Christianity and Politics, by Rev. James V. Schall, S.J., St.Paul Editions, 342
Of all my undergraduate classroom experiences, none is so memorable as my introduction to what was to become my major, philosophy. As a freshman at Notre Dame, I noticed with a little dismay that some faceless bureaucrat in the registrarâs office had inserted, mistakenly I thought, Philosophy 101 on my course schedule, something I had definitely not chosen. Until the botch could be straightened out, I decided I had better attend, and thus found myself in an auditorium with about 300 other, equally perplexed, freshmen. Philosophyâwe had never had it beforeâsome had never even heard of it, and the very name sounded mysterious. It had to do with Greeks, someone ventured; another thought it was a bit like religion.
After a time, the professor of the courseâalso the department chairmanâcame into the hall and announced that no, it was not a mistake and that Philosophy 101 was in fact a requirement for all Notre Dame students. Philosophy, he explained simply, was the pursuit of wisdom, which sounded to us, scribbling away, perfectly sensible, but he then said that it was something more, that it was also above mere knowledge, at which point he lost most of us. Our first assignment was to read The Last Days of Socrates, a collection of four dialogues by Plato concerning the trial and execution of Socrates. By then, I was sure that I would flunk out of school in disgrace.
Such is the academic void which James V. Schall confronts in his latest book, Christianity and Politics. Sadly, today not only do most students start out this ignorant in college, many unfortunately have their ignorance reinforced over the next four years. The idea that the ancients had anything terribly important to say is considered shocking; that they were even capable of saying something important is considered impossible.
In this book, Father Schall reiterates the classic theme that we need to rediscover the past in our classroom to inculcate our students with a respect for, if not an agreement with, what has come before. Though certainly not a revolutionary idea, due to the foibles of human nature it appears to be one that needs to have its importance stressed with each generation, and especially now. âWe are desperately in need of a generation of students angered at the fact that they have been deprived of their intellectual and moral tradition.â
In just this sense, Christianity and Politics is a philosophical, not theological, primer. The authorâs intention is to take the secular activity of politics and show that orthodox Christian doctrines of original sin, reason, the immortal soul, and free will have very practical consequences here in the City of Man. It is not Father Schallâs intention to defend specific positions on any given political or theological issue, but rather to interest people in the intellectual history of these disputes, to get people to start thinking for themselves instead of mouthing some ready-made media clichĂŠ. The implication, which is more than justified when one considers the large number of students who graduate each year, is that would-be scholars are being intellectually short-changed, as they are required to know and interpret the present without even a basic grasp of the past to serve as a touchstone.
The tone is set in the introduction, entitled âThe Lost Art of Christian Politics,â where Father Schall suggests that Christian thought today is not so much misunderstood as it is unknown in our colleges and universities. There are English majors who go through four years of school without ever bumping into Shakespeare, except possibly as an obscure footnote. Students today graduate with degrees in political science never having heard of, much less having studied, Augustineâs just war theory or Thomasâs treatise on law. Even the ancientsâPlato, Aristotle, Ciceroâremain unread by the people who take their positions in society as lawyers, politicians, generals, corporate chiefs, and, occasionally, priests.
Ironically, in their recent zeal to overcome imagined intellectual shortcomings deriving from their religious heritages, church-founded schools are tossing away even the best of their traditions for the latest unproven educational quirks. The new professors cast a patronizing eye on the past, when books were actually placed on an Index and pre-judged to be immoral, or, at least, an inducement to immorality. Christianity, they smile knowingly, was certainly narrow back in those days. There is, however, little difference between the censors of yesteryear and the new breed of professor, for the assumptions have now gone to the other extreme: all books and opinions condemned in the past are now assumed to be superior to the orthodox. The intellectual heirs of the Index are not the traditionally inclined at all, but those who judge a book, not on its merits, but by the comments of voguish book reviewers. Does the author quote Boethius? Then he is a reactionary. Does the author believe in original sin? Then he must be a Jansenist. Is he against national health insurance? Surely, then, he lacks compassion.
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The attack is not, as some mistakenly believe, a result of the exaltation of reasonâquite the opposite. The mark of a wise man, Aristotle noted, is his ability to make distinctions, and this ability today is lacking among our would-be intellectual leaders. How else can we explain the failure of this class to recognize the inherent evils of communism? How else can we explain the superstitious attachment to the idea of central planning in underdeveloped countries when it has brought only increased misery, famine, and repression everywhere it has been tried?
