That Strauss Had an Influence on Catholic Political Philosophy Is Undeniable

City Journal: Rome Vs. Chicago by
Leo Strauss outlined the essential questions about modernity that Catholics grapple with today.

A review of Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers, by Geoffrey M. Vaughan (Catholic University of America Press, 360 pp., $75)

See also: On the Catholic Appreciation of Leo Strauss

The problem is not "modernity" as Catholics, influenced by Strauss or not, may believe, but the state.

Can Philosophy Ever Escape Genealogy

The Imaginative Conservative: The End of Modernity by Thaddeus Kozinski

Modernity, by God’s grace, may be the site of a new synthesis, the transcending of stale categories of thought and practice, in which a new Christendom can emerge, one in which the reign of God in His glory and love emerges side-by-side with the full dignity and flourishing of man…

Michael Gillespie wrote another hit piece against nominalism, tracing all of the problems of the Western world to 14th ce Franciscans like Ockham: The Theological Origins of Modernity.

Agnosticism

Why Agnosticism Is the Worst Idea Ever by Thaddeus Kozinski

Baffled That This Was Published at Pravmir

Orthodoxy has always held women in the highest regard. Church history is full of amazing women such St. Olha of Kyiv and...

Posted by Orthodoxy and the World on Monday, January 25, 2016

Dale M. Coulter Responds to Charles Taylor

First Things: Wrestling with Charles Taylor by Dale M. Coulter
Is our world really so disenchanted?



A Secular Age



Related:

Pope Francis Reaching out to Evangelicals

Pope Francis and the Future of Charismatic Christianity
by Dale M. Coulter


abridged
Pope Francis Sends Video Message to Kenneth Copeland - Lets Unite

Pope Francis, Pentecostals, and Friendship
by Dale M. Coulter

Charismatics, Magisterials, and Rome
by Greg Forster


Related:
“We are not against modernity, but we are against westernization”
Hindu outcry prompts Penguin to withdraw book by Mark Movsesian

Two Responses to William Cavanaugh on the Modern State

Thomas Storck, William Cavanaugh's "Killing For The Telephone Company," A Critique

A response to both Storck and Cavanaugh: Cavanaugh and the Question of the State by Joshua Bowman

The major problem with Storck's critique is that he ignores the problem of scale - perhaps an assumption about scale is implicit in Cavanaugh's critique of the modern state but he should have made it explicit. Aristotle, as I don't cease to point out, certainly had much to stay about scale and we are reminded of the fundamental importance of scale to the health of a community by 20th century thinkers like Leopold Kohr, E.F. Schumacher, and Kirkpatrick Scale.

The consolidation of power, political and economic - facilitated by improvement in communication and cheap energy. Earlier large political units (I would not call them polities) were forced by the limits of energy and communication to be somewhat decentralized, with some empires more decentralized than others (Roman and Chinese and Persian).

What of the managerial state, with the development of bureaucracy which seeks to legislate every tiny detail? What bigger violation of "subsidiarity" could there be at this point, as the bureaucracy serves those who hold power and implements their will?

Even if they claimed to be sovereign would their claim be just or right?

Thaddeus Kozinski on Saving Modernity

A new Christendom: Can Christianity breathe life into modernity?

"The transition from enlightenment, secular foundationalism to post-enlightenment, secular traditionalism can best be understood by considering the transition from the early-medieval synthesis of faith and reason to its divorce in late-medieval nominalism and voluntarism. Such a consideration can also help us to predict and depict more accurately what the next transition might look like."

I won't say this genealogy has "long been discredited" by intellectual historians; indeed it remains popular among Catholics. Who is able to write a scholarly historically accurate refutation of the thesis?

The Enlightenment was a tool for those pursuing the "will to power" - some may have been sincere believers in liberalism, but was it true of all who sought to increase their own power? I do think that it remains useful to look at various historical trends as a rejection of various forms of authority and tradition, but I would not tie every individual rejection with the concomitant adoption of Enlightenment ideology.

