Month: April 2005

Casey’s showing a fourteen point lead according to this. Still, we’re talking about a race that won’t begin in earnest til a year from now. Plus, one wonders how much Pennsylvanians really know about Bob Casey, Jr. Granted he was elected overwhelmingly to the post of state treasurer last year, but I expect he’s still coasting on name recognition to a large degree.

Santorum, whatever one thinks of his performance as a Senator, is no fool; he’s been moderating his positions (or at least appearing to moderate them) on things like the death penalty and the minimum wage recently. Not to mention his support for the “moderate” pro-choice Arlen Specter last year against his pro-life challenger Pat Toomey. I’m guessing it’ll be a close race.

One more…this one’s from Lutheran Uwe Siemon-Netto, religion writer for UPI. Siemon-Netto attempts a debunking of some of the more common myths floating around.

He’s a religious fanatic who hates reason and wants to return to the Dark Ages!

He will doubtless baffle many of his former detractors by stressing the need for a return to reason, which is a central theme of his theology. For Ratzinger, the significance of reason was precisely why John the Evangelist used the word, “Logos,” in referring to Christ in the opening sentence of his Gospel.

“‘Logos’ denotes reason and meaning, but also Word,” Ratzinger wrote. “The God, who is Logos, assures us of the rationality of the world, the rationality of our being, the divine character of reason, and the reasonable character of God, even though God’s rationality surpasses ours immeasurably and appears to us as darkness.”

Ratzinger insists, “Rationality has been the postulate and the condition of Christianity and will remain a European legacy with which we can confront peacefully and positively Islam as well as the great Asian religions.”

[…]

Hence, he continued, “Europe must defend reason. To this extent we must be grateful to secular society and the Enlightenment. It must remain a thorn in our side, as secular society must accept the (Christian) thorn it its side—meaning the founding power of the Christian religion in Europe.”

He’s a foe of ecumenism and a hard-hearted triumphalist!

Coming from the land of the Protestant Reformation, this allegedly doctrinaire Catholic has already made it clear by his very actions the journey out of the “tyranny of relativism,” whose properties are suspended ethical principles, must be an all-Christian enterprise.

Almost unnoticed by the world’s media looking for sensations at the memorial service for John Paul II, Ratzinger quietly communed Brother Roger Schutz, the Swiss Protestant pastor and founder of the vibrant ecumenical community in Taizé, France.

Benedict XVI, arguably the foremost Catholic theologian of our time, has always been an ecumenist, though never a fuzzy one. If he gives the Sacrament to a member of another Christian church—and Schutz was not the only one—he makes it abundantly clear he consider this person a fellow member of the mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church.

As happens all too often, I’ve been sidetracked from my reading schedule (loosey-goosey as it is) by a trip to the Philly public library. (The beautiful weather we’ve been having has made the walk from the office to the library enjoyable as well as edifying!)

Two acquisitions of note on the latest trip:

• Justification: An Ecumenical Study by George Tavard. Tavard is a Roman Catholic theologian making the case, more or less, that Luther got it right. I’m about 2/3rds of the way through this. Some interesting bits about the Council of Orange and how it seems to have been unknown for much of the Middle Ages.
• Chrisitan Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World by Robert P. Kraynak. This looks really interesting. Seems that Kraynak is going to argue against the common assumption that Christianity necessarily entails support for liberal democracy. Instead, he’s going to emphasize the Augustinian “Two Cities” notion as setting certain limits to how full-throated an endorsement Christians can give to any political system.

I’m usually one to groan when some actor or rock star starts spouting off about politics (then again, why should their opinions be worth less than some semi-anonymous guy sitting in front of a computer screen?), but I found these snippets from Bono’s new book relatively sensible (link via Thunderstruck).

Bono on G. W. Bush:

“He was much more amusing than I expected. Like, he was funny and quick. … For all the swagger, this Texan thing, he has a religious instinct that keeps him humble.”

Bono on the Iraq war:

“There are very few things I would disagree with Tony Blair about. Going to war, when he did, with Iraq would be one of them. … It wasn’t a move to make himself popular. Fairly unusual behavior for a politician. We need more of this. … There are those who believe in the long term that establishing a beachhead for democracy in the Middle East is the only way to bring peace to the region. I’m not one of them. I have only to look to my own country to see what the presence of a foreign military can do for swelling the ranks of terrorism.”

