I have played a (very) small role in helping Brian Davies, OP at Fordham bring to posthumous light some writings of my late friend Herbert McCabe, OP (1926-2001). Spending an afternoon or evening with Herbert in an Oxford pub was one of life’s great intellectual delights. Herbert was an acknowledged influence on many, including Alasdair MacIntyre (who partly credits McCabe in the preface to Whose Justice? Which Rationality? with changing MacIntyre’s view about Thomism), Denys Turner, Anthony Kenny, Stanley Hauerwas, Seamus Heaney, and Terry Eagleton. Herbert died ten years ago this summer, and I still think about him every day.
One of the best things Herbert ever wrote was a set of three sermons for the Triduum, which is available in his volume God Matters, much of which is on Google Books or for purchase at a reasonable price. As he says in his sermon for Good Friday:
[M]y thesis is that Jesus died of being human. His very humanity meant that he put up no barriers, no defences against those he loved who hated him. He refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world. So the cross shows up our world for what it really is, what we have made it. It is a world in which it is dangerous, even fatal, to be human; a world structured by violence and fear. The cross shows that whatever else may be wrong with this or that society, whatever may be remedied by this or that political or economic change, there is a basic wrong, persistent through history and through all progress: the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist. The cross, then, unmasks or reveals the sin of the world. In this sense the crucifying of Jesus is the archetypal sin of mankind, the root and meaning of our original 'sin', which is the lack of grace and moral weakness we suffer from, not (first of all) by committing any sin, but just by belonging to, originating in, the human species, the animal that has not come to terms with its new kind of animality. This twist in the human condition is what St Thomas calls the materia, the psychological expression, of the sin of the world. What gives it its real significance (its forma) is the rejection of God's love that was most clearly demonstrated in the killing of Jesus. As we all know only too well, even when we have been liberated by faith and baptism from the sinfulness of original sin and become children of God in Christ, the psychological distortion in our human nature remains with us until we are fully restored at the resurrection. With the cross the alienation of humankind is recognized as sin, and for that very reason recognised as something that can be forgiven.
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The cross and resurrection are the eternal dialogue of Father and Son as projected on to the screen of history, what it looks like in history. If you want to know that the Trinity looks like be filled with the Holy Spirit and look at the cross. The Trinity, when reflected in our history, like something reflected in rippling water, looks pretty strange, just as the human being in our history looks strange, being despised and crucified: Ecce homo.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
I worry sometimes that Rob Vischer and I are the only people who take subsidiarity seriously. We seem to be amid a subsidiarity renaissance, though, when I see Rick Hills invoke it a recent blog post and come across pieces by Heather Gerken and Daniel Halberstam broadly gesturing in the direction of, in Russell Hittinger’s term, "the sociality of society." As Hittinger puts it, “[T]he point of subsidiarity is a normative structure of plural social forms....To be sure, subsidiarity is often described or deployed in a defensive sense--as to what the state may not do or try to accomplish--but the principle is not so much a theory about state institutions, nor of checks and balances, as it is an account of the pluralism and sociality of society.” Here is Gerken on her project in the Harvard Law Review Supreme Court Foreword (“Federalism All the Way Down”):
Even as I join the nationalists in insisting on the center’s ability to play the national supremacy card, my account elides the principal-agent distinction, privileges messy overlap over clear jurisdictional lines, and understands power to be fluid, contingent, and contested. I celebrate the fact that Tocqueville’s democracy fails to produce Weber’s bureaucracy. I argue that division and discord are useful components of an integrated policymaking regime and a unified national polity. All of these claims push up against a conception of national power that is as deeply rooted in sovereignty as is federalism’s conventional conception of state power.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Over at the new Catholic Moral Theology Blog, Charlie Camosy has an interesting post on the debate in the Netherlands over whether to prohibit kosher and halal methods of animal slaughter, an issue to which Marc pointed us a few days ago. (Jerusalem Post story about the reaction of the European Jewish community here.)
I should confess at the outset (and I suspect Charlie will disagree here) that I don’t hold the view that non-human animals have moral “rights,” at least as that claim is usually understood, nor do I believe that vegetarianism is morally obligatory. That does not, of course, entail that I hold that animals may be treated wantonly or cruelly. Aquinas was quite correct, I think, to say (following Maimonides) that the method of kosher slaughter may have been chosen to prevent cruelty to animals and, in turn, that cruelty is a vice opposed to temperance, but not justice (I-II, 103.3 ad 6; 103.6 ad 1; II-II, 159). As an aside, it seems to me that those who would want to affirm heightened moral standing to animals are better served by Christine Korsgaard’s ongoing project to give a broadly Kantian account of our duties toward some animals (based in the kind of being they are) in, for example, her 2004 Tanner Lectures at Michigan than by the usual utilitarian arguments. See also Brian Leiter’s comments here.