As Father Schall says, this utter failure of our leaders to recognize problems, much less find solutions, is the inevitable result of a philosophically deprived people. âWe are, in fact, an irate generation aswe note criticisms about presidents, congressmen, corporations, bureaucrats, and law-enforcement agents,â he says, âwho violate supposed ethical standards, the moral worth of which we are not accustomed or even allowed to justify at a theoretical or religious level.â
To insist that a given state of affairs is not acceptable, wrong ifyou will, is necessarily to assume that there exists some standard for judging what is acceptable. This paradox is the Achilles heel of skepticism, for no man can live and really be a skeptic, and the search for this objective standard is what is meant by orthodoxy.
Today, though, there is very little understanding of first principles, of reasoned argument from logic, of what nature reveals about man, of the relationship between faith and reason. The tragedy of it all is that this recurs every few generations despite the fact that these things have been addressed in the past by great and intelligent men. Looked at objectively, Christianity has supported the clarification of the past. more than our secularists. Whereas nonbelievers by and large ignore the faithful, Christians believe they can learn something from everyone, even pagans. Accordingly, Augustine learned from Plato, criticized him where he thought Plato was wrong, supported him where he thought Plato was right, and both Augustine and future generations were much better off for the effort.
The pagans today are very timid creatures indeed. Though the philosophers of ancient Greece did not have the added benefits of revealed truth, they knew how to use reason as far as it would take them. From this, they were able to examine man and his world to help determine (a) how things are, and (b) how things ought to be. To do this, of course, one must first go back to the basic questions about the nature of man and the nature of this world.
Christians have additional assistance. They have the further advantage of revealed truth which helps illuminate manâs condition, helping him to lift his eyes upward and take in the whole of himself, not just his feet. This implies the recognition of manâs imperfection, which is called original sin, and the recognition of the earth as a transitory place. The repeated idiocy of each age, which must be unlearned, is that man is essentially different from what he was a decade ago, a century ago, a thousand years ago. Anyone who reads any historical worksâphilosophy, economics, theology, literature, art, scienceâquickly recognizes the utter falsity of this notion. Analyze any aspect of man throughout the ages and, unless one is a complete fool, one will find that man is no more or less foolish and has the same basic problems which remain unsolved.
Christians have the further obligation, both spiritual and intellectual, to understand what our faith teaches about the way we are and ought to be. Foremost in Christian thought is the divine emphasis on the importance, uniqueness, and beauty of the individual human, who, accordingly, has a personal immortal soul. Without the understanding of the individual, political theories become inhuman as they are abstracted and divorced from real people who compose the worldânot âeconomic man,â âreligious man,â âworker man,â but people who are all of theseâyour father, your sister, the grocer, the town cop, all of whom have namesand are all the contrary abstractions rolled into one. Why else would we admire a Mother Teresa, engaged in an apparently absurd activity, tending to faceless beggars in Calcutta, people not known when alive and not missed when dead, her work having no real effect on the practical problem of poverty? Why indeed?
The question is not puzzling to Christians, and again Father Schall is there to suggest that the most prudent course is to turn to orthodox explanations, for they are orthodox by virtue of surviving the test of time. Chesterton called this the âthrilling romance of orthodoxy.â
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There was never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. . . . It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep oneâs own.
It is orthodoxy, in short, that gives answers, true answers to an anxious age. It is orthodoxy that distinguishes between the City of God and the City of Man. It is orthodoxy which Father Schall summons when he defines Christianity as âessentially dealing with the Firstcommandment, the love of God, and the Second only in its light.â Thus the Christian is in the unique position of being able to recognize the importance of the here and now while at the same time denying its ultimate significanceâsomething communists, fascists, liberation theologists, and even libertarians are unable to do.
Christianity and Politics, then, is more philosophical than theological, educational rather than prescriptive. It is an appeal to students of any age to examine their Western heritage as an orientation which offers answers to questions that have bedeviled man from the beginning. For though the search for answers is individual, the possession thereof is collective. âWhen I fancied that I stood alone,â said Chesterton, âI was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.â We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, in the same ridiculous position. Only some of us know it.