MacIntyre's critique of the market-cum-state

Dorothy Day often said the greatest enemy of the Church is the state: that is, the modern buerocratic state inimical to subsidiarity, solidarity, and the practice of the virtues of the common good. She was always a firm opponent of capitalism-as-we-know-it (that is, she was not against private ownership of property but believed that capitalism-as-we-know-it is opposed to the Church's social teaching) and argued for distributism instead.

Alasdair MacIntyre has spent his entire life arguing against the modern nation state and market capitalism (which he sees as two sides of the same coin). In a way, all his work, particularly post-After Virtue, can be see as an attempt to provide the philosophical underpinnings for a critique of the modern market-cum-state.

I can't emphasize enough how important I think this critique is. Most political discourse is, I believe, already defeated by its presupposition of the modern state and market as a neutral given; on the contrary, I have come to the conclusion that is must be resisted and the work of building a new culture of life (i.e. islands and oases) is as much a work of creativity and imagination, conceiving new forms and practices independent of this status quo.

Most have heard MacIntyre's famous quip that modern liberals and conservatives are in reality two sides of the same coin, and thus in reality, liberal-liberals or conservative-liberals (whose differences in the end amount to little insofar as this dialectic perpetuates the status quo of the market-cum-state). In fact, the market and the state, and the way in which these two poles are dialectically co-opted by Republicans and Democrats, posit the same conclusion: two sides of the same coin. Therefore, to serve or aid one is to serve or aid the other, full stop.

There is a great summary of MacIntyre's political thought in a paper by Ronald Beiner: "Community Versus Citzenship: MacIntyre's Revolt Against the Modern State" (Critical Review 14 [2000] n. 4; pp. 459-479). It is really the best summary I have found, and I highly recommend a close study. Here is a selection (pp. 464-469); nota bene.

MacIntyre’s Political Philosophy

MacIntyre is not the only one of our four thinkers to disown the communitarian label, but his denials have been more adamant and more fleshed-out than those of the other three. So a good place to start our consideration of MacIntyre’s politics may be with a careful examination of his explanations of why he doesn’t consider himself a communitarian.

Basically, there are two reasons. The first is that he considers it a “mistake to suppose that there is anything good about local community as such.... Local communities are always open to corruption by narrowness, by complacency, by prejudice against outsiders and by a whole range of other deformities, including those that arise from a cult of local community.” This is a perfectly good reason not to enshrine community as such as a normative standard: the standard, rather, is the quality of social practices that various communities enable us to realize. What concerns MacIntyre is the flourishing of humanly worthwhile practices and the virtues and excellences that they bring into play, and he is interested in communities insofar as they provide sites for these practices and virtues (and for no other reason). This is a good reason for rejecting the communitarian label, and other communitarians such as Sandel and Taylor would be in full agreement with MacIntyre on this point.

The second, more distinctive reason is that MacIntyre associates communitarianism with the project of applying the language of common good to the modern nation-state, and he thoroughly and wholeheartedly rejects this project. As he puts it: “The communitarian mistake [is] to attempt to infuse the politics of the state with the values and modes of participation in local community.”

For anyone who takes the basic structures of modern political life as given, it is not easy to fathom the depth of MacIntyre’s hostility to the state as a mode of organizing political activity. His essay, “Poetry as Political Philosophy,” probably conveys the tenor of his antistatist rhetoric as well as any of his writings. The purpose of the essay is to investigate a thesis that MacIntyre attributes to W. B. Yeats, namely “that no coherent political imagination is any longer possible for those condemned to inhabit, and to think and act in terms of the modernity of the twentieth-century nation-state,” and there is no question but that MacIntyre affirms the truth of what he takes to be Yeats’s insight.

MacIntyre highlights Yeats’s image of the modern nation-state “as a tree dead from half-way up.” Insofar as Yeats himself intends to apply this image specifically to the Irish state of the 1920s and 1930s, he understates the generality of his insight: what Yeats sees and condemns in the Irish state “belong[s] to it not as Irish, but as state. They are features of the modern state as such... [expressing] the imaginative poverty not of a particular regime or type of regime, but of the structure of every modern state.” To overcome the “imaginative sterility of the modern state” and to engage in “a less barren politics,” one must seek out other forms of institutionalized community, beyond the boundaries of “the conventional politics of the contemporary state.”

It’s not obvious where MacIntyre gets his view that what defines communitarianism is a commitment to the nation-state as the primary location for community (and that therefore he’s not a communitarian). To be sure, other communitarians don’t necessarily rule out the nation-state as a possible location for community, but neither do they privilege the nation-state as the preferred location for community. In truth, Sandel, Taylor, and Walzer tend to be ambivalent about whether they want an enhanced community at the level of the polity as a whole, or whether they want a decentralized politics that would enhance community in more local settings at the expense of the national political arena; they sometimes fudge this question rather than express a clear preference. It seems implausible, however, to insist that a preference for the nation-state is what defines their communitarianism; rather, the most that one can say is that they stand closer to the commonsensical mainstream view that certain important forms of human community are realized (or can be realized) at the national level, whereas MacIntyre embraces the quite radical view that genuine community, and the goods that a genuine community subserves, are entirely ruled out within the horizon of the modern state.

MacIntyre’s attitude to the state can be summed up in the simple injunction: “Have no truck with the Devil!” In place of state-related politics, he substitutes what he calls “the politics of local community.” MacIntyre is very clear about the sorts of communities that qualify as communities of common good: “fishing communities in New England over the past hundred and fifty years...Welsh mining communities [instantiating] a way of life informed by the ethics of work at the coal face, by a passion for the goods of choral singing and of rugby football and by the virtues of trade union struggle against first coal-owners and then the state... farming cooperatives in Donegal, Mayan towns in Guatemala and Mexico, some city-states from a more distant past.” Communities of this sort qualify as possible sites for common good. It is equally clear, for MacIntyre, that the politics of the national state don’t come anywhere near qualifying as a possible site of common good. Why not?

Modern nation-states are governed through a series of compromises between a range of more or less conflicting economic and social interests. What weight is given to different interests varies with the political and economic bargaining power of each and with its ability to ensure that the voices of its protagonists are heard at the relevant bargaining tables. What determines both bargaining power and such ability is in key part money, money used to provide the resources to sustain political power: electoral resources, media resources, relationships to corporations. This use of money procures very different degrees and kinds of political influence for different interests. And the outcome is that although most citizens share, although to greatly varying extents, in such public goods as those of a minimally secure order, the distribution of goods by government in no way reflects a common mind arrived at through widespread shared deliberation governed by norms of rational enquiry. Indeed the size of modern states would itself preclude this. It does not follow that relationships to the nation-state, or rather to the various agencies of government that collectively compose it, are unimportant to those who practice the politics of the virtues of acknowledged dependence. No one can avoid having some significant interest in her or his relationships to the nation-state just because of its massive resources, its coercive legal powers, and the threats that its blundering and distorted benevolence presents. But any rational relationship of the governed to the government of modern states requires individuals and groups to weigh any benefits to be derived from it against the costs of entanglement with it.

Our formulation above should probably be qualified somewhat, as follows: “To the extent that you must have truck with the Devil, in order to avail yourself of the necessary benefits that it confers, you should not fool yourself into thinking that receiving these benefits joins you in a relationship to the Devil expressive of a common good.”

Central to this conception is an understanding of rational deliberation. Members of a community can join in a politics of common good only when it is possible for them “to come through rational deliberation to a common mind.” Clearly, political association on the modern scale cannot imaginably meet this standard. According to

the conception of political activity embodied in the modern state, . . . there is a small minority of the population who are to make politics their active occupation and preoccupation, professional and semiprofessional politicians, and a huge largely passive majority who are to be mobilized only at periodic intervals, for elections or national crises. Between the political elites on the one hand and the larger population on the other there are important differences, as in, for example, how much or how little information is required and provided for each. A modern electorate can only function as it does, so long as it has only a highly simplified and impoverished account of the issues that are presented to it. And the modes of presentation through which elites address electorates are designed to conceal as much as to reveal. These are not accidental features of the politics of modern states any more than is the part that money plays in affording influence upon the decision-making process.

Given the theoretical standards by which MacIntyre defines a genuine deliberative community, it would be ludicrous to characterize this general system as a process of shared rational deliberation. Without moral-political deliberation there is no possibility of arriving at “a common mind,” and without a common mind shaped by shared rational deliberation, there is no common good. The conclusion, following inescapable from MacIntyre’s premises, is that politics as we know it in the modern world cannot be characterized as anything other than “fragmentation through the conflicts of group interests and individual preferences, defined without reference to a common good.”

Two responses seem called for. The first is to recognize the theoretical force and philosophical stringency of the notion of a common good that MacIntyre here applies. Only very special kinds of communities and very particular types of social situation permit one to speak of a common good (“a common mind arrived at through widespread shared deliberation governed by norms of rational enquiry”), and one can pretty much define modernity as that constellation of social life that rules out, or at least drives to the margins, precisely those kinds of community and types of social situation that warrant the language of a common good. The second response is to note just how harsh a picture this account gives us of the politics of the modern state. It more or less has the effect of disqualifying any concept of political community within the boundaries of modern social life.

