By way of reply to Rick's agreeable disagreement with me, my point was that the ideal is for intellectus to rule, indeed to rule and measure. To clarify and amplify my earlier point, the ideal is for the human ruling mind to be measured and ruled by higher law, both natural and divine, and thus to create human law to give effect to higher law. Separation of powers and checks and balances are certainly better than some alternatives -- and they can indeed sometimes deliver human law that gives effect to higher law, but they are not the ideal.
Not only that. I don't doubt that some people embrace separation of powers and checks and balances out of "humility and caution," but others, including many of the Framers, embraced them exactly because they denied the ideal on pseudo-philosopohical and pseudo-theological grounds. They denied, more specifically, that we can know what man is, and not knowing what man is, we do not know that he enjoys an intellectus that can know the higher law that is a participation in the Eternal Law. What such nescient and denying Framers were left with was (to borrow a phrase from Russ Hittinger) "a thermodynamics of power." And what that has delivered, more than two hundred years later, is Lawrence, a legally enforceable right not to be ruled and measured, but to invent yourself (limited only by the harm principle). That is not intellectus at work, it's pure voluntas.
I don't suggest that Lawrence was inevitable, only that, though neo-cons don't like to admit as much, it reflects core elements of many of the Framers' Lockean commitments; for them, the question of man's summum bonum is (as Pangle says of it for Locke) "perfectly idle." To repeat, checks and balances may in certain circumstances be a way to give effect to higher law, but it is not the ideal. And its essential defect is this: with checks and balances as the fundamental organizing principle, what we have is a state that in a self-conscious and principled way cannot think, it can only bicker. Yes, individual members of our government can think, at least in principle; but the fruits of their intellectus then get thrown into that thermodynamics of power.
A Christian king can think, if only we could find one. We cannot find one because we have a Constitution that rejects the ideal.
I have addressed some of these issues here, and I address others among them in a forthcoming paper 'The Pursuit of Happiness' Comes Home to Roost: Same-Sex Union, the Summum Bonum, and Equality.
Further to the fine posts by Rob, Susan, and others about the NRA's and others' calls to "solve" the problem by multiplying police and *their* guns, I am reminded of one of my favorites sentences from Bernard Lonergan's book Insight (1958): "Is everyone to use force against everyone to convince everyone that force is beside the point?" I think this sentence contains the key insight for unlocking a solution to the obvious social problem we face. The use of force against adult human beings, though sometimes necessary and justified, means that intelligence has failed.
I'll just add that the preference for using force against force is reflected, mutatis mutandis, in our nation's principled commitment to a system of separation of powers and of checks and balances. Government by the intelligent part would reflect unity, not institutionalized division and intended friction.
From the Holy Father's recent Christmas Address to the Roman Curia:
"The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question. He quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man."
I've blogged here before about Christopher Ferrara's epochal achievement Liberty, the God that Failed. Below, from my Foreword to the book, is food for thought about where the escalating licence for violence comes from -- and where it does not come from:
"The truth, though, is that the period in which the Catholic religion has been severed from the state, either completely or in large part, has been the bloodiest in human history. Some 27,000 died effecting liberty from the English Crown, and, as Ferrara demonstrates, we must also face 2 million dead in the French revolution (“inspired by the American example”), the genocide of 300,000 Catholics in the Vendee by the Jacobin regime, 3 million dead following the fall of the Jacobin and Thermidorian regimes, 600,000 dead in the Civil War in America, 16 million dead in World War I (fought to make Europe “safe for democracy”), 7 million dead in the Bolshevik democides, 70 million dead in World War II, 20 million dead in genocides, including 6 million Jews, and so it goes on and on. Just who imposed all of this suffering? No, it was not the Vatican."
In reviewing the posts and comments on MOJ and elsewhere on the question of what a Catholic position on regulation of firearms in the contemporary situation would look like, one thing -- the one thing necessary, in my view -- is consistently missing. What hardly gets a mention is that Catholics are obligated, so the Church teaches, to seek to realize the peace of Christ in this fallen world. And Catholics also believe, or they should believe, that the peace of Christ is possible only in the reign of Christ. I'm not suggesting that it's especially helpful to approach this regulatory issue by asking "What would Jesus do?", but asking that question as a partial starting point wouldn't be an unhelpful corrective, either. The end game here, so to speak, isn't, say, protecting the liberties enjoyed by Englishmen in 1688. The proximate end-game is a world blessed by social structures that reflect the Gospel, for that is the sort of culture that helps souls reach The One Who Matters. It is not in the least surprising that a nation that came into being thanks to muskets in revolution against a king who was no real tyrant cannot now think clearly about where guns belong.
As His birthday approaches, we might do well to recall that the Prince of Peace should be our guide and measure -- yes, even in public.
"If a thoroughly malicious sociologist, bent on injuring the Catholic Church as much as possible, had been an adviser to the Church, he could hardly have done a better job." Peter Berger, Homiletic and Pastoral Review (1979).
As it happens, perhaps the most influential adviser in the direction Berger laments was Msgr. Hannibal Bugnini, a flaming Freemason. On how Freemasonic ideas combined with others to deform the Mass at and after Vatican II, see Michael Davies, Pope Paul's New Mass (Angelus Press, 1980). On the influence of Freemasonry on the modern situation in general, see Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (OUP, 1991) by Margaret Jacob, Professor of the History of Science at UCLA.
"The distinguishing feature of the French Revolution, what makes it an event unique in history, is that it is evil, radically evil." Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821)
Needless to say, I welcome The Economist's recent recognition that traditionalist Catholics are the avant-garde of our age. As one would expect, that recognition is generating some exciting discussion, including by Anna Williams at First Things. Ms Williams concludes by considering the worry that traditionalists wish to withdraw from the world. The actual direction pursued by traditionalists is the opposite, however, and that's what the real fuss is about. Traditionalists do not wish to separate from the culture; they are emphatically not separatists. Traditionalists wish to correct and transform culture in the image of the incarnate Christ. Traditionalists are not willing to give up on the culture, because its transformation contributes to the salvation of souls. It is this intransigent insistence about tranfsorming the world that the enemy resists with all its might and theory. As I argued in a recent paper, "the Church is not a bomb shelter" into which the faithful are to retreat. The Church is the society that fortifies the faithful to go forth and get the job done: the Church militant. I returned to the theme of the moral exigence of the Church's and the lay-faithful's being intransigent about creating Catholic culture here. When one understands the Church as Christ-continued in the world, her transformative capacity becomes unmistakable -- and a cause of hope. There is no other reason to hope.
"We cannot affect the outcome because we have consented to move within that cosmion according to a social mode of Christianity that, as Louis Veuillot so vividly put it, is 'sufficiently nothing to live in peace with the rest of the world.'" [Ferrrara, Liberty, the God that Failed 642 (2012)].
If you think Vatican II and its various false fruits were a surprise, and even if you celebrate Vatican II -- read Veuillot! As Veuillot (1813-83) already saw, any "Church" that sought to be so much of a nothing as to live in peace with the rest of the world would be denied even that false consolation. See now the impending proceedings regarding the contraceptive mandate as they concern the Church.
