@suzania wrote a critique of Andrew Willard Jones' recent piece on subsidiarity, and you should certainly read it.https://t.co/O0MhqflqdY
— New Polity (@PostliberalTho1) September 1, 2020
I'm not going to take the time to cover all of the problems in both essays. With regards to Black's reply: Subsidiarity was always an unsuccessful attempt to deal with the state; authority proper to a political community does not scale up, and organization of political communities requires something other than the unitary state and its centralization of authority which it usurps. If we're going to try to discern political relationships in Genesis, perhaps the first political community, if it were truly self-sufficient with respect to political goods was constituted by Adam and Eve. But the more important political relationship would have been the one existing between Adam and his sons Cain and Abel, not as father and sons, but as political equals. (And I disagree with Filmer and his Patriarcha on this point.) With regards to the reply of Jones and Barnes to Black: While the production of virtue is an end of the political community, it is an end order to the primary end of the political community, which is political life or life in civic friendship. The state cannot produce virtue but it can produce habits in those subject to it. These habits are useful to those who are rule and make a man good for a particular (bad) regime, but not good simply. The family does have a role to play in forming its members in virtue, but because the family is an incomplete society, the formation it offers must be done in conjunction with the formation offered by the political community. The father has a role to play in educating his sons, but other men in that community have roles to play as well, and the goal of that formation is not to erase the inequality that exists between father and son by nature (as "biological" cause and effect) but to elevate the son to the status of a political equal in the case of a republican regime. As for using the mystical language of the Bridegroom and the Bride the Church to explain this, that has its own problems. Just one word on the mystical marriage of the Son and the Church: much of Latin theologizing about the mystical marriage involves imposing of human ideals and norms regarding marriage, and we see how ideas about "equality" and even "complementarity" influence theology. Even when the ministers of the Church are ordered to the ministry of the sacraments, this is not the Church being "given power over the distribution of God's grace" (what a Latin way of thinking about it), but the Church serving the Bridegroom, Christ, to whom She is conformed.Andrew Willard Jones and Marc Barnes respond to Susannah Black @suzania on the question of subsidiarity within the new, postliberal, Christian society.https://t.co/TAeKe5f16X
— New Polity (@PostliberalTho1) September 2, 2020