It’s true that the goods provided by the modern state are not products of communal deliberation in any rigorous sense, but they are still goods, and expressive surely of some mode of political community, however attenuated (and capable, in principle, of building up more of a sense of political community in proportion to its goods being perceived as real ones). In Canada, for instance, there is more or less a national consensus, shared in even by political parties on the right end of the political spectrum, that a nationally funded public-health system is a shared civic good. The state, in providing this good, is seen as the agent of the national consensus. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t controversies about the adequacy and efficiency of the Medicare system; but it does seem to suggest that the state can provide civic goods, and that there is, in this respect, a civic community on behalf of which such goods are provided.

There is no question that MacIntyre’s political commitments remain those of a radical egalitarian, and that his revulsion against capitalism has not diminished at all from what it was at the start of his intellectual career. (As John Haldane has remarked: “In certain respects MacIntyre’s position is like that of old-style Christian socialists: at once critical of society for its failure to attend to the needs of the weak, the dispossessed, the overlooked and the socially marginalized, yet also firm in defense of traditional morality.”) This makes his root-and-branch rejection of state-based politics all the more startling, since so much of twentieth-century left-wing politics has revolved around hopes to make the state the agent of egalitarian transformations of the political community as a whole.

In a discussion in 1997, I asked MacIntyre how he squares his residual Marxism with his antipathy to the state, since, in our situation—in the political world in which we live—the state offers the only restraint upon the capitalist market, both in its provision of regulatory mechanisms and in its capacity as an agent of distributive justice. Here is the gist of his interesting reply.

MacIntyre said that what we’ve had since 1945 is the state-cum-market. The welfare state was invented by Bismarck, as well as Disraeli, Lloyd George, and Balfour—that is, not by social democrats, but by conservatives trying to preserve an orderly capitalist society. Operation of the resulting state/market produces a certain amount of disorder, which in turn needs to be corrected by welfare-state policies. Welfare is therefore bound to a cycle: the state promotes growth, it regulates the market with welfare, then it needs to cut back. It issues promissory notes that have to be paid for (in the context of U.S. politics) by Republican policies. Democrats and Republicans occupy different positions within this cycle, yet they are bound to the same process.

MacIntyre rejects the whole package, namely a growth economy managed by the state, with occasional corrections with welfare and so on. Consequently, the welfare state is not an alternative to the state/market; it is, on the contrary, part and parcel of the kind of state entirely implicated in the operation of market capitalism. Most political contests in the contemporary West revolve around competing views of what constitutes the right balance between state and market (the power of the market versus the authority of the state). For MacIntyre, by contrast, market and state are two sides of the same coin, and rather than choosing between them, or deciding how to give greater weight to one or the other, we should toss away the whole coin. MacIntyre doesn’t go so far as to assert that there are no goods associated with state-based politics; what he does assert is that the basic structures of the modern state, and the form of political community it makes available, are essentially and not just incidentally inimical to a common good-based politics (and it is precisely this insight into our prevailing political reality that, on his view, “communitarians” have failed to grasp).

Inspiring Jesuits II

One Jesuit who long ago renewed my wounded hope in the Society is now the President of Gonzaga University, Robert Spitzer. (See his website for many examples of his magnaminity.) Fr. Spitzer is wonderful for so many reasons: he is a true genius; he's from Hawaii; he's legally blind enough not to be allowed to drive; he has a great laugh; calls Gonzaga's basketball success his "gift of the Holy Spirit"; conceived a wholly original program and method for teaching classical Aristotlean ethics, to groups as different as business executives and high school religion students; founded a one-of-its-kind pro-life organization in (of all places) Seattle, Washington; while still being a college President finds time to write articles on proving creation with astrophysics; he's as approachable as a child; he's as comfortable in quantum physics as he is in Biblical criticism; he took on Planned Parenthood in not allowing them to speak on Campus.

I first got to know Fr. Spitzer at Seattle University in the Spring of '98: I gravitated right away to the this professor of philosophy who was, first and foremost, a priest. Every morning he would say Mass for the faithful few in the upper Admin. chapel with reverence and devotion, and no matter how many incredible projects and activities he took on, it was always clear at the end of the day what was most important to him: his ministry. He stood out a bit from other Jesuits on campus, as he was never seen without clerics. But his constant enthusiasm and kindness toward students was rewarded with a massive following. I remember distinctly one time going down to Olympia (the state capital) to protest for March For Life with Fr. Spitzer, and another time when he engaged in a public debate at school on whether women should be allowed to be priests: I only mention these two events to point out how a Jesuit who is well-liked by his brothers, was appointed President of a Jesuit university by the Provincial of the Oregon province, and continues to inspire young men to enter the Society, has also managed to preserve his ministry as a priest and been a vigorous defender of the Church and orthodoxy, while nontheless courageous enough to reach out and minister to the universal Church, as well as avoid vituperative polemics. Not all good Jesuits are marginalized in the Order; in fact, not by a long shot.

Fundamentally, anyone who knows Fr. Spitzer will tell you that he really exhibits the fruits of the Spirit; and for this reason I think he is an important example for young Jesuits. It is because of Fr. Spitzer's virtues of humility, kindness, and patience that have translated into apostolic effectiveness, his ability to stand for the truth and yet pick his battles, his unwillingness to be caught up in conservative-liberal crossfire exchange and instead in simple magnaminity he focuses on being a Priest--because of his littleness, God has been able to use him is such an extraordinary way. To me he will always be an example of a Jesuit who exemplifies Ignatius's idea of a "priestly charism".

Here is a talk of his on Creation and astrophysics. Fun stuff.

Fr. Spitzer founded the Center For Life Principles; here is their website.

His book, Healing the Culture is a real gem, and very teachable (e.g. my Dad has been teaching it to high school Juniors for almost ten years now); it outlines his famous "four levels of happiness" moral philosophy.

Fr. Spitzer has some great stuff on educating in the Jesuit tradition. He is now writing a series on how Jesuit education is based on the transcendentals (his most recent one is here). Here is a selection from his first article on Jesuit education.

When I speak about Gonzaga, I say that we are trying to achieve the highest standards in the Jesuit educational tradition. People almost invariably ask, "What do you mean?" I normally give the "three-minute answer" which does not do justice to this deep, long-standing, remarkable enterprise. Thus, I decided to devote the next three issues of this column to "my take on Jesuit education.

The principles guiding the values of an Ignatian education derive from Part IV of the "Constitutions of the Society of Jesus," and from the "Ratio Studiorum" of 1599. The ultimate goal of the Ratio Studiorum was not merely to develop rhetorical, writing, and thinking skills, but to help students understand and articulate the wisdom, knowledge, and habits benefiting their souls and the souls of others. One might rephrase this goal in contemporary terms as "to prepare the students to pursue their ultimate personal good and the common good." The study of philosophy is central to helping students achieve this goal by providing essential background and foundations to understand and articulate: ·

• Rationality (evidence, consistency, valid argumentation, and systematic avoidance of omissions)
• The existence of God, and appreciating God's love and justice
• The ultimate end/ends (goals) of the human person
• The highest end/ends of the polis (community), or society (i.e., the common good)
• The means for pursuing the goals for human personhood and the common good (i.e., ethics).

The order of this list is significant, for without an understanding of the foundations of rationality, one could not achieve a rational awareness of God as Creator; without an awareness of God, one could not achieve an awareness of the ultimate end of the human person (not only created by God, but destined for God). In this view, one could never hope to achieve an adequate awareness of oneself without some awareness of the one Being capable of satisfying human desire.

Since Augustine's time, Western philosophers believed that human desire was oriented toward an unconditional, perfect, and unrestricted end (in Truth, Goodness, Justice, Beauty, Being and Love). If this were true, human beings could never satisfy themselves, and indeed, could never be satisfied by anything except unconditional, perfect, and unrestricted Truth, Goodness, Justice, Beauty, Being and Love. Augustine's famous exclamation in Book I of the "Confessions" expresses it succinctly: "For Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." If one believes that we are endowed with this desire for the unconditional, perfect, and unrestricted, then there are only two options: (1) One can come to affirm and relate to the God who alone can satisfy one's ultimate ends; or, (2) one can deny or reject God, and admit that life is absurd, for if God did not exist and human desire is satisfied only by the unrestricted, the human person is destined to be frustrated in the very ground and height of his/her nature.

This sets the stage for the fourth contribution of philosophy, namely, understanding and articulating the common good. For Suarez (an early Jesuit philosopher who first articulated a theory of rights resembling our contemporary one), the objective of society is to optimize the common good. This requires not only an awareness of the ultimate good for humans, but also a means of assuring that the good of the whole does not annihilate the good of some individuals. The actualization of these two potentially diverse objectives moved Suarez to articulate his theory of rights (the very first articulation of rights in history).

The third and fourth contributions reveal the need for the fifth, namely, ethics, principle, and virtue. Since the days of ancient Greece, many understood that ends do not justify the means. One cannot use an unjust means to pursue a just end; such means are inconsistent with, and therefore undermine, the good end.

