Descoqs, a follower of Suarez’s interpretation of St Thomas had allowed the political sphere a wide degree of autonomy and he was prepared to detach “political society” from “religious society,” with its own “natural” end or purpose.

Laberthonnière retaliated by accusing Descoqs of being influenced by “a false theological notion of some state of pure nature and therefore imagined the state could be self-sufficient in the sense that it could be properly independent of any specifically Christian sense of justice.”

“The Church,” said Laberthonnière, “does not issue words of command, backed up by menaces or favours; she raises souls to the life above and causes a supernatural obligation to be born and cultivated in the conscience…” Hence is utter rejection of any sort of “state religion,” which Maurras proposed and Descoqs (and many other Catholics) welcomed.

I’m surprised to learn that universities can be a place where ideas can be freely discussed, and I’m even more surprised to learn that lesbians can be anything other than closed-minded ideologues, automatons of the feminist and gay agendas.

I’m being sarcastic, of course, but amid all of the nasty exaggerations found on this site, I enjoyed hearing you describe the obvious, which is that students (and other Americans for that matter) are interested in a variety of ideas and perspectives.

Hmmmm…when I think of Maurras and the AF, what first comes to mind is their proto-fascism, monarchism, anti-modernism and anti-semitism. The factor of Maurras’ agnosticism/atheism that you mention seems just a nasty caboose at the end of a train of rather unsavory reactionary sentiment. I don’t know much about the Blondel/Descoqs debate, but Bernardi’s book looks promising.

The whole Counter-Revolutionary school embraced views similar to Lammanais, Joseph de Maistre being the best-known example.

A secular version of it can be found in the “Catholic Atheism” of Charles Maurras, which led to a spirited altercation between Maurras’s Jesuit defender, Pedro Descoqs and the Oratorian, Laberthonnière, in Maurice Blondel’s periodical, L’Annales de philosophie chrétienne.

Laberthonnière shrewdly accused Maurras of seeing the Church as shoring up society against “the anarchy he saw as inherent in Christianity itself.”

Blondel accused him of proposing “A Catholicism without Christianity, submissiveness without thought, an authority without love, a Church that would rejoice at the insulting tributes paid to the virtuosity of her interpretative and repressive system… To accept all from God except God, all from Christ except His Spirit, to preserve in Catholicism only a residue that is aristocratic and soothing for the privileged and beguiling or threatening for the lower classes—is not all this, under the pretext perhaps of thinking only about religion, really a matter of pursuing only politics?”

I recognize, however, that teachers in other institutions might have to be considerably more careful. This is especially true in the before-college levels, which quite often today don’t even give a nod to freedom of discussion.

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Since Esolen mentions Chesterton, Christopher Dawson and Maritain as comprising a “fourth position” — although just how Mr. C’s distributism, Mr. D’s “corporativism” and Mr. M’s integralisme could together constitute a coherent “position” is left unspoken — perhaps the “Golden Age” would be the interwar period wherein these men were more or less interacting contemporaries (1919-1939). If so, this is not necessarily a move towards myth or myth-making; however, it’s certainly an odd choice on Esolen’s part that raises more questions than it answers…

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Michael PS quotes Andrew Fairbairn who wrote, long ago, that:
“Lamennais argued that without authority there could be no religion…”

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I love the multiple ironies here! I’m sure Fairbairn and John Henry Newman would be as amused as I am.

I can’t be Hindu and a Rastafarian. Rawls lets a Hindu remain a Hindu.

But any creed that’s put forward as merely “public” could do the job. I could say “In the public realm, we act according to the norms of Rastafarianism, which we all recognize as having only a conventional authority over our public lives.”

Rawls’ Political Liberalism is a view as substantive as any other.

What, in any given community, constitutes the body of agreed premises will, inevitably, determine what counts as a reason. In the absence of such agreed premises, there is no appeal but to the sword. Liberalism arose in 17th century Europe precisely because there was a widespread recognition that religious differences arising from the Reformation appeared permanent and ineradicable and that some other basis of civil consensus had to be sought.

Of course, one can argue that the quest is illusory: thus, “Lamennais argued that without authority there could be no religion, that it was the foundation of all society and morality, and that it alone enfranchised man by making him obedient, so harmonizing all intelligences and wills. And thus the Church, as the supreme authority, became the principle of order, the centre of political as well as religious stability; the only divine rights were those she sanctioned, in her strength kings reigned, and through obedience to her man was happy and God honoured.”