon which the imagined nation is built.

Such death is then elaborately ceremonialized in liturgies involving the flag

and other ritual objects. Indeed, it is the ritual itself that retrospectively

classifies any particular act of violence as sacrifice. Ritual gesture and

language are crucial for establishing meaning and public assent to the

foundational story being told. The foundational story is one of both

creation and salvation. At the ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary

of D-Day in 1994, for example, President Clinton remarked of the soldiers

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that died there both that “They gave us our world” and that “They saved

the world.”xi

Again, William Cavanaugh writes:

The public shrine has been emptied of any one particular God or creed, so

that the government can never claim divine sanction and each person may

be free to worship as she sees fit . . . . There is no single visible idol, no

golden calf, to make the idolatry obvious . . . officially the shrine remains

empty. . . . The empty shrine, however, threatens to make a deity not out

of God but out of our freedom to worship God. Our freedom comes to

occupy the empty shrine. Worship becomes worship of our collective self,

and civil religion tends to marginalize the worship of the true God. Our

freedom, finally, becomes the one thing we will die and kill for.xii

“You may confess on your lips any god you like, provided you are willing to kill for

America”

{Leave this part out if running out of time} Since 911, individual liberty in

America has been vastly curtailed, and global violence has exponentially

increased. Wars and rumors of wars abound. Perhaps the next staged, false-flag

terror event will trigger the final annihilation of our freedoms and the complete

establishment of a global police state, if we aren’t nuked out of existence first.

The apocalypse seems to be upon us. So, what should we do—now? No doubt

we should do all we can to restrict the scope and power of modern states and

international institutions of global governance, as well as expose the

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machinations of the “deep state” that actually rules us. We must preserve what

is left of the freedoms of speech, protest, and worship by non-violent means,

and by self-defensive force if necessary. Moreover, if our analysis is correct and

modernity is merely the replacement of one bloody sacred for another—we

used to have bloody crusades and wars for Christ and Mohammad, now we

have them for democracy and freedom—it would seem reasonable for us to

turn our efforts towards banishing any semblance of the sacred from the public

square so as to separate it from all corrupting, political, coercive, and violence-

making power and thus corruption. This would protect both the sacred from

profanation and the state from idolatry. In other words, if Western

governments are indeed shrines and purveyors of satanic nothing-worship, then

we need to strip them of all sacred authority and power. Wasn’t this precisely

the intent of the American Founders and the First Amendment?

While it cannot be denied that a more secular, less powerful, and more—

much more—decentralized government-military-financial-educational-

intelligence-media complex is the sine qua non of any solution, if we take the

reality and power of the sacred as seriously as it deserves, we should be as

discontented at seeing the sacred remain merely a private affair as we are

seeing it counterfeited, mocked, and profaned. God exercises, whether we

recognize it or not, social, cultural, and political reign over the world—we live

now in a theocracy, always have, and always will, until the end of the world.

And this rule is not just over individual hearts, but over institutions and states,

over men organized collectively for the common good and for His honor, even if

they dishonor Him and order the sacred commons to their monstrous, vampirish

appetites. He is the ultimate common good, the ultimate ground for any human

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social contract, and if He is relegated to the private sphere of idiosyncratic and

irrational fancy, something not-so-good will always take His place. Just as there

is no such thing as free speech, there is no such thing as an empty shrine.

Thus, we must work not only to dethrone the satanic sacred, the

Abomination of Desolation now residing in the Holy of Holies, but also to

replace it with the authentic sacred, the worship of the Living, Holy, All-

powerful, All-knowing, All-just, All-merciful God. We need to learn, practice,

revitalize, and establish in our communities and states those Traditions that

embody and transmit His existence and will, that embody and mediate the

ultimate realities of man’s existence, the transcendent origin, end, and meaning

of all things that cannot be grasped by human reason alone, and which cannot

be fully rationalized, defined, or articulated. Ultimate reality must be

experienced and obeyed through and in its incarnations in authentic religious

traditions. It is in this sense that genuine sacred traditions are the eyes that

allow us desacralized men to see the spiritual, eternal, and transcendent

meaning hidden in the physical, temporal, and mundane facts of everyday

existence, to truly “delight in meaning” by being immersed in the True, the

Good, and the Beautiful. We must replace the counterfeit and degrading

meanings given to us by the satanic sacred with the truth.