Jesuits appreciated the need for principles, because they realized that our capacity for rationalization is virtually infinite. I don't know about you, but give me five minutes and I can rationalize any action as being good through utilitarian criteria (a harms/benefits calculus). If we are capable of such rationalization, it will never be sufficient merely to solve ethical cases or make ethical arguments. We must steep ourselves in principles and virtues which may not be absolutely applicable in all circumstances, but must stand at the ground of all ethical questioning and thinking, and which, therefore, cannot, without trepidation, be compromised.

These five dimensions of the Jesuit educational tradition are by no means restricted to philosophy. They permeate the study of literature, history, politics, law, the social sciences, the natural sciences, the health sciences, and even engineering. Of course, they interact with theological and pastoral studies and reflect upon the community life and spiritual life of the students. They form a powerful ethos giving rise to faith, self-awareness, justice, love and above all, a life dedicated to the common good.

Read the rest here.

A great Jesuit and a great priest. Deo gratias!

Homage to Catalonia

In these last few years I have grown rather disillusioned with politics, as well as having become somewhat radical (in the Augustinian-Schindlerian sense). At times however I can still be touched and moved by rare and fine political writing. I think chiefly here of Orwell. One of the most moving books I have ever read is his Homage to Catalonia, one of the more neglected masterpieces of the 20th century, his account of fighting with the Republican-Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. Run, don't walk, to the bookstore and get it! Here is a favorite selection:

THE days grew hotter and even the nights grew tolerably warm. On a bullet--
chipped tree in front of our parapet thick clusters of cherries were forming.
Bathing in the river ceased to be an agony and became almost a pleasure. Wild
roses with pink blooms the size of saucers straggled over the shell-holes round
Torre Fabian. Behind the line you met peasants wearing wild roses over their
ears. In the evenings they used to go out with green nets, hunting quails. You
spread the net over the tops of the grasses and then lay down and made a noise
like a female quail. Any male quail that was within hearing then came running
towards you, and when he was underneath the net you threw a stone to scare him,
whereupon he sprang into the air and was entangled in the net. Apparently only
male quails were caught, which struck me as unfair.

There was a section of Andalusians next to us in the line now. I do not know
quite how they got to this front. The current explanation was that they had run
away from Malaga so fast that they had forgotten to stop at Valencia; but this,
of course, came from the Catalans, who professed to look down on the Andalusians
as a race of semi-savages. Certainly the Andalusians were very ignorant. Few if
any of them could read, and they seemed not even to know the one thing that
everybody knows in Spain--which political party they belonged to. They thought
they were Anarchists, but were not quite certain; perhaps they were Communists.
They were gnarled, rustic-looking men, shepherds or labourers from the olive
groves, perhaps, with faces deeply stained by the ferocious suns of farther
south. They were very useful to us, for they had an extraordinary dexterity at
rolling the dried-up Spanish tobacco into cigarettes. The issue of cigarettes
had ceased, but in Monflorite it was occasionally possible to buy packets of the
cheapest kind of tobacco, which in appearance and texture was very like chopped
chaff. Its flavour was not bad, but it was so dry that even when you had
succeeded in making a cigarette the tobacco promptly fell out and left an empty
cylinder. The Andalusians, however, could roll admirable cigarettes and had a
special technique for tucking the ends in.

Two Englishmen were laid low by sunstroke. My salient memories of that time
are the heat of the midday sun, and working half-naked with sand--bags punishing
one's shoulders which were already flayed by the sun; and the lousiness of our
clothes and boots, which were literally dropping to pieces; and the struggles
with the mule which brought our rations and which did not mind rifle-fire but
took to flight when shrapnel burst in the air; and the mosquitoes (just
beginning to be active) and the rats, which were a public nuisance and would
even devour leather belts and cartridge-pouches. Nothing was happening except an occasional casualty from a sniper's bullet and the sporadic artillery-fire and
air-raids on Huesca. Now that the trees were in full leaf we had constructed
snipers' platforms, like machans, in the poplar trees that fringed the line. On
the other side of Huesca the attacks were petering out. The Anarchists had had
heavy losses and had not succeeded in completely cutting the Jaca road. They had
managed to establish themselves close enough on either side to bring the road
itself under machine-gun fire and make it impassable for traffic; but the gap
was a kilometre wide and the Fascists had constructed a sunken road, a sort of
enormous trench, along which a certain number of lorries could come and go.
Deserters reported that in Huesca there were plenty of munitions and very little
food. But the town was evidently not going to fall. Probably it would have been
impossible to take it with the fifteen thousand ill-armed men who were
available. Later, in June, the Government brought troops from the Madrid front
and concentrated thirty thousand men on Huesca, with an enormous quantity of
aeroplanes, but still the town did not fall.

When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line, and
at the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most futile of my
whole life. I had joined the militia in order to fight against Fascism, and as
yet I had scarcely fought at all, had merely existed as a sort of passive
object, doing nothing in return for my rations except to suffer from cold and
lack of sleep. Perhaps that is the fate of most soldiers in most wars. But now
that I can see this period in perspective I do not altogether regret it. I wish,
indeed, that I could have served the Spanish Government a little more
effectively; but from a personal point of view--from the point of view of my
own development--those first three or four months that I spent in the line were
less futile than I then thought. They formed a kind of interregnum in my life,
quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything
that is to come, and they taught me things that I could not have learned in any
other way.

The essential point is that all this time I had been isolated--for at the
front one was almost completely isolated from the outside world: even of what
was happening in Barcelona one had only a dim conception--among people who
could roughly but not too inaccurately be described as revolutionaries. This was
the result of the militia--system, which on the Aragon front was not radically
altered till about June 1937. The workers' militias, based on the trade unions
and each composed of people of approximately the same political opinions, had
the effect of canalizing into one place all the most revolutionary sentiment in
the country. I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of
thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all
living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was
perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense
in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of
Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of
Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness,
money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The
ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost
unthinkable in the money--tainted air of England; there was no one there except
the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of
course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and
local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of
the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who
experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards
that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been
in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the
word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug.
One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion
to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the
world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving'
that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the
grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism
quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and
makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is
the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless
society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that those few months in
the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while they lasted,
were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one
was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and
no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages
of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it
deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see Socialism
established much more actual than it had been before. Partly, perhaps, this was
due to the good luck of being among Spaniards, who, with their innate decency
and their ever-present Anarchist tinge, would make even the opening stages of
Socialism tolerable if they had the chance.

Of course at the time I was hardly conscious of the changes that were
occurring in my own mind. Like everyone about me I was chiefly conscious of
boredom, heat, cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger. It is quite
different now. This period which then seemed so futile and eventless is now of
great importance to me. It is so different from the rest of my life that already
it has taken on the magic quality which, as a rule, belongs only to memories
that are years old. It was beastly while it was happening, but it is a good
patch for my mind to browse upon. I wish I could convey to you the atmosphere of that time. I hope I have done so, a little, in the earlier chapters of this
book. It is all bound up in my mind with the winter cold, the ragged uniforms of
militiamen, the oval Spanish faces, the morse-like tapping of machine-guns, the
smells of urine and rotting bread, the tinny taste of bean-stews wolfed
hurriedly out of unclean pannikins.

The whole period stays by me with curious vividness. In my memory I live over
incidents that might seem too petty to be worth recalling. I am in the dug-out
at Monte Pocero again, on the ledge of limestone that serves as a bed, and young
Ramon is snoring with his nose flattened between my shoulder-blades. I am
stumbling up the mucky trench, through the mist that swirls round me like cold
steam. I am half-way up a crack in the mountain-side, struggling to keep my
balance and to tug a root of wild rosemary out of the ground. High overhead some
meaningless bullets are singing.

Inspiring Jesuits!! (There lives the dearest freshness deep down things...)

I have been posting quite infrequently of late: there has been a lot going on in my life, not the least a full load of teaching English to Juniors. I am trying to purify my intentions toward my work, that it may become in the deepest sense, an apostolate. I'm not there yet.

In the meantime, I thought I would try to do a little occasional series on inspiring Jesuits, as part of my constant effort to upbuild that least order, and hopefully edify others and perhaps inspire them to consider discerning this order.

[N.B. This is not a list of "the few good Jesuits" as I know there are many good Jesuits out there. These are just ones that inspire me.]

The first is a young priest that soon enough many will hear of. I am hard pressed to think of another young priest that fills me with so much hope about the New Springtime; and he is a Jesuit! Fr. Dave Meconi, SJ, recently finished his doctoral work at Oxford, and is already a well-published authority on Augustine, as well as being a regular on the orthodox Catholic journal circuit. He is strong, attractive, charismatic guy: a superlative example of an atheltic, popular, smart, and cool dude who despite wordly options becomes a priest. I first met him when he used to come by Franciscan University of Steubeville, stumping for vocations.