Bono the Free Trader!

“The Left may offer more money to fight AIDS or deal with the debt burden, but they scuttle off when we talk about trade reform. The [Common Agricultural Policy] of Europe so supported by the Left denies African products access to our supermarket shelves while we flood them with subsidized produce. … French cows have more money spent on them per day than most Africans earn. But you know what? This is one issue this rock star just cannot take on.”

Interesting, but to be read with some skepticism since Michael Novak is a shameless apologist for the spiritual glories of capitalism and the idea that the ideals of the American founding are in perfect sync with Christianity (I like capitalism – in a Churchillian ‘least bad of the available options’ sense – and the principles of the American founding too, but I at least expect there to be some tension there!).

Anyway, here’s Novak on the political philosophy of the new pope:

One of Cardinal Ratzinger’s central, and most misunderstood, notions is his conception of liberty, and he is very jealous in thinking deeply about it, pointing often to Tocqueville. He is a strong foe of socialism, statism and authoritarianism, but he also worries that democracy, despite its great promise, is exceedingly vulnerable to the tyranny of the majority, to “the new soft despotism” of the all-mothering state, and to the common belief that liberty means doing whatever you please. Following Lord Acton and James Madison, Cardinal Ratzinger has written of the need of humans to practice self-government over their passions in private life.

A homily from 1981:

The state is not the whole of human existence and does not embrace the whole of human hope. Men and women and their hopes extend beyond the thing that is the state and beyond the sphere of political activity. This does not only apply to a state that is Babylon but to any and every state. The state is not the totality: that takes the load off the politician’s shoulders and at the same time opens up for him or her the path of rational politics. The Roman state was false and anti-Christian precisely because it wanted to be the totality of human capacity. In that way it claimed what it could not achieve; and in that way it distorted and diminished men and women. Through the totalitarian lie it became demonic and tyrannical. Getting rid of the totality of the state has demythologized the state and thereby liberated men and women as well as politicians and politics.

But when Christian faith, faith in man’s greater hope, decays and falls away, then the myth of the divine state rises up once again, because men and women cannot renounce the totality of hope. Even when such promises dress themselves up as progress and monopolize the concept of progress and of progressiveness, nevertheless considered historically they are a going back behind the Christian thing that is new, a turning back on the scale of history. And even when they proclaim as their goal the complete liberation of mankind and the elimination of all domination, they stand in contradiction to the truth of man and in contradiction to his or her freedom, because they force people into what they can achieve themselves. This kind of politics that declares the kingdom of God to be the result politics and distorts faith into universal primacy of the political is by its nature the politics of enslavement; it is mythological politics.

To this, faith opposes the standard of Christian reason, which recognizes what man is really capable of creating as the order of freedom and can be content with this because it knows that man’s greater expectation lies hidden in God’s hands. Rejecting the hope of faith is at the same time rejecting the standard of political reason. To renounce the mythical hopes of a society free of domination is not resignation but honesty that maintains men and women in hope. The mythical hope of a do-it-yourself paradise can only drive people into fear from which there is no escape; fear of the collapse of their promises and of the greater void lurks behind it; fear of their own power and its cruelty.

From a CT review (by First Things’ Richard John Neuhaus) of Ratzinger’s book Salt of the Earth:

As off-putting as it is to Protestants, for many Catholic theologians the Reformation is not a formative event. In the worlds of Catholic faith and life, they believe, other things of equal or greater importance were happening in the sixteenth century. That is not the case with Cardinal Ratzinger. In part, no doubt, because he was born and reared in Germany, his theology has always been in intense conversation with the Reformation traditions.

He is not, of course, a “minimalist” theologian who is inclined to tailor Catholic teaching to fit Protestant tastes. But he has intimate understanding and appreciation of the religious and theological genius of figures such as Luther. He believes that what is true in the Protestant critique can and should be embraced by what he calls “the structure of faith.” At the same time, he does not seem to expect too much in the healing of the breach between Rome and the Reformation. Speaking of the prospects for Christian unity, he says at one point that perhaps the most we should hope for is that there will be no new schisms. At another point, however, he speaks of Catholic “responsibility for the unity of the Church, her faith, and her morals,” and he envisions the ways in which the exercise of the office of the papacy will change “when hitherto separated communities enter into unity with the Pope.”