What does concern me is the alacrity with which some, perhaps a majority, in the Netherlands appear willing to throw the religious freedom of observant Dutch Jews and Muslims under the bus. Charlie quotes Party for the Animals leader Marianne Thieme that “religious freedom isn’t unlimited,” but that isn’t the point. One needn’t have the view that religious freedom is “unlimited” (who does?) to think that a discriminatory prohibition against religiously required methods of animal slaughter is an affront to religious freedom. One could imagine how a blanket prohibition on certain forms of animal killing with the object of preventing animal cruelty could be neutral and generally applicable (to use the formulation from US constitutional law) and not based in religious discrimination. But, as Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah makes clear, it would be difficult to draft such a prohibition without raising concerns about invidious religious discrimination because the terms of such a prohibition will often be underinclusive with respect to the putative government objective. Easier, then, just to single out particular forms of animal slaughter that are based on the beliefs of disfavored religious minorities. The record in Lukumi and, so it seems, in the pending Dutch legislation are replete with examples of such religious animosity. And while US constitutional law is not directly relevant to the Dutch debate, religious freedom is a human right and, in this respect at least, US law has developed a set of helpful doctrinal categories and distinctions.
Finally—and this is a small point—I’m not at all sure that Psalm 51 can be interpreted, as Charlie does, as a “shift in Jewish understanding of right relationship with God and non-human animals.” The text strikes me more as a lamentation over God’s impatience with manipulative and formalistic ritual amid faithlessness and a lack of righteousness (and then, in the Christian tradition, echoed in the preaching of John the Baptist and Jesus) than anything to do with the treatment of animals.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
I know this is a blog about Catholic legal theory, but because it’s a Catholic blog I assume it’s about, well, everything and that surely includes Catholic higher education. As many readers of this blog know, John Tracy Ellis wrote a famous article in 1955 (“American Catholics and the Intellectual Life”) bemoaning the state of Catholic higher education. Ellis began with an observation from Denis Brogan that “in no Western society is the intellectual prestige of Catholicism lower than in the country where, in such respects as wealth, numbers, and strength of organization, it is so powerful.” Ellis’s essay has prompted a lot of soul searching and striving over the last fifty years to build up the academic profile of Catholic universities, with mixed success.
That’s all well and good, but I have a different question: why are Catholic universities not winning more at what is--let’s be honest--one of the most powerful forces in American culture, major college sports?
Continue reading
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
A peculiarity of the age is that one of our most profound Christian intellectuals is a reclusive Calvinist writer of (mostly) fiction who lives in Iowa City. Marilynne Robinson will receive the Kuyper Prize from Princeton Theological Seminary next Thursday and deliver a lecture entitled "Open Wide Thy Hand: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism" (details here). Anyone who has not read her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead should do so immediately.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
David Brooks’s column in today’s New York Times about Congressman Ryan’s budget plan joins a host of recent pieces about the end of the welfare state and the model of economic growth and social democracy that most of us take for granted--I’m thinking also of my friend Yuval Levin’s “Beyond the Welfare State” in National Affairs, Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, and Walter Russell Mead’s writings at The American Interest (here and here). While I know there’s room to question many details of this account (and some will reject the account outright), I’m more interested in the implications of this for Catholic social thought. Much of CST--in both its more liberal (Dan Finn, for example) and more conservative (Michael Novak, for example) forms--is premised on something like the modern welfare state, viewed either with enthusiasm or with skepticism. Certainly much of the papal social encyclical tradition and the US Bishops’ 1986 pastoral letter on the economy are very much about the who, where, what, and how of the role of the state in regulating the economy and redistributing wealth.
But what if we really are on the verge of a new economic order--at least with regard to the ability of the state to finance entitlement programs to aid the poor, the sick, and the elderly--and the approach of the social tradition to economic questions needs to be reframed? A tradition that goes back to John Chrysostom and Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi should surely have something to say about the ordering of economic life that doesn’t start with certain modern premises. So what is it?
*The title of an essay by David Foster Wallace (an epochal genius, though tragic) reviewing John Updike’s Toward the End of Time, which has nothing to do with the topic of this post.