Here is a story about his ordination in 2003 (here is the original link to the story as it appeared in Company Magazine):

He was a good little kid,” says Phyllis Braganini, mother of David Meconi, SJ. David’s older sister, Anne Brancheau, takes it a step further, “He was a great kid, extraordinary if you ask me.” She goes on to say that David is a wonderful uncle to her three children, Ben, Samuel, and Sarah. “They love him. He’s crazy Uncle Dave. Whenever he calls, they all crowd around the phone to hear what he’s saying, even if he’s just shouting German words at them.”

As David neared ordination, people everywhere, his family, friends, and fellow Jesuits all said “he’ll make a great priest.” While he’s a tremendously gifted scholar, who will study next year at Oxford University and has already published articles in numerous scholarly journals, it’s not the academics people are talking about. Rather it’s his ability to relate to people, to make connections with students, his nieces and nephews, his mother, the many lay people he encounters in his ministry, and fellow Jesuits from the U.S. and around the world.

Fr. Peter Ryan, SJ, an associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, MD, and a good friend of David’s, says with “unmixed enthusiasm” that “we need priests who can connect on the human level with typical lay people, and David is a natural at that. He’s a steady, well-integrated man whom people look up to. And he has a great zeal for souls. This was evident during his time in regency at Xavier University, when with the help of Fr. Matt Gamber, SJ, he invited students to participate in Mass, penance, and Eucharistic Adoration. The student response was quite remarkable. Indeed, stunning. One reason was surely that the students understandably looked up to Dave. They were attracted to him because he is so personable, joyful, and zealous. But Dave is not interested in adulation. He used his gifts to attract students not to himself but to the Lord Jesus Christ and his holy Catholic Church.”

David grew up in Paw Paw, a small town in Western Michigan, where his family still runs the St. Julian Winery. Even as a boy who loved cracking people up with practical jokes, David demonstrated a desire to serve others, to help other people. “When he was in school, my mom would get mad at him because he was always giving his things away,” recalls his sister Anne. “There were some kids around Paw Paw that didn’t have much. If Dave thought they didn’t have a winter jacket, he’d give them his. There was one boy he sort of adopted. He just brought him over to the house, opened his closet doors and said ‘take whatever you need’.”

David shoveled sidewalks and mowed the lawns of elderly neighbors very often for little, if any, money. He and one of his closest friends in high school set up an intramural sports league for Paw Paw grade schoolers because they didn’t think the kids had much to do. The league continues today. David was well liked by his peers. He played football and baseball, finished very near the top of his class and was voted homecoming king his senior year.

In 1983 he enrolled at Hope College in Holland, MI. Three and a half years later, he graduated with a degree in economics and a minor in religious studies. Thoughts of a religious vocation crossed David’s mind from time to time in college. At one point, his mother says, he returned from school and said matter of factly, “I’m going to be a priest.”

After graduation, though, he moved to Chicago and clerked for S&P 500 futures trading at the Chi-cago Mercantile Exchange. “It was the late 80s. Reagan was president. Things with the economy were good,” David says, recalling the time he spent at the “Merc.” Even though he was making what his sister Anne describes as “really good money,” David wasn’t excited about what he was doing.

“I liked it there,” he says, “but not for the right reasons.” In what may have been the first concrete step towards a religious vocation, David found himself drawn to the Church and began attending daily Mass at the Cathedral in Chicago. “I felt like Moses,” David says: “’Today I set before you life and death.’ There was comfort, money, and wealth at the Merc. Then when I was at Mass I saw all these people who wouldn’t even be allowed on the observation deck at the Merc, much less on the floor: the homeless, the poor, the old, and the stinky. I knew one could become a saint working on the floor of the Merc but I also knew I wasn’t one of them.” He left his job in 1987 and began work on an MA in theology at Yale University. In the spring semester he transferred to Notre Dame University.

In the fall of 1988, he transferred again, this time to Marquette University, where he soon met Fr. Donald J. Keefe, SJ, a professor of theology. “He was the first Catholic intellectual I’d ever met, a man who was available for students and knew the tradition backwards and forwards. He took his life seriously as a priest and as an academic. I’d never seen a priest who didn’t have a parish,” David recalls. “That life was attractive to me. He was a tremendous influence.” Under the guidance of Fr. Keefe, David poured himself into his studies. He was amazed by the breadth of knowledge displayed by his classmates. He worked side by side with them during the day. After class he’d go see Fr. Keefe. “He caught me up on 2,000 years of philosophy. I had to read every night to catch up with the other guys.” Fr. Keefe also became a close friend of David’s and his spiritual director.

“I’ll remain eternally grateful to him,” David says of Fr. Keefe, who is now professor emeritus of theology at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, MI. In fact, in a gesture of gratitude and respect, David asked Fr. Keefe to vest him during the ordination liturgy. Some of David’s gratitude no doubt comes from an encounter which took place just after he’d finished his degree at Marquette. “I was thinking about religious life,” David says, “but I had a full ride to go to the University of Toronto for a Ph.D. in theology. I had my bags packed, the car loaded up, and I was literally pulling out of town, when I stopped by to see Fr. Keefe. ‘Why are you going to lock yourself into a program for six years?’ he asked me. ‘If you’re serious about the priesthood, then don’t go somewhere you can’t think about it for six years’.” Fr. Keefe suggested instead that David go study for a year in Rome.

“Rome?”

He had his bags packed to go to Toronto. But Fr. Keefe told him he could help him find classes to take at the various theology schools in Rome. And David had family in Faleria, a town not far from Rome. Two weeks later he was on a plane. To Europe, not Toronto.

One of the first people David met there was Fr. Peter Ryan, who was also studying theology at the time. “He put me over the edge,” David says of Fr. Ryan. “Talking to him about who the Jesuits were, and my own prayer life. He was convincing.” He also became David’s spiritual director. “It’s amazing,” David recalls, “you’re looking, you’re looking, and then God just puts the right people in your life.”

He spent a year in Rome and then came back to the States, where he studied for one more year before entering the Jesuit novitiate, Loyola House, in 1992. In his second year there, David was assigned to St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago for his “long experiment”. He helped teach Greek and Latin there. The experience was, for him, a powerful one. David worked closely with Frank Raispis, a long-time classics teacher at the school. He found in Frank a powerful affirmation of his own vocation.

“He was really the one that convinced me this is what I wanted to do with my life: spend it teaching kids in the Jesuit tradition. He was doing exactly what I wanted to do.”

After completing the novitiate and taking first vows, David moved on to the Jesuit First Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago, where, because of the many classes he’d taken prior to entering the Society, he was able to continue teaching at St. Ignatius while working on a further philosophy degree with Fr. Leo Sweeney, SJ, a now deceased Loyola University philosophy professor.

David completed the First Studies Program in two years and then began a four-year regency teaching undergraduate philosophy, Latin, and Greek at Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH. “I didn’t want to go at first,” he says, “but after a semester I was hooked. I loved it. The ability to engage students more earnestly in terms of their life choices appealed to me. Everyone has to go to high school, but once people get to college you can start to ask them more serious questions. ‘Why are you here? Who are you gonna marry? Why? When?’”

Joe Mordente, a theology teacher and track coach at Montini Catholic High School in Lombard, IL, met David at Marquette. They became close friends and Joe, who says he was “overjoyed” when he learned that David had decided to become a priest, later visited Xavier University while David was completing his regency. He says that while teaching a full load of philosophy courses, David had also helped organize weekly mass and confession because he wanted to set the students “hearts on fire with the Catholic faith.” Joe goes on to say that during his visit “there must have been 60 kids who attended Holy Mass at 9:00 P.M. on a Thursday night and a dozen or more who went to confession. Everywhere we walked on campus that weekend students would either hail Dave from afar or come running over to say hello, wanting to be in his company even for a moment. How they loved him. It was like seeing a modern day re-enactment of John 10: 1–21. I thought, ‘he is to them—in a certain sense—their ‘good shepherd’.”

During his regency, David connected with Fr. Richard Tomasek, SJ, director of spiritual formation of the seminarians in the theology school of the Pontifical College Josephinium in Columbus, OH, who became his spiritual director. Fr. Tomasek says David is “bright, and funny, committed to the faith, and committed to the Society of Jesus.” But the reason he’ll make a “great priest,” according to Fr. Tomasek is “because he can meet people both in their strengths and joys and in their weaknesses and sorrows, and also because he loves the Lord and is zealous to help people know and follow the Lord. It helps that he is a great teacher and preacher besides.”

During summer 2000, David traveled to Berlin, where he studied German for “28 hours a day.” He was preparing for theology studies, which he was slated to begin in the fall at Jesuitenkolleg, a Jesuit theology school in Innsbruck Austria. In three years in Innsbruck, David completed an S.T.L., the licentiate in sacred theology, and also published a number of scholarly articles.

The experience in Innsbruck was profound. David says he was blessed to be part of an extremely prayerful community. “We had daily Mass, and daily prayer. Every couple months we did a weekend of silence. It was a real highlight for me to live with guys from Romania, Hungary, and Poland, guys who know what it’s like to be beaten up for the faith.”

