So I’m going to introduce the comments I have at Baylor on the work of probably the greatest living political philosophy (according, for example, to Harvey Mansfield). It goes without saying that I’m trying to get Pierre to make sense to ME:
1. My view of Europe today isn’t of course based on first hand observation. I’m not that kind of social scientist. But I’ve listened to criticisms of Europe by the best French political thinkers, beginning with Pierre Manent.
2. These criticisms are both French and Catholic.
3. According to Manent, the nation is the modern form of the ancient polis, a particular place where people can and should find a political home. The nation is a body, with definite territorial limits. It’s a place with customs, traditions, and political institutions. The nation is a form fitted for beings like us , beings with bodies and minds, eros and will, hardwired, so to speak, for living together in the truth about the joys and responsibilities we share in common.
4. Now the nation can and should be chastened by the fact that human beings are more than citizens. They have, the Catholic Manent knows, another and higher home than their political one. Christian revelation illuminated what we now can see is true about with our own eyes how we are as free persons independently of revelation. That’s why the idea of personal freedom remains in the world—irreducible personal identity or inwardness or conscience—even as belief in the God of the Bible recedes.
5. The truth about our personal freedom as social, relational beings is represented in this world by the universal church. The church too is a body, an institution, a form fitted for who we are.
6. But the universal church isn’t meant to and really can’t displace the particular nation. Manent shows in great detail the ineptitude that invariably follows when the church attempts to think politically, to do the work the nation and its statesmen are supposed to do—just as the nation engages in tyranny based on psychological reductionism when it tries to displace the universal message of the City of God with some ideology or civil theology.
7. Modern civil theology—or the subordination of the church to the nation—and modern ideology—or the deformed politicization of the task of liberation of the universal church—are both degrading lies.
More to come . . .
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