As might be expected, Salt of the Earth pays extensive attention to the office of the papacy. It is assumed that the New Testament intends a continuing “Petrine Ministry” in the church. The question is the relationship, if any, between that ministry and the ministry of the bishop of Rome, who, it is claimed, is the successor of Peter. Some Protestants, Ratzinger notes, “are ready to acknowledge providential guidance in tying the tradition of primacy to Rome, without wanting to refer the promise to Peter directly to the Pope.” Many others, he says, recognize that Christianity ought to have a spokesman who can personally and authoritatively articulate the faith both to the world and to the Christian community.

From an article found at the Houston Catholic Worker:

As talk escalated about a U. S. attack on Iraq, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, began stating unequivocally that “The concept of a ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” His comments had been published as early as September 2002 and were repeated several times as war seemed imminent.

Cardinal Ratzinger recommended that the three religions who share a heritage from Abraham return to the Ten Commandments to counteract the violence of terrorism and war: “The Decalogue is not the private property of Christians or Jews. It is a lofty expression of moral reason that, as such, is also found in the wisdom of other cultures. To refer again to the Decalogue might be essential precisely to restore reason.”

Preparation of a new shorter, simpler version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church will soon begin and, according to reports and interviews with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, it will probably include revisions to clarify the section on just war, as the official version has done against capital punishment in a civilized society. Cardinal Ratzinger will head up the Commission to write the new catechism. In an interview with Zenit on May 2, 2003, the Cardinal restated the position of the Holy Father on the Iraq war (II) and on the question of the possibility of a just war in today’s world.: “There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war.’”

(emphases mine)

Long live Pope Benedict XVI!

CNN story here.

Read his (quite good) homily from yesterday here.

Stay tuned for various media fits that the notorious “enforcer of orthodoxy” is now pope.

UPDATE: via Amy Welborn, Andrew Greely (nobody’s idea of a conservative) makes the case for Ratzinger (written before his election).

Kevin Kim had a good post the other day on where he fits in on the political spectrum and his take on the ideologies of left and right. Kevin’s refusal to engage in the Manichean exercise of declaring one team the embodiment of all that is good and pure and denouncing the other as the spawn of hell is certainly refreshing.

This got me to thinking about the principles I tend to take for granted when thinking about politics, so I thought I’d jot them down. This isn’t intended as a full-throated defense of these principles, much less anything as grandiose as a “political philosophy.” More like some loosely connected thoughts, ruminations, and speculations on what I take to be the purpose and scope of political authority.

No Salvation Through Politics

Against postmillennialists of the Right and liberationists of the Left I take it as axiomatic that nothing we can do will bring in God’s Kingdom. Politics is not a means by which we build the Kingdom of God on earth. It is a strictly this-worldly affair whose aim is to secure the conditions of tolerable earthly existence during this age.

For Christians at least, politics can never be the locus of one’s final allegiance or the bearer of one’s identity. They are first and foremost citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem, and their commitment to any earthly kingdom will be penultimate at best. This results in the “desacralization” of politics and a sober realism about what it can and can’t achieve. No regime, political system, cause, or candidate is above criticism or immune to the effects of sin. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

Arguably the worst horrors of the 20th century were precipitated by the desire to bring in by force a political utopia – heaven on earth. Fascist and Communist revolutionaries tried to “immanentize the eschaton,” to use Eric Voegelin’s phrase. Not only is this an attempt to play God, it neglects to take seriously the extent of human sin and the limits of human wisdom in this age. Any responsible politics will have to be limited in its aspirations.

Coercion is Bad

Longtime readers (both of you) know that I renounced my former adherence to doctrinaire libertarianism, but one thing that the libertarians get which often seems to elude conservatives, liberals, communitarians, etc. is that coercion is inherently morally problematic. All use of government power implies at least the possibility of the use of force. Laws are backed with enforcement power, which means, if necessary, you will be fined, imprisoned, or possibly killed for not complying. As the father of our country put it “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master.”

Which is not to say that I think the use of coercion is always wrong. But it does seem to me that there is a prima facie duty (to borrow from W.D. Ross) to refrain from coercion. And the burden of proof falls on the person advocating coercion to show why it’s necessary. (This would apply a fortiori to lethal force, requiring an even higher burden of proof on the person advocating war or capital punishment.)

One, Two, Many Loves

“Pluralism” has become a kind of liberal shibboleth, but there are good reasons for respecting the limits that pluralism puts on government action. The usual argument put forth begins with a kind of value relativism (or at least a skepticism that we can know the good) and then concludes that no one should “impose their values on others.” This argument conveniently overlooks the fact that it presupposes the non-relative value of non-imposition, and threatens to lapse into a contradiction.

Fortunately, one can take value pluralism seriously without retreating into relativism. Augustine points the way with his famed notion of the “two loves.” According to Augustine, our loves (i.e. what we “value,” to put it in the parlance of our times) can either be oriented toward God or toward the finite goods of this world. Those who love God above all else constitute the “City of God” and those who love finite things constitute the “City of Man.” Moreover, in this life there’s no telling who’s who. And, we could add, at any given point in time, particular individuals may be at different points along the road toward loving God; our selves remain divided. Plus, at any given time none of us are able to examine our own selves objectively enough to determine whether our own loves are properly ordered; we are right to be humble about imposing our own prefrences as a matter of public policy. This de facto pluralism makes the imposition of anything more than a partial peace impossible, since it can’t be assumed that everyone shares the same scale of values.

The upshot is that, for Augustine, there is no hierarchy of values shared by the denizens of the City of God and the City of Man. It would be evil for earthly values to be imposed on those who love God, and it would be fruitless for the heavenly values to be imposed on those whose loves are turned toward finite goods, since only God can induce spiritual regeneration in a soul. Genuine community requires loves held in common, but no earthly kingdom can meet this standard. At best, governments can impose a kind of peace, but they can’t bring people’s loves into alignment with the true hierarchy of values. Virtue cannot be coerced.

The Limits of Pluralism

However important it is to respect pluralism, everyone (or nearly everyone) agrees that out and out anarchy would be bad. A helpful distinction here, I think, is between pursuing goods and preventing harms. Goods are plural, and often irreconcilable. Promoting one may lead to a diminishing of others. And people are divided on how they rank various goods.

But there is much less diversity of opinion regarding harms. Nearly everybody regards violent assault, invasion of bodily integrity, deprivation of material goods, starvation, and ill health as evils to be avoided as almost any cost. So, it seems to me that a politics of limited aspirations dedicated to securing the peace of the earthly city should be dedicated, above all, to minimizing these types of harms.

It is, not coincidentally, precisely in avoiding these kinds of harms that coercion seems most justified. It’s a lot easier to justify the use of force to prevent certain death than to round up support for the NEA. But, lest this be mistaken for merely a libertarian relapse on my part, I take it that harms like starvation, ill health, destitution, and environmental degradation are just as serious and so there is no reason why, in principle, government action wouldn’t be appropriate to mitigate or prevent those kinds of harms (via wealth redistribution, regulation or whatever is deemed to work best).

Some harms are, of course, controversial. For instance, abortion is clearly a serious harm to if you think the fetus has the same moral standing as a newborn infant (or even if you think it has some degree of moral standing), in which case there would seem to be a justification for government action to prevent or curtail it. However, given its controversial nature in this time and place, a lot will depend on prudently assessing what laws can be realistically enforced given the current moral consensus (or lack thereof).

A Chastened Liberalism?

So, what we end up with is a government that is aspirationally limited, minimally coercive, tolerant of pluralism, and empowered primarily to secure peace (however limited and fragmentary) by preventing harm and meliorating the worst effects of human sin.

Not a very exciting or exalted view of the role of government, I grant you. I’m probably still more influenced by libertarianism than I realized (or maybe better the more chastened classical liberalism of someone like F.A. Hayek). But in a world where untold evil has been committed (and is being committed) in the name of exalted political ends that may not be such a bad thing. I have to say that these words from C.S. Lewis have always resonated with me:

The secular community, since it exists for our natural good and not for our supernatural, has no higher end than to facilitate and safeguard the family, and friendship, and solitude. To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all the economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit. (“Membership,” in The Weight of Glory, pp. 161-2)

Best I can come up with at the moment, anyway…