“Since arriving in Innsbruck,” he says, “I’ve been explicitly praying for benefactors. Being there was such a great opportunity. I’ve only grown in my gratitude. In adolescence you very often don’t know where food comes from. You just expect it to be there. As you get older, you learn to appreciate where things come from. Benefactors and supporters have become more and more important as time has passed and I’ve become more attentive and thankful.”

During fall 2002, David’s mom Phyllis, his sister Anne, and his brother Mark, traveled to Innsbruck for his ordination to the deaconate. Anne says she was struck by the genuine kindness of David’s Jesuit brothers in Austria. “Everyone was so friendly and welcoming. The Jesuits are a great bunch of people.” His mother echoes the same sentiments.

“The Jesuits seem to be the finest people; so dedicated, so holy, so happy to serve. I can’t think of any better place for Dave.” David will spend this summer serving at St. Xavier Parish in Cincinnati, OH, before once again heading overseas, this time to Oxford, England, where he’ll pursue a Ph.D. in theology. His specialty is the fourth century and he’s already working on a book about an obscure form of Christian poetry. “We’re so proud of him,” his mother says.

David, for his part, is excited about his ordination. Throughout formation, he says, the greatest grace has been “the ability to serve others. To be known and identified as a Jesuit opens doors in other people’s lives. It’s a privilege. People ask for prayers and spiritual direction. They ask you to help them see God. There’s not much better than that.” Since his ordination to the deaconate in October, he’s done a few baptisms. “I’ve gotten a taste of what it’s like, people asking you to assist in what’s probably the most important event up to that point in their lives and I hope the priesthood will be a continuation of those experiences and even more significant experiences.

"'You see, a good burp is to the rumbling stomach what praise is to the satisfied heart!' St. Augustine’s comparison here (Sermon 255) captures not only the “earthiness” of late antiquity but a timeless truth as well: When we take care to notice how God has filled our days with his goodness, we will do nothing other than praise and thank him. For all earthly beings are invitations to divine friendship and when I look at my life, I am astounded to see how God has blessed me with his fidelity, with so many incredibly beautiful friends, and with a Jesuit vocation which allows me to serve the Lord and his family in so many ways. Priestly ordination is a time to look at one’s life, and I can’t help but smile and thank Jesus Christ for deigning to need us and to rely on us to bring him to others."

Here is a link to an article he wrote, "John Paul II and the Femininity of Holiness".

Here is another, "A Christian View of History".

The Fool for Christ

For this great feast, one of my favorite writers on one of my favorite saints. From Thomas Merton's No Man Is an Island:

These thoughts on vocation are evidently incomplete. But there is one gap that needs to be filled in order to avoid confusion. We have spoken of the active and contemplative lives without, so far, referring to the vocation which St. Thomas rates higher than any other: the apostolic life in which the fruits of contemplation are shared with others.

Instead of speaking of this vocation in theory, let us look rather at its perfect embodiment in one of its greatest saints: Francis of Assisi. The stigmatization of St. Francis was a divine sign of the fact that he was, of all saints, the most Christ-like. He had succeeded better than any other in the work of reproducing in his life the simplicity and poverty and the love of God and of men which marked the life of Jesus. More than that, he was an Apostle who incarnated the whole spirit and message of the Gospels most perfectly. Merely to know St. Francis is to understand the Gospel, and to follow him in his true, integral spirit, is to live the Gospel in all its fullness. The genius of his sanctity made him able to communicate to the world the teachings of Christ not in this or that aspect, not in fragments expanded by thought and analysis, but in all the wholeness of its existential simplicity. St. Francis was, as all saints must try to be, simply "another Christ."

His life did not merely reproduce this or that mystery of the life of Christ. He did not merely live the humble virtues of the divine infancy and of the hidden life at Nazareth. He was not merely tempted with Christ in the desert or weary with Him in the travels of His apostolate. He did not only work miracles like Jesus. He was not only crucified with Him. All these mysteries are united in the life of Francis, and we find them all in him, now singly and now together. The risen Christ lived again perfectly in this saint who was completely possessed and transformed by the Spirit of divine charity.

St. Thomas's phrase contemplata aliis tradere (to share with others the fruits of contemplation) is not properly understood unless we have in mind the image of a St. Francis walking the roads of medieval Italy, overflowing with the joy of a message that could only be communicated to him directly by the Spirit of God. The wisdom and salvation preached by Francis were not only the overflow of the highest kind of contemplative life, but they were quite simply the expression of the fullness of the Christian Spirit--that is to say of the Holy Spirit of God.

No man can be an apostle of Christ unless he is filled with the Holy Ghost. And no man can be filled with the Holy Ghost unless he does what is normally expected of a man who follows Christ to the limit. He must leave all things, in order to recover them all in Him.

The remarkable thing about St. Francis is that in his sacrifice of everything he also sacrificed all the "vocations" in a limited sense of the word. After having been edified for centuries by all the various branches of the Franciscan religious family, we are surprised to think that St. Francis started out on the roads of Umbria without the slightest idea that he had a "Franciscan vocation." And in fact he did not. He had thrown all vocations to the winds together with his clothes and other possessions. He did not think of himself as an apostle, but as a tramp. He certainly did not look upon himself as a monk: if he had wanted to be a monk, he would have found plenty of monasteries to enter. He evidently did not go around conscious of the fact that he was a "contemplative." Nor was he worried by comparisons between the active and contemplative lives. Yet he led both at the same time, and with the highest perfection. No good work was alien to him--no work of mercy, whether corporate or spiritual, that did not have a place in his beautiful life! His freedom embraced everything.

Francis could have been ordained priest. He refused out of humility (for that too would have been a "vocation" and he was beyond vocations). Yet he had in fact the perfection and quintessence of the apostolic spirit of sacrifice and charity which are necessary in the life of every priest. It takes a moment of reflection to reconcile oneself to the thought that St. Francis never said Mass--a fact which is hardly believable to one who is penetrated with his spirit.

If there was any recognized vocation in his time that Francis night have associated with his own life, it was the vocation of the hermit. The hermits were the only members of any set of religious persons that he consistently imitated. He frequently went off into the mountains to pray and live alone. But he never thought that he had a "vocation" to do anything but that. He stayed alone as long as the Spirit held him in solitude, and then let himself be led back into the towns and villages by the same Spirit.

If he had a thought about it, he might have recognized that his vocation was essentially "prophetic." He was like another Elias or Eliseus, taught by the Spirit in solitude, but brought by God to the cities of men with a message to tell them.

All the many facets of the vocation of a St. Francis show us that we are beyond the level of ordinary "states of life." But it is for that very reason that, whenever we speak of the "mixed life" or the "Apostolic vocation" we would do well to think of it in terms of a Francis or of an Elias. The "mixed life" is too easily reduced to its lowest common denominator, and at that level it is nothing more than a form of the active life. As such, it suffers by comparison with the contemplative life. Why? Because the dignity of the apostolic life, in the teaching of St. Thomas, flows not from the element of action that is in it but from the element of contemplation. A life of preaching without contemplation is nothing but an "active life," and though it may be very holy and meritorious, it cannot lay claim to the dignity ascribed by St. Thomas to the life which "shares with others the fruits of contemplation."

But in proportion as the mendicant friar approaches the ideal of his founder, in proportion as he lives the poverty and charity of Francis or Dominic, and plunges into the loving knowledge of God which is granted only to little ones, in proportion as he abandons himself to the Holy Spirit, he will far outstrip the contemplative perfection of those whose contemplation is given them for themselves alone.

More on St. Francis (i.e. an insanely long selection from one of Matthew Fish's papers)

And did you know that, in the revolution he brought to Europe, St. Francis unknowingly becomes the watershed in the history of Western thought? The thesis is Louis Dupre's, defended quite convincingly in his magisterial Passage to Modernity, and a thesis I borrowed for a paper I once wrote where I tried to make sense of the Greeks, Scotus & Ockham, "pure nature," Gaudium et Spes, and John Paul II's Christological revolution. (I know, it sounds a bit daring, if not obscure.) Here is a "selection" from my paper:

The Christian understanding of form, synthetically articulated within the inheritance of Greek philosophy, although within this cultural form faithful to its Jewish inheritance, particularly in its insistence on the absolute transcendence of God, reached a crisis in the Medieval age. As Dupré summarizes:

How could a cosmic symbolism prefigured in and centered around one individual—the Christ—conform to the universal Greek idea of form? Moreover, if God had definitively revealed himself in the ‘man of sorrows,’ how could one continue to regard the splendor of the universe as the image of a God who had appeared ‘in the form of a slave’?[1]

Even more, as Cardinal Francis George has maintained, is the claim provocative: “in Jesus Christ, God has become a creature, without ceasing to be God and without compromising the integrity of the creature he becomes.”[2] The implications of this claim had by no means been fully plumbed by the thirteenth century: despite the clear centrality of the Logos to the Christian cosmos, this was often inconsistently applied, insofar as cultural forms, particular instantiations of justice and freedom, were carelessly extended. Furthermore, Scholasticism itself began as a product of the general fleeing of Christians from the terrors of a world falling apart at the end of the Roman empire: the product of the mass conservation of European monasticism was no doubt the creation of a unique cultural synthesis, but with a major flaw: unlike the kerygmatic approach of the Church Fathers, the Scholastics created a theology first for the school, commenting on texts for other scholastics. A deeper systematic reflection was perhaps inevitable, and this is not to say it did not bring a wealth of insights to the Church; nonetheless, theology tended to begin and remain at the level of abstraction.