To dethrone the satanic sacred that has usurped the seats of earthly power

in Western society, we first must repent of our own complicity in its rites and

ceremonies. That complicity has much to do with accepting the scapegoating

status-quo because it flatters, protects, and keeps us feeling comfortable, and

refusing to speak truth to power out of fear. After a thorough examination of

conscience, we must unmask the satanic face hiding right out in the open so as to

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help those blinded to its existence and horrific nature through the unholy fear it

engenders, the tortuous psychological and spiritual deceptions it incessantly

enacts, and its totalitarian control of public discourse. As Neil Kramer describes,

“For the ordinary person, the primary power of Empire rests not in its might or

cunning, but in its invisibility. People who are not mindful of its presence do not

comprehend their conscious and spiritual incarceration.”xiii

Father Waldstein writes:

The City of God is founded on a love of God that leads its citizens to

contempt for themselves, counting all earthly things as worthless. . . .

Augustine argues that the temporal ought to be ordered to the eternal (Civ.

Dei XIX,17), but that this ordering will never be achieved entirely

harmoniously till the second coming of the Lord. For, there is a second city

here on earth in addition to the city of God— the civitas terrena, the

earthly city. This city is founded on a love of self to the contempt of God

(Civ. Dei XIV,28). And these two cities are in conflict . . . The earthly city is

always opposed to true religion. . . . Justice consists in giving each his own,

thus no society is just that does not give God the worship due to Him.xiv

The city of man has always been opposed to true religion, to the truly

sacred, and this opposition has only increased in our “secular age,” and

exponentially since 911. At the heart of every culture is always the sacred, and at

the heart of our post-911, pathocratic, imperial culture of death and deception is

a terrible—but entirely vincible—sacred power in mortal conflict with the Logos,

the merciful, loving, and truly sacred Person who protects, guide, and saves those

who are willing to recognize, adore, and trust in Him.

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In conclusion:

As Orestes Brownson maintained in the 19th century, the American project or

ordered liberty and religious freedom could not succeed in the absence of a

majority of Catholic citizens. He was correct. But I would go a step further than

Brownson and claim that the American project cannot succeed unless

Catholicism, or at least a generic theism based upon a true overlapping consensus

that includes the natural law as an authority (as a start) replace the incoherent

liberalism we have now and have had ab initio as the ultimate source of moral

and political authority in the state.

LEAE OUT IF TOO LONG: Without some sort of integrally implemented

confessional state Christian model, England, or America, cannot be saved from

its continual fall into decadence. We can move towards this by establishing

some measure of legal and political autonomy for small-scale tradition-

constituted communities, little polises, as it were, that can be held together by a

federal alliance based upon a consensus on practical, natural-law based norms,

something I articulate in more detail at the end of my book The Political

Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophy Can’t Solve It . Any

confessional political order would, of course, have to emerge organically and by

steps, and it would, of course, presuppose a widespread conversion to

traditional Christianity. One might call this utopian, but the proper end must be

seen and loved in order for us to act prudently and effectively, not to mention

righteously.

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As Brad Gregory has so magnificently recounted in his The Unintended

Reformation, the Protestant Revolutionaries denied fundamental truths

declared by the infallible teaching authority of the Magisterium of the Catholic

Church, and they denied the capacity of her custodians and all faithful Christians

to be certain of her possession of the truth. They supplanted this ecclesial and

magisterial authority and certainty with sola scriptura, an inexorably subjective,

"from the inside,” and thus incoherent conduit to definitive and saving

knowledge about Christ. The Enlightenment liberals, stuck in ecclesial

subjectivism, epistemological reductionism, and ontological nominalism, then

attempted to build something objective on this subjectivist sand, and

supplanted the Bible with "reason." The post-modernists then supplanted

reason with "irony," and “narrative,” in short, the authoritative “truth" that

there is no access to universal truth about reality, let alone the will of God, or at

least no way to know that one has access to it.

And at the end of this line of revolutionaries, we find ideologues like the

Catholic Anthony Kennedy, as well as those Catholics and Christians who,

though explicitly renouncing ecclesial subjectivism, nominalism, and liberalism,

speak and act in practice as though the Catholic Church were just, politically

speaking, a private sect, that the truths of the natural and Divine Positive law

should never have any privileged authority in guiding and justifying law, and

that the American experiment would be a success if only Catholics, Christians,

and other men of good were virtuous, active, and sufficiently educated, that is,

with no need for any restructuring of the regime in light of Catholic social

teaching, the philosophia perennis, and the natural law.

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Solutions to separation of Church and state?

But as the Nietzschean Stanley Fish has demonstrated, the proper separation of

Church and state is, in a word, impossible—if it is to be accomplished within and

according to liberalism and the liberal nation state, and this includes, as Michael

Hanby has shown, the classical liberalism of the American Founders, however

much better this form of liberalism was than what we have now. And if this is

true, it would explain why there is no good and rationally coherent solution to

the Kim Davis issue. Within the intellectual, moral, legal, and political

constraints of the contemporary American regime, a regime that is and cannot

help not being utterly incoherent on the relations of Church and state, the just

separation of Church and state is, as it were, mission impossible. Either Davis

goes to jail, or she is permitted to abstain from signing the licenses with her

name, or some compromise is made. But whichever is determined by official

coercive power, it is not, and cannot be, a rational determination.