"In the words of Maritain, there has been a certain maturation of the political order, and it does look like the Gospel seed has come to a greater fruition in certain temporal areas - though there is room for much more growth, and there have been many misshapen and misbegotten stalks, as well as abortive fruits. One simply cannot discount or reject the modernity-friendly Gaudium et Spes in this regard. This maturation, and the real responsibility that it demands, which is the aspect of modernity gravely lacking today, is the true message of Gaudium et Spes when interpreted correctly according to the hermeneutic of continuity - that is, not as a replacement of the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX, but as its complement. After Vatican II, no Catholic can interpret the prior Leonine social teaching and theology as simply a rejection of modernity, but neither can he reject or dismiss the prior teaching as outdated or simply mistaken."

How many of the advances in "science" and technology were possible because of the excess wealth first made possible through empire, supplemented later by cheap energy? As for the supposed maturation of the political order - I deny such a thing has happened. To take one aspect, we have drifted away any authentic form of republican government. Is it not the case that those who have maintained the consolidation of political and economic power during the early stages of nationalism have done so while proclaiming themselves to be fervent believers in "democracy" and "freedom"? The current political [dis-]order cannot be "Christianized" because it itself is opposed to right reason. Evangelization can only prepare people for death or possibly for a new, more localist order arising from the old.

Perhaps there are no "convincing and satisfying answers" because there are no easy answers that enable the current system to be perpetuated. Any real movement towards republicanism cannot but be a subversion of the system.

Pierre Manent on Modernity

But does he satisfactorily explain what separates "Modern" from pre-Modern? He does give a (Straussian?) explanation of the Modern project with Machiavelli as one of the central actors, but I'm not buying it.

Pierre Manent, City, Empire, Church, Nation
How the West created modernity
(via FT)

There is something terrible in human action: what makes us human is also what exposes us, takes us out of ourselves, and sometimes causes us to lose ourselves. In the beginning, human beings gathered, fished, hunted, or even made war, which is a kind of hunting; but they acted as little as possible, leaving much to the gods and tying themselves down with prohibitions, rites, and sacred restraints. Historically, properly human action first appears as crime or transgression. This, according to Hegel, is what Greek tragedy brings to light: innocently criminal action. Tragedy recounts the passage from what precedes action to properly human action.

Say what? Is that a true presentation of what "primitive" cultures believed about human action? Sounds like someone's setting up human action to be some sort of liberation from superstition disguised as divinely-imposed restraint. I hear a serpent calling.

Manent explains that the Modernity is a political project of collective action, in which "democracy" holds a central place. The roots of the project can be found in ancient Greece. The city was insufficient by itself to secure internal and external peace and so what was needed was empire. And then the Church appears.

Not only did the imperial idea mark the West through the enduring prestige of the Roman Empire; the idea was reborn in a new form, one that was, again, particular to Europe. This was the Catholic or universal Church, which aimed to reunite all mankind in a new communion, closer than that of the most enclosed city and more extensive than that of the vastest empire. Of all the political forms of the West, the Church extended the greatest promises, since it proposed this community, at once city and empire; but it was also the most disappointing, since it failed to bring about the universal association for which it had awakened a desire.

Though I have just surveyed the history of premodern Europe with the speed and delicacy of Attila the Hun, I have gathered the elements of the situation that will allow me to elaborate the modern project.

Europeans were divided among the city, the empire, and the Church. They lived under these mixed and competing authorities, these three modes of human association. The cities that survived or were reborn were in competition with—indeed, often at war with—the Roman Empire (now known as the Holy Roman Empire, in what is today Germany); and the Church was in competition with the cities and the empire, which, in turn, were in competition with it. The disorder was dreadful, a conflict of authorities and of loyalty. It was this confusion that the modern project wanted to allow us to escape—and in this, it succeeded.

As a result, not only were there competing authorities but competing identities as well:

The conflicts had to do with institutions but also, more profoundly, with the human type that would inspire European life. Whom to imitate? Did one have to follow the life of humble sacrifice for which Christ provided the model? Or was it better to lead the proud, active life of the warrior-citizen, a life for which Rome had provided the framework and of which Rome was the product par excellence? Should Europeans, surveying the ancient world, admire Cato or Caesar? Europeans no longer knew which city they wanted, or were able, to inhabit; thus they did not know what kind of human being they wanted, or were able, to be. It was in this radical perplexity, and in order to come to terms with it, that the modern project was born.

Competing authorities and authoritative texts lead to a disconnect between speech and action. Which texts were to determine action? The Reformation was one answer to this question. Machievelli gave another, directed especially at the tension between Christianity and the way men actually were.

