Front Porcher Patrick Deneen criticizes the critics of the HHS mandate for using the “dominant privatistic language of liberalism.” He agrees this is the prudent strategy, but believes it masks the deeper divide between Catholic and Modern political thought in general. Such a tactic will allow the critics to win the battle, but lose the war because it concedes the Modern outlook. For example, to talk about religious liberty is to presuppose Modern concepts such as the public v. private sectors and individualism.
Deneen’s discussion resembles Leo Strauss’s distinction between the Ancients and Moderns on how society should be organized: “Regime means that whole, which we today are in the habit of viewing primarily in a fragmentized form…” The Ancients portrayed society as organic, while Moderns artificially divided it into parts like public v. private, church v. state, and individual v. society. Deneen takes this quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns and replaces the Classical view with the Catholic view: “Liberalism [Modernism] was fundamentally animated by a deep philosophical and theological objection to Catholicism – and, until recent times, vice-versa.”
Yet the Catholic view might have more in common with the Modern view than Deneen suggests. For example, the fragmentation Strauss attributes to the Moderns can be traced back to a pre-modern thinker, Augustine. He taught Christians are citizens of two kingdoms, the City of God and the City of Man. Such a teaching conflicts with the holism of the Classical Regime and underlies the current tension between religious liberty and the HHS Mandate. Augustine writes, “This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace. It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced. [emphasis mine]” If a citizen’s duties to his state come into conflict with his duties to God, then he cannot obey both masters but will have to choose one.
Another idea which brings Catholics and Moderns together is the person or individual. The Ancients saw the individual as a part of a whole, or as Peter likes to say, city fodder. Catholics and Moderns, on the other hand, agree that every human being is unique and irreplaceable. The disagreement between the two is over sovereignty. The Modern believes in ‘sovereign selves’ while the Catholic locates sovereignty in God. The Modern notion of individual autonomy is an attenuated or thinner version of the Christian conception of the dignity of the human person. It is an attempt to safeguard individual rights without making any grand claims about his place in the Cosmos. Thus both sides believe in religious liberty, but disagree about its purpose. Regardless, it shows the critics’ adoption of religious liberty language is not simply a prudential move, but a principled one as well.
March 5th, 2012 | 10:34 pm
The eschaton has long been immanentized, thus the tension of human existence, in modernity, has been corrupted. As an example, the Democrat is a citizen who is a member of a political party that supports/condones the systematic slaughter of human infants. Both logically and morally there can be no relationship between the Christian (Catholic) and the registered Democrat. A Christian Democrat is oxymoronic.
March 6th, 2012 | 12:29 am
This is a similar point to what I was trying to say about Aquinas and conscience in the comments to Deneen’s post. I believe that Deneen’s focus on the common good was too one-sided an interpretation of the Christian tradition, that needs to be balanced by the person, as you suggest.
March 6th, 2012 | 11:23 am
Your last paragraph does not seem to recognize the importance of ancient natural right : it seems to me that the ancients emphasized the idea that one’s life ought not to be be city fodder (even if some people’s lives are such fodder).
On the other side, Hobbes account of our right to everything, is hard to call even a thin endorsement of human dignity.
March 6th, 2012 | 12:04 pm
Patrick,
You gotta say more, because you might be right.
Peter
March 6th, 2012 | 1:39 pm
And Patrick Cain, a lot will depend on which “ancients” we mean. I.e., the statesmen from Livy or Plutarch generally will exhort you to be city fodder, albeit at the highest level–nor does it seem that Livy or Plutarch disagree with such exhortation. Plato and Xenophon teach something else, most quickly represented by the fate of the patriotic man displayed in the Republic at 553b, and by the strategy the philosophic man adopts at 496d of “standing aside under a little wall.” And the trick is to see that whatever Aristotle elaborates about what is the best and most just that can be done with a polis, on the core issue he ultimately joins Plato and Xenophon.
I.e. the “one’s life ought not be city fodder” of ancient natural right really means:
“as only the truly philosophic can know, one’s life ought not be city fodder.”
P.S. Great post, Jason. The other Patrick should respond; perhaps Matt will prod him to.
March 6th, 2012 | 2:08 pm
I could say a lot more, but doing so would greatly increase risk not being right. . . .
But I am tempted enough to point out that Socrates did not consider himself simply a part of the regime. We might even be hard pressed to find a better example of an “individual”. Insofar as we mean his example as ancient political thought, it is hard for to see how that thought emphasizes the common good over and against the individual. Athens certainly didn’t think so anyway.
I also do not think there is much in common between Modern individual autonomy and Catholic individual dignity. As Hobbes shows, the claim of the former entails no duty to respect the latter. I know that Zuckert appears to claim to overcome this problem in his reading of Locke, but I think his argument does not quite do what he seems to claim it does (as I think he well knows).
March 6th, 2012 | 2:49 pm
By the way, I had not yet read your revisiting of this question, when I posted this, Peter.
I see you hedge on what Zuckert means too – interesting. You should say more some day (or have you elsewhere?)
March 6th, 2012 | 5:19 pm
Isn’t it a little too easy to throw medieval Catholic political philosophy in with the Ancients? This does make it simpler to respond to Deneen, but I don’t think it’s what he was asserting. Deneen did seem to be connecting Catholicism with a holistic approach, but the medievals are just too different from the ancients to accept the paint-by-numbers Straussian claim that it’s all as simple as A or B, whole or parts, Ancients or Moderns.
Remi Brague shows why in all his books about the medieval synthesis, as it developed out of the ancients and made way for the moderns. I think Brague would be somewhere between Deneen’s hard anti-liberalism and the rapprochement position you are trying to work out, Jason: his thesis is that modernity’s great contributions (the individual, natural rights, etc., etc.) do come out of the Catholic middle ages, but that modernity has appropriated them by means that are more Muslim than Christian. Modernity has done to late medieval Catholic political philosophy what the Muslims did to the ancient world: it has assimilated key Catholic insights, even as it has made a show of total repudiation, leaving no traces behind.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact