In Burke’s letters, as elsewhere, (specifically on questions “penal” and “popery” and certainly a few decades later during the French Revolution), he might echo a medieval Thomist. Kirk, Stanlis, Canavan would I think argue so, but unfortunately a good case can also be made for the Whiggish and utilitarian Burke of Morley and Macpherson, which was the dominant interpretation prior to the traditionalist intellectual revival of the 40s and 50s. This was the tension I had in mind, and it leads to the uneasy question of “conservatism” as it relates to a country with a lot of revolution and liberalism in its bones. We are quite “inauthentic” by comparison to the Spain and France of hundreds of years ago!

And you have pinpointed the issue well: the emancipation of the will through political action in the name of freedom and reason and the march of “progress” through human history. The view that reason, fundamentally, comes from us, and that we are capable of something like a utopia.

A conservative Whiggism is an acceptable compromise, perhaps, given the foundations, but how much hubristic damage can even a mild revolutionary mindset do? I think what a Triune and Sacramental mindset offers is a rebuke to personal and political hubris. However hubris plays out in the personal and political spheres, in ways large and small, hubris of ambition should almost always be checked. And as for “oranisism” (that’s a good phrase too), you are probably right to suggest it does not account for a Catholicism based on natural law. It deserves more thought. Can liberalism be escaped in our socio-cultural contexts? Possibly not. What a depressing thought.

And so what I am thinking is that an “authentic conservatism” does not exist. There are sentiments that are conservative, and I believe that conservatism in the abstract is the “negation of ideology”, even as its coalitions may contain ideologies, but it is best reflected in the traditionalist family, where the political can diminish. Primarily Political People – a particular disease of the Left – fill up too much life space with matters of systematic organization. Such actions are the opposite of conservatism.

Burke seems to understand the American revolution as being limited in this radical sense by the colonies’ own inherited traditions of English law and custom, at least when their revolution is compared to France a decade or so later.

So Burke was a professed Whig who was able to make distinctions between the political and the moral, between the law and abstract justice. You claim this position is more amenable to American political traditions than traditional European Catholicism, and I agree. Whether compared to Jacobinism or later ecclesiastical condemnations of Americanism, Burke’s conservative Whiggism makes for a healthier balance in the USA.

However, then you point to the uneasy place that (some) American Catholics (as opposed to Catholic Americans) find themselves in a coalition of American conservative Whiggery. Given their profound understanding of the sacramental nature of love and the family stemming from the biological nature of the union between two–male and female–American Catholics try to expand this notion to a sacramental(?) understanding inclusive of an organic whole of the community. The trinity and its love in three persons offers a rebuke to the modern and American liberal separations–separations indicative of liberal modernity as as Pierre Manent describes it.

I’m not sure this “oranisicm” of catholicism accounts for a catholicism based on natural law. Surely the natural law considers distinctions (separations?) between the household and the city? While these two realms are not separate, a prudent statesman (even a Christian one) would not try to conflate all sorts of rule into one type of rule. While one must be concerned with the proper formation of the other, the city is not the household, and vice versa. This distinction is at least defensible in terms of the natural law.

But I think you are right in the larger Augustinian doctrine of the two cities. Man is not God, and his city is terrestrial and temporal (and fallen). The two truths of human nature of which you speak are correct–original sin and the belief that you shall be as gods (nice phrase btw–”the world’s oldest belief system.” It is like the world’s oldest profession as I heard Peter Kreeft once say).

We are truly restless hearts, or in a Pascalian understanding of modernity, restless minds to boot. This is an unresolvable tension that the natural law (which in some circles is a contradiction in terms) cannot seem to resolve. But reason is available by nature to figure out the truth too. It may be ultimately insufficient, but is is what we humans have in common nonetheless.

Once again, this was a thought provoking post.