Insofar as the American regime, both on the federal and local levels,

constitutionally and legally prescinds in its legal and political deliberations from

any consideration of the moral and political and theological claims of the

Catholic Church, as well as of the authority of the natural law, of which she is

the unique and authoritative custodian; and precludes other citizens from

considering these authorities in those arguments and debates in the public

square, in Congress, in the Senate, in the Supreme Court, and in any other

forum where argument and debate can ensue in law, it renders itself incapable

of resolving fundamental political issues, let alone ones that bear upon the

supernatural realm, the Church’s rights and privileges, and the authority of God.

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And this is so because, ultimately, only Jesus Christ has the authority to settle

the just bounds between Church and state—because he is the author of both.

By the fact of his Incarnation, he brought together Church and state, heaven and

earth, divinity and humanity for the first time. And after bringing them together,

he commanded their proper separation: "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and

to God what is God's." Therefore, in order to know we owe Caesar and God

today, we must listen to his authentic and infallible mouthpiece—which isn’t

the Supreme Court or conservative court sophists. Unless we have access to the

voice of Christ, Fish is right—there is no way of solving the problem. It is mission

impossible.

Yet, there must be a solution because Christ commanded us to solve the

problem. In short, Christ must have given us a sure and "from the outside" way

of determining his will regarding the proper ordering of Church and state.

Anything but a living, visible, unified, universal, hierarchical, concrete, corporal

institution whose unity, holiness, universality, and apostolicity is recognizable

by all "from the outside" cannot afford humans the clear determination of

Christ's will in matters of political, as well as any other matter. Anything less

would inevitably perpetuate both the denial of access, and the subjective

uncertainty of that access to the definitive truth regarding Christ's will for the

proper ordering of the political order vis-à-vis religion in general, and the

Church in particular, a denial and uncertainty that would make the just

separation of the prerogatives of Church and state impossible, and would thus

make a just resolution to particular conflicts between Church and state

impossible, such as the Kim Davis conflict. What we would have is either

outright civil war, or what we have now, the Procrustean attempt to make the

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message of the Gospel fit into the arbitrary will of whoever happens to be ruling

in the state. In short, chaos or a hopelessly compromised Christianity, or both.

And this is indeed what we have.

No one but God can define his Church and her relationship with the state; no man

is God but Christ; and no one can authoritatively speak for Christ other than his

One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Only she has absolute freedom of

conscience and religion; only she has been authorized to speak for God on what

belongs to him, but all baptized Christians in communion with her participate in

this right. Kim Davis doesn’t know any of this, but she does know that what

belongs to God—and not the state—is her immortal soul, and she has acted

accordingly. Would that those who know better than she about matters

theological and spiritual would do the same.

i See especially William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (October 1995).

ii William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011).

iii. James Kalb, “Skepticism and Dogmatism (Snippet from Book-to-be),” June 6, 2006; available from http://turnabout.ath.cx:8000/node/1472; Internet; accessed November 6, 2006.

iv. D. Stephen Long, The Goodness of God: Theology, The Church, and Social Order (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), 300.

v Rémi Brague, “Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?” Intercollegiate Review (Spring, 2006), 11, available at http://www.mmisi.org/ir/41_01/brague.pdf.

vi Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 9. vii Thomas Molnar, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1988), 137. viii Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1989), 336. ix“Modernity’s Apocalypse” in The Blueprint: Reflections, Debates and Propositions for a New Catholic Social

Action Plan, ed., Guido Preparata, (forthcoming, 2016). x James Alison, “Contemplation in a world of violence: Girard, Merton, Tolle,” a talk given at the Thomas Merton

Society, Downside Abbey, Bath (November, 2001), available at http://girardianlectionary.net/res/alison_contemplation_violence.htm.

xi William T. Cavanaugh, “The Liturgies of Church and State” Liturgy 20, No. 1 (2005): 25-30.xii William T. Cavanaugh, “The Empire of the Empty Shrine: American Imperialism and the Church,” Cultural

Encounters 2, no. 2 (Summer, 2006), 15. xiii Neil Kramer, “Invisible Empire” (May 22, 2014), available at http://neilkramer.com/invisible-empire.html .xiv Edmund Waldstein, “Religious Liberty and Tradition” (January, 2015), available at

http://thejosias.com/2015/01/02/religious-liberty-and-tradition-iii/.