Two things in particular brought about the crisis from which modernity would begin to crawl: the introduction of Aristotle and the consequent debate on the relation between faith and reason, and the sudden appearance of St. Francis of Assisi. The introduction of Aristotle, and the threat of Muslim philosophy and the position of “two truths” threatened to fracture the synthesis the Fathers had achieved; thanks to the genius of saints like St. Thomas, reason and revelation, for a while at least, were shown to be ordered to the same object of truth, and harmonious. Sadly, most were not convinced. This was due to both a desire to remain faithful to the Augustinian subordination of reason to faith, and the revolution that St. Francis had epitomized. He was preceded by a more general cultural movement, a Christian naturalism that began at the end of the eleventh century, “when a fresh awareness of the Incarnation as a cosmically transforming event suddenly dawned upon the entire civilization and spawned a new trust in nature.”[3] As Dupré laconically notes, in the wake of this movement, St. Francis “upset an intellectual tradition which he hardly understood and which he certainly had no intention of challenging.”[4] This change was the radical devotion to Jesus the human individual: simply put, this “new, more concrete vision of the Incarnation raised the significance of the individual. It contrasted with the primacy of the universal that had ruled earlier thought.”[5]

For the Greeks, the universal was all-important, and the central influence, through the idea of form, in all of culture. Aristotle resisted the Platonic trend toward an ultimate universalizing of all reality; he put the singular as substance at the center of the cosmos. Nonetheless, knowledge was only of universals, and thus the singular became merely the state of what is the case, not the object of wisdom.

If the Image of all images is an individual, then the primary significance of individual form no longer consists in disclosing a universal reality beyond itself. Indeed, the universal itself ultimately refers to the singular. It would take thinkers, mostly Franciscans, over a century to draw the philosophical and theological conclusions inherent in Francis’s mystical vision. But in the end, the religious revolution begun in the twelfth century succeeded in overthrowing the ontological priority of the universal.[6]

Inasmuch as St. Thomas became the highpoint of Scholasticism, even his grand synthesis of syntheses, as Balthasar points out, in the light of this latter revolution, becomes transitional:

In Thomas’s Summa the particulars—that is, concrete events—were not allowed to stand as the chief object of theology. In his thought, they rather represent examples of God’s eternal, supratemporal wisdom vouchsafed by God only because of our temporality. And sacred doctrine has for its primary focus this wisdom. That is why Aquinas was so interested in the general, suprahistorical essence (quidditas) of things, while the historical and actualist dimensions must step back. And so he focused on the lasting structure of the universe, in contrast to which the temporal nature of salvation history as standard-setting singularia recedes into the background.[7]

Admittedly, several of the claims in this statement of Balthasar’s would be contested today, particularly in light of the contemporary revisionist schools of Thomism. Nonetheless, the tension was certainly perceived in St. Thomas’s time, just as it was in Balthasar’s, even if the details are debatable. Only in the “Christian positivism” that St. Francis re-discovered, the fundamental datum of the Incarnate singular, “the peculiarity of the Christian scandal becomes visible.”[8] And, as Dawson has shown, it is a fact that the in cultural explosion associated with St. Francis the protagonists really believed they were in the work of a re-discovery. Indeed, as Cardinal Ratzinger emphasizes, the classical perspective focused on the eternal, “which as the entirely ‘Other’ would remain completely outside the human world and time; on the contrary, [Christian belief] is much more concerned with God in history, with God as man.”[9] What is exceptional in Medieval theology is not so much St. Thomas; rather, in this light he was judged more in continuity with the classical Augustinian neo-Platonic heritage. (Which, interestingly enough, is the current dominant trend in Thomistic studies, or as Romanus Cessario, OP has put it, “reading Aquinas as if he were Bonaventure.”[10]) In fact, he was largely forgotten, as to many of his authentic positions, until the twentieth century. On the contrary, the new and decisive—which is not to say helpful—thinker that emerges is the Franciscan John Duns Scotus, “who developed the primacy of the individual into a wholly new philosophy.”[11] It will come as no surprise to any reader of contemporary theological literature that Scotus and William of Ockham remain the perpetual bogeymen.

A very important distinction must be made here, one which unfortunately was lost among most of the followers of the Thomistic, Franciscan, and Jesuit schools in Neo-Scholasticism, and neglected by most chroniclers of the nominalist revolution. What was decisively new in this historical re-discovery of the absolute singular, Jesus Christ—for the purposes of theology and culture—was ignored in these later traditions, and Catholic theology more and more flew down the slope of anachronism, despite occasional rebirths and resurgences, until the ressourcement of twentieth century theology. Scotus was not the first scholastic to bring the singularity of Jesus Christ into his system qua singularity—no doubt the credit here must go to St. Bonaventure. However, in Scotus philosophical decomposition immediately created the situation from which nearly all Catholic theology came to be seen, until the twentieth century.[12] Furthermore, these errors slowly created the logos or rationality that we call modernity: a culture, as we have stated, “hostile to both the flourishing of virtue and the reception of grace,” and ultimately, hostile to the evangelization and transformation of the world, to the mission of Jesus Christ.

What Scotus lost in his turn to the individual was in fact the proper understanding of the universal, of form. Instead of trying to integrate the discovery of the absolute unique event of Jesus Christ with the metaphysics of St. Thomas—founded on the transcendent being of God who is pure act, to-be itself, in and through whom all creation participates by means of the real distinction of essence and created esse—he reverted to the more primitive Greek onto-theology, wherein God and man are contained under a common genus: being—and subsequently losing the original Christian distinction. Where for St. Thomas, God is sheer to-be subsisting itself, “non-competitively transcendent to the realm of finite things and therefore totally immanent to all things as a cause of their being,” in Scotus, the individual itself becomes a form, and singularity adds a formal characteristic to genus and species. Individuality now becomes “the supreme form, and perfect knowledge consists in knowing this individual form.”[13] The primacy of the universal suddenly came to an end in Scotus’s contagious logic, and “the decisive Neo-platonic hold on Western thought was broken.”[14] With this, arguably the greatest insight of St. Thomas, participation in esse, was lost. As Cardinal George has argued, modernity was created by “a breakdown of classically Christian participation metaphysics and the consequent emergence of a secular arena at best only incidentally related to God.”[15] The inevitable consequence in Scotus’s metaphysics is the univocal predication of God and man as beings:

Though it was perhaps his intention to draw the world and God into closer connection, this epistemological and ontological shift actually had the opposite effect. In maintaining that God and the world can be described with a univocal concept of being, Scotus implied that the divine and the non-divine are both instances of some greater and commonly shared power of existence. But in so doing, he radically separated God from the world, rendering the former a supreme being (however infinite) and the latter a collectivity of beings. In opting for the univocity of the idea of existence, Scotus set God and world alongside of each other, thereby separating “nature” and “grace” far more definitively than Aquinas or Augustine ever had and effectively undermining a metaphysics of creation and participation. God is no longer that generous power in which all things exist but rather that supreme being next to whom or apart from whom all things exist.[16]

The consequences of Scotus’s innovations were left to the truly revolutionary fourteenth century theologian William of Ockham. It is here that the logos of modernity is laid out in all its principles, only to be followed through by the thinkers of modern philosophy, who despite their differences still remain within the essential lines of the modern-nominalist spirit. With Ockham’s criticism of the intelligible species, and the separation between intuitive knowledge and the object known, knowledge becomes now, both entirely dependent on God to produce—nature is no longer always potentially intelligible—and the human mind to reflexively cognize; as the nominalist Nicholas d’Autrecourt classically stated, “nothing that is known is known with a certitude of its existence, except knowledge itself.”[17] Reality can no longer be trusted, and “when evidence loses it ultimate trustworthiness as a criterion of truth, then truth needs a foundation beyond itself.”[18] The path here to the cogito is very short one indeed:

Seeking a foundation for the order of cognition, Descartes has redefined the ultimate ontological principles in the function of the epistemic order. The foundation both of the mind and of the world is conceived in accordance with the conditions and needs of knowledge…. While Greek philosophy of the classical age had defined being in terms of form and its dependence primarily (though never exclusively) in terms of participation, modern thought conceived of nature as a causal interaction of forces and of transcendence as a supremely powerful divine will which created and ruled all things by means of efficient causality.[19]

God being relegated to an extrinsic influence, who no longer effects the cosmos formally, is left ghostly absent; where classically the cosmos had an interiority that always pointed to its participation in the Word, now nature was a neutral sphere, in fact a canvas for the mind to impose meaning upon, that the mind must inform since reality has now become void of intelligibility, and therefore any higher ordering or purpose. All meaning and purpose has been exclusively reserved to the inscrutable divine will.