Now, the greatest distance between speech and action is introduced by the Christian Word, which requires men to love what they naturally hate (their enemies) and to hate what they naturally love (themselves). The modern political project, which Machiavelli was the first to formulate, was therefore a response—it began as a response, in any case—to the “Christian situation,” one marked by competition among authorities, disorder of references, anarchy of words, and, above all, the demoralizing contrast between what men said and what they did.

Isn't that a erroneous account of Christian charity? (Or, more accurately, of the emotion of hate, which is not opposed to charity or rational love?) But this false account may be needed by Manent to make his point.

The problem of the Christian age was solved, therefore, by the sovereign state and by representative government—that is, by our political regime considered as a whole. My object here is not to describe the mechanisms or, for that matter, to sketch the history of the representative regime. Still, one point must be emphasized. The decisive factor in the reconciliation between speech and action is the formation of a common speech by the elaboration, perfection, and diffusion of a national language. Luther’s Reformation was a spiritual upheaval, but it was also inseparably a political revolution and a national insurrection. Too often forgotten is that even before the modern state was consolidated and became capable of authorizing or prohibiting effectively, the nation had emerged in Europe as the setting for the appropriation of the Christian Word, which the universal Church had proved incapable of teaching effectively. Each European nation chose the Christian confession under which it wished to live and essentially imposed it, after many attempts, on its “sovereign.” Europe assumed its classic form with the “confessional nation,” soon to be crowned by its absolute sovereign, who would later bring about its “secularization”; and this was the form in which it succeeded in organizing itself in the most stable and durable manner. From then on, it was in the framework of a national civic conversation that Europeans sought to link their speech with their actions and their actions with their speech. The national form preceded and conditioned representative government.

Having rejected the authority of the Church and weakened it, the elites controlled the modern nation-state. Can we really say that we have had "representative" government in the West, rather than rule by a few, regardless of the general population's approval of them through the fiction of voting? Manent may just be giving his analysis, rather than approving the modern nation-state as a solution, but he is missing something in his account of the rise of the modern nation-state, and how its development necessarily violates the human scale. Without this, he can pretend that the modern nation-states are democratic, but they really aren't. They are governed for the benefit of the few.

The divorce between action and speech helps explain the new role of political correctness. Because speech is no longer tied to a possible and plausible action against which we might measure it, many take speech as seriously as if it were itself an action and consider speech they do not like equivalent to the worst possible action. Offending forms of speech are tracked down and labeled, in the language of pathologists, “phobias.” The progress of freedom in the West once consisted of measuring speech by the standard of visible actions; political correctness consists of measuring speech by the standard of invisible intentions.

Bad psychology as philosophy? A simplistic thesis to explain the evolution of Western polities; the need to match words to action. (Straussian emphasis on texts or their understanding of logos/logoi?) The changes were not due to the need for man to resolve tensions within himself in his beliefs, but rather it is the story of the struggle of power after the fall of Adam and Eve, with some unique Western features.

James Matthew Wilson Offers a Description of Modernity

James Matthew Wilson, Against Rationalism, Idealism, and Abstraction
Part II in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church. Read Part I here.

The traditionalist wishes to defend the reverence and deference due to inherited folk ways in spite of their appearances of irrationality, and often does so by taking a stand in defense of the irrational per se. Such is political romanticism. And the traditionalist presumes, understandably, that securing allegiance to a tradition will in turn keep in place the essential elements of a localized and intergenerational community. If one toes the line of spiritual tradition, the body of natural community will be sustained. If one demands fidelity and solidarity to one’s own as the highest if inexplicable good, one can secure the perseverance of an entire way of life. Modernity is consequently decried as rationalist, idealist, and abstracting—claims I take to be true, but perhaps not for the reasons the traditionalist critique would recognize.

Surely, modernity is beholden to this triad of fetishes. I would argue that insofar as modernity is “rationalistic,” it has ceased to believe in reason; insofar as it is idealist, it neglects not simply the body but the idea of reality; and insofar as it tends toward abstraction, it has failed rather than succeeded in being adequately critical of the concrete conditions of human knowledge.

I hope he elaborates more on what he takes to be the weakness of the traditionalist position is (as stated in the first paragraph).