The human mind assumed the part which earlier generations had attributed to God or to nature. When theology ceased to guarantee that meaning and value would be given to the world, it fell upon the mind to define or invent them. Such a move inevitably resulted in a separation between a meaning-giving mental subject and a physically given but meaning-dependent world. This was the option actually chosen by philosophy and science.[20]

If the self is now the source of all intelligibility, reconstructing nature according to the ideal categories of the mind, by doing so the self has “lost its own substantial content to the all-absorbing cognitive and volitive functions it exercised.”[21] This was an incredible weight to bear, infusing intelligibility into the canvas of nature, most notably the idea of transcendence. “Man’s mission to be creative was misunderstood as a charge to accomplish everything himself.”[22] This no doubt became the hardest task, accomplishing transcendence, and man soon found it easier to simply ignore or doubt it rather than ground it in the power of the mind. Being itself becomes the emptiest of concepts, divorced from transcendence.

Concomitant with this new objectivity was the emphasis placed upon the will by Scotus and Ockham. No doubt, Ockham sought to found his philosophy explicitly in what he saw as distinctive in Revelation, in the particular Franciscan interpretation of his time: “at the center we find the divine creator; his freely chosen, loving attention to every creature is emphasized,” but at the cost of any intrinsic continuity or deeper purpose consonant with the cosmos.[23] For the Fathers and Scholastics in the Augustinian tradition, freedom was always a freedom for the good: it itself was a faculty distinctly formed in the image of the Divine, in its capacity to love the good, which was always seen as a participation in the freedom and love of God. In short, created freedom was determined and limited by its object, and in its orientation by the radically prior movement of God as the most interior of causes. Scotus sought to further ground the higher necessity and sufficiency of the divine initiative in presenting all of the cosmos as “implied in the effect of a single divine decision made in the beginning, thus dispensing God from ever having to react to creaturely actions.”[24] While the Thomistic view of the Incarnation as a response to the sinfulness of man seemed to open a possibility for potency in the Divine to its critics, Scotus’s solution in fact renders God all the more distant, if indeed protecting his freedom from necessity.

Ockham circumvented the problem in the distinction between God’s absolute power and his ordained power. While traditionally, God’s actions in creation, the world order, were seen as fitting expressions of Divine goodness, in Ockham this became merely arbitrary. In St. Thomas, God was just as immanently active as the principal cause in the universe of secondary causes, which allowed them to remain true causes (and not mirages á la Malebranche) and yet always instrumentally dependent on the principal cause always present in operation. In nominalism, this became two successive moments of reality: following the logic that what can be separated logically may exist in reality as separate, they held that

at a first time God possesses absolute power which he at a second time entrusts to secondary causes. The idea of an independent order of secondary causes which thereby originates gradually led to a conception of nature as fully equipped to act without divine assistance.[25]

Where before, God’s goodness and beauty were central to culture though created form, now it is God’s inscrutable will that protects him from any real relation with man, and guarantees that culture too will have to be protected from man’s impingement upon Divine freedom. We cannot postulate any reason behind God’s actions: the order of the cosmos “depends at each moment on God’s resolution to abide by it,” not on the express correspondence between God’s freedom and his goodness.[26] As Dupré has pointed out, this move had momentous consequences: everything that the classical Greek view saw as part of the order of the cosmos, of form, in the pregnant intelligibility of nature informed by the Word, now became simply arbitrary, simply devoid of meaning. Nature depended in no way upon transcendence, beyond the simple voluntarist decision of the lawgiver.[27] Freedom became open-ended self-determination, and nature was no longer looked to for evoking the purpose and design of life; “and rather than perfecting nature in accordance with nature’s internal teleology, the person now submits it to exclusive human purposes.” As to culture, it is no longer “cultivating what nature gives freely [but] yoking it forcefully to human wants.”[28] Wherefore the central obligation of modernity is discovered: “to order the world without God,” because all God provides is the simple establishment of the fact of the world, no more.[29] In a few steps modernity will arrive at Marx: nature is first and foremost something to be produced, in the future; the self is simply the subject of its own activity, and thus verum est quia faciendum.[30]

It does not take much imagination to speculate how this affected theology and Christian culture. However, as logically as the next step may have followed from the premises of the nominalist innovations, the evolution was just as surreptitious: the separation of the relationship between nature and grace. The classical position had been, man’s nature is all the greater precisely because it demands a higher mover to bring it to fulfillment.[31] The position of St. Thomas on this point is clear: man has one ultimate end, the vision of God, which specifies human nature toward its end, that man has a natural desire for supernatural beatitude, an end that he cannot each by his own power, but must be given to him as grace. Reflecting the wider context of the Greek Fathers, the cosmos, centered in man, can be said to have a natural capacity for the Divine, for transformation;[32] indeed this was nothing else than the theological systemization of the Biblical outlook epitomized in St. Paul’s Letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians. In the speculative atmosphere of Scholasticism, the question was posed, which never occurred to the Fathers to ask: “Can man have a purely natural end?” This question began in realm of abstraction, and was not intended to alter the perception of what is in fact the case; clearly the question was posed simply to protect the gratuity of the supernatural order, to preserve the distinction that the Fathers held to so dearly. This inheritance was never seamless: Scholastic theologians recognized the tensions between the Eastern approach of deification, and the Western model given by Augustine—that the fall had wounded nature and nature had to be healed and elevated. Although the Eastern approach persevered especially through monastic spirituality, and the influence of Dionysius on the West, Augustine’s stridency against Pelagianism rightly gave a primacy to man’s need for grace, although not without inherent tensions in this reactionary theology.[33]

The influence of nominalism exploded all over Europe in the Reformation. Luther saw the difficulties in the abstract consideration of nature, and the latent Pelagianism in nominalism. He attempted a reunion of nature and grace through his reading of Galatians and Romans, in the corruption of nature and its inability to procure anything good, and nearly collapsed the problem in his concentration upon the event of Jesus Christ’s satisfaction for our sins, and its pro me character. But his tendency to conceive justification as a forensic imputation, with his inconsistent dialectical rhetoric, only resulted in passing over the deeper chasm.[34] Nonetheless Luther and reformed theology set the tone for the neo-Scholastic debates. The abstraction of pure nature, consistent with the nominalist divorce between the cosmos and Divine transcendence and immanence, was transposed onto the canvas that nominalism had left, of the bare fact. It is well known that Cajetan and Suarez in their reaction to reformed theology and possessing a reading of St. Thomas more in line with Scotist emphases, posited grace as an order added over and above the prior order of nature, resulting in a now two-tiered cosmos, with two distinct orders, the natural and supernatural, juxtaposed to each other; among others, they laid the neo-Scholastic foundation that was to perdure until the twentieth century. Of course, the nominalist revolution had rendered St. Thomas’s authentic positions obscure, in the light of his being read through the Scholastic tradition of commentary and dialectic, now of course determined by nominalist categories.

The teaching on the two orders, the natural and supernatural, represents an innovation when compared to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. This system, which is loosely called the two-storey system, combined more or less extrinsically the natural order in a form that corresponded to the modern sense of life, with the freely given grace that is essential to the Christian message. It was content to note that the two orders did not contradict each other….[35]

Thus the Church and the world, respectively, were held responsible for the two separated orders, with the state in particular assuming responsibility for the saeculum. In his own life man shared in this disjunction, his attention divided interiorly to the concerns of his soul to which the Church spoke, and on the other hand the concerns of his body and his city, to which the state responded. Grace affected man in his interior life, but was still-born when it came to building a just world and a beautiful culture.[36]

The great attack of Jansenism, which itself was an attempt to return to the purity of the Augustinian vision of salvation history, proved the limitations of this two-tiered construction. Either the supernatural was so exalted so as to render nature unintelligible, corrupt, and useless, or nature was defended to such an extent that what was distinctively new and unique in Revelation was lost.[37] It was the great merit of the Jesuit Cardinal Henri de Lubac to have shown that this development was anything but faithful to St. Thomas’s position.[38] Schindler summarizes what de Lubac in fact recovered:

Grace orders nature from the beginning of nature’s existence and from the deepest depths of nature; grace is nonetheless not a requirement or implication of nature, but is rather an utterly gratuitous gift which calls nature radically, indeed infinitely, beyond itself. God calls and thus orders man from the depths of his being to God; and God is thereby more deeply related, more interior to man than man is to himself. At the same time, the God who so orders is infinite and thus one in relation to whom man as a finite being can exact no claim whatsoever.[39]

It is not our intent here to debate the merits and implications of de Lubac’s landmark studies. The devolution of the Scholastic synthesis into natural theology, a rationalist apologetics, a deontological ethics, and an appended spiritual theology, in this regard is well known. It was not until the neo-Thomist renaissance—begun in the mid-nineteenth century, and especially propelled by Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris, which brought about the renewal of actually reading the texts of St. Thomas and using them as a touchstone for all branches of theology—was a new appreciation of the problem made possible. Only then did the complex phenomenon of the twentieth century ressourcement lead to the rediscovery of the classical synthesis of nature and grace; only then were the weaknesses of the modern bifurcation wholly grasped. In the desire to read St. Thomas within the tradition, concomitant with the newly given attention to the Fathers and Biblical studies, the original tensions were located, allowing a yet untried approach to the dilemma of Christianity and culture, now re-conceived under the problematic of the Church and the modern world.

This new approach was anticipated by an inheritance of Papal teaching, beginning with Pope Leo XIII, perhaps best summed up in Pope Pius X’s “restoration of all things in Christ.”[40] However, it tended to relegate the crisis to the political realm, where the Church held her traditional stance of teaching and admonishing, “that the law of Christ ought to prevail in human society and be the guide and teacher of public as well as private life.”[41] Yet we can see the vestigial ambivalence of earlier controversies when for example Pope Leo XIII states that the end of society is the obtaining of “natural good…though always in harmony with the perfect and eternal good which is above nature.”[42] Yet this is offset by statements such as: “Society in its foolhardy attempt to escape from God has rejected the divine order and revelation…. This sacrilegious divorce has resulted in bringing about the trouble which now disturbs the world.”[43] The evils of the incipient culture of death were always seen for what they were: the exclusion of God and the Church from the world. Without a doubt, the Church in general always retained the desire “to lead back mankind under the dominion of Christ,” but such prohibitions as “Nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum est” did not encourage a deeper diagnosis.[44] Nonetheless the materialism, hedonism, and injustice of modern society was subject to a thoroughgoing critique in the Social teaching of these Popes, particularly under Pius XI and Pius XII. We can see a clear anticipation of the re-discovery by Pius XII in his inaugural encyclical Summi Pontificatus, speaking of the economic evils of modern culture:

Their root is deeper and more intrinsic, belonging to the sphere of religious belief and moral convictions which have been perverted by the progressive alienation of the peoples from that unity of doctrine, faith, customs and morals which once was promoted by the tireless and beneficent work of the Church. If it is to have any effect, the reeducation of mankind must be, above all things, spiritual and religious. Hence, it must proceed from Christ as from its indispensable foundation; must be actuated by justice and crowned by charity.[45]

Such insights unfortunately were seen by most to be rhetorical flourish, particularly since the Roman Curia and many influential religious superiors were, by and large, entirely antagonistic to any perceived threat to the neo-scholastic hegemony.[46] What was hoped for, if anything, was a wholesale return to traditional theology, and a further fortification against a secularized culture. The lesson here, which becomes paramount for Vatican II, is that there has never been a “golden-age” in theology: all the more, the High Middle Ages cannot be returned to, nor would this be desirable. No doubt in many ways St. Thomas—whom by and large the old guard wanted to raise to the level of infallibility—remains foundational, particularly in his metaphysics, faithful to the classical synthesis of transcendence and nature. If we proceed to critique the devastating foundations of modernity in nominalism, this is not done in order to argue for an anachronistic return, as if the errors of modernity were unable to uncover any truths of their own. Even more, the fundamental modern inspiration remains the same one for us today: “the search for an adequate conception of transcendence.”[47] In theology as well as logic: abusus non tollit usum. Modernity, fundamentally, is a wrong response to a valid problem. Consequent is the question of culture: how to inculturate the form of Christ, how to transform the whole nexus of human life within the deeper destiny of the cosmos. This is the real issue:

To pursue theology in the incomparable uniqueness of a theological scientia de singularibus or…of the concretissimum, where we get beyond the contrast of the mere historical fact and purely transhistorical doctrine; where, in other words, the essence of event as well as doctrine is embedded in the person and activity of Jesus Christ. Perhaps this was the theological point that historical nominalism meant to drive home. But, because it confined itself to the philosophical level and did battle only there, it failed. And the worst consequence of that failure was…Martin Luther. Today our task must not be to trace back once more the path that led to that mistake. Rather we must hold fast in philosophy to the justification of ontological and normative inquiry, keeping it alongside a philosophy of existence and history, so that we might maintain the foundation and full conceptual panoply [of philosophy] for explicating the theological datum.[48]

The fundamental theological datum, the unique singular revelation of Jesus Christ, that had in fact initiated the Medieval crisis, was the nucleus that effected the incredible event of Vatican II. This (again) rediscovered datum became the atom-bomb that immediately threatened to devastate the secular realm, once and for all, in a new evangelization.

All attempts to regain the lost unity made at the dawn of the modern age failed. Meanwhile Christians have learned to live with the separation. As their world has grown more and more ‘secular’, their faith has come to depend with increasing exclusivity on revelation separated from, if not opposed to, ‘nature’.[49]

Yet in the pontificate of John XXIII, an entirely new attitude emerges: the change that this brief pontificate effected is well known. Secularization, the positioning of the Church as irrelevant and the consequent excising of Christianity from culture, was the direct result of the opposition between nature and grace, wedged deep within the structure of neo-Scholastic theology. Pope John encouraged theologians to reconsider these issues, particularly in his lifting of the restrictions that had been placed on many of them. Inasmuch as ressourcement theology argued that all things in nature, in the cosmos, have been created through and in Christ as the image of the invisible God, they prepared the way for the decisive formulation of Vatican II.[50] Pope John himself clearly stated at the opening of the Council that the Church, “by vivifying the temporal order with the light of Christ, reveals men to themselves….”[51] Twenty-five years earlier de Lubac had amazingly anticipated this in his masterpiece, Catholicisme, when he wrote: “By revealing the Father and by being revealed by him, Christ completes the revelation of man to himself.”[52]

Thus, for a few, the road back had become clear. The recovery could not come through a simple return to the classical outlook, but through a new attempt of synthesis, centered resolutely on the distinctively modern insight (which ironically is nothing other than the same Biblical insight so architectonic to the Fathers), the rediscovery of the Christian scandal: “Jesus has really made God known, drawn him out of himself…made him manifest for us to look upon and touch, so that he whom no one has ever seen now stands open to our historical touch.”[53] In respect to this scandal—whether the destiny and meaning of whole cosmos could depend on something so contingent, so historical, so unexpectedly unique—only in this pitch can the response be found, if indeed the Incarnation “opened up vistas closed to human reason.”[54]

The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him who was to come, namely, Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear.[55]

[1] Dupre, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University, 1993), 31
[2] Francis Cardinal George, “Catholic Christianity and the Millennium: Frontiers of the Mind in the 21st Century”, unpublished lecture given to the Library of Congress, June 16th, 1999, 1.
[3]Dupré, Passage, 33.
[4] Ibid., 38.
[5] Ibid., 37.
[6] Ibid., 38.
[7] Hans Urs Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 264.
[8] Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 54.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Cited in Rowland, 6: Romanus Cessario, “Virtue Theory and the Present Evolution of Thomism”, The Future of Thomism, ed. D. Hudson and W. Moran (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 297.
[11] Dupré, Passage, 38.
[12] Cf. Catharine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
[13] Dupré, Passage, 39.
[14] Ibid.
[15] George, 5.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Cited in Dupré, Passage, 81.
[18] Ibid., 82.
[19] Ibid., 88.
[20] Ibid., 58.
[21] Ibid., 113.
[22] Peter Henrici, “Modernity and Christianity”, Communio, v. 17 Summer 1990, 141-51, at 149.
[23] Ibid., 148.
[24] Dupré, Passage, 123.
[25] Dupré, “Introduction” to Henri de Lubac, Augustinianism and Modern Theology (New York: Crossroad, 2000), xii.
[26] Dupré, Passage, 123.
[27] Ibid., 127.
[28] Ibid., 113.
[29] Schindler, “Introduction: Grace and the Form of Nature and Culture”, Catholicism and Secularization in America: Essays on Nature, Grace, and Culture, ed. David L. Schindler (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1990), 12.
[30] Dupré, Passage, 119. Cf. Ratzinger, to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 63.
[31] ST I-II 5.5.ad.2
[32] ST I-II 109.3
[33] Dupré, Passage, 169.
[34] Cf. Ibid., 206-208.
[35] Walter Kasper, “Nature, Grace, and Culture: On the Meaning of Secularization”, Catholicism and Secularization in America, 41.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Dupré, Passage, 170
[38] Dupré, “Introduction”, ix.
[39] Schindler, “Introduction”, 10.
[40] Pius X, E Supremi, 4.
[41] Leo XIII, Tametsi futura, 8.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Leo XIII, Annum Ingressi Sumus, 20.
[44] Pius X, E Supremi, 8; Benedict XV, Ad Beatissimi, 25.
[45] Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, 83, emphasis my own.
[46] Cf. Aidan Nichols, “Thomism and the Nouvelle Théologie”, The Thomist, vol.64, n.1, 1-20.
[47] Dupré, Passage, 253.
[48] Balthasar, Karl Barth, 266.
[49] Dupré, “Nature and Grace”, Catholicism and Secularization, 67. Indeed, and furthermore, separated from if not opposed to reason.
[50] Kasper, 42.
[51] John XXIII, Humanae Salutis, 10.
[52] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 339.
[53] Ratzinger, Introduction, 55.
[54] GS 24.
[55] GS 22.