August, 2022 - Opus Publicum

August 24, 2022 Books, Catholic Social Thought

A Few More Thoughts on Edward Feser’s All One in Christ

Following my initial thoughts on Edward Feser’s All One in Christ (Ignatius 2002) (AOIC), I had a brief exchange on Twitter with Feser where, inter alia, he accused me of not understanding what a genetic fallacy is. This is due to the fact that I believe he commits this very fallacy in AOIC with respect to Critical Race Theory (CRT) when he repeatedly links it to postmodernism and Marxism. According to Feser, all he does in AOIC is “point out that there are certain features that CRT shares with Marxism and postmodernism, and that they’re as problematic in the one case as in the others.” Feser does this, but that is not all he does.

According to Feser, the genetic fallacy “involves rejecting a claim or an argument merely because of some disreputable historical or cultural association it has or is alleged to have” (77). This fallacy, also known as the fallacy of origins or the fallacy of virtue, has been defined elsewhere as holding that “if an argument or arguer has some particular origin, the argument must be right (or wrong). The idea is that things from that origin, or that social class, have virtue or lack virtue. (Being poor or being rich may be held out as being virtuous.) Therefore, the actual details of the argument can be overlooked, since correctness can be decided without any need to listen or think.” Whether one accepts Feser’s truncated definition or the more expansive version matters not. What matters, at least to Feser, is that he did not commit it. That is debatable to say the least.

Turning back through the pages of AOIC, Feser wastes no time in linking CRT to postmodernism and Marxism. He does it right away in the very chapter where he defines CRT (53-54):

Because CRT is energetically promoted in the name of “antiracism”, many suppose that it must be benign. That is as naïve as thinking that Marxism must be benign given that it presents itself as an ally of the working class. In fact, Marxism has only ever yielded an oppression worse than the kind it claims to eradicate. Similarly, in the name of remedying the evil of racism, CRT actually promotes a novel and insidious form of racism. Like Marxism, CRT is a grave perversion of the good cause it claims to represent, and it is utterly incompatible with Catholic social teaching.

Setting aside for a moment that Feser has not demonstrated that Marxism qua Marxism, as opposed to disparate applications of Marxism, “has only ever yielded an oppression worse than the kind it claims to eradicate,” why mention it at all? Even if Marxism invariably leads to greater oppression, Feser does not prove that CRT creates more racism; it rather “promotes a novel and insidious form of racism.” However, by weaving Marxism and CRT together, Feser intends the reader to believe that the problem with Marxism (oppression) is the same problem found in CRT without demonstrating as much. Perhaps Feser would say he is making a (casual?) comparison between Marxism and CRT. Such a claim could hold water but for the fact Feser returns to this matter repeatedly in AOIC. Here is what he says in Chapter 5 (71-72):

Readers familiar with Marxism and postmodernism will have noted the similarities CRT bears to them, the main difference being that CRT substitutes an obsession with race for the Marxist’s obsession with class and speaks of “whiteness” rather than the bourgeoisie as the sinister power lurking behind all legal and cultural institutions. This is no accident for Marxists and postmodernists such as Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, respectively, were key influences on the development of CRT.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that CRT is essentially a reformulation of some of the main themes of Marxism and postmodernism in racial terms. Where Marxism speaks of the conflict under capitalism between oppressive bourgeoise and the oppressed proletariat, CRT speaks of a struggle under “systematic racism” between an oppressive “whiteness” and an oppressed “people of color.” Where the postmodernist takes all norms and truth claims to be culturally relative and masks for the vested interests of power, CRT identifies this power in the case of European and American civilization with “white supremacy”, specifically.

Feser has more to say about CRT’s connections to postmodernism and Marxism, though never does he try to upset their claims. He takes it as given that postmodernism and Marxism are wrongheaded, pernicious, destructive, and so on and so forth. This is ironic given that just a few pages later, Feser chastises “CRT writers” for “the extremely poor quality of its [sic] argumentation and analysis.” He goes on to say, “Because these writers typically present ideas with a matter-of-fact and even aggressive confidence, unsophisticated readers may be unduly impressed” and that “[t]he self-assured style of this writing functions…as a rhetorical device by which its intellectual flimsiness might be masked” (74).

Though Feser is not committing the genetic fallacy here, he is partaking in another fallacy he notes in the book: special pleading, “which involves applying an arbitrary or unjustified double standard” (81). Here Feser blasts CRT for its “matter-of-fact and even aggressive confidence” in making arguments all the while arguing in a matter-of-fact and aggressively confident (if not dismissive) manner about postmodernism and Marxism—the corrupt soil from which the rotten tree of CRT allegedly sprung. Feser wants his audience to give him a pass where he fails to provide one to CRT.

Returning to the genetic fallacy, Feser may again claim he is only highlighting similarities rather than rejecting CRT (and encouraging others to reject it) because of its “disreputable historical or cultural association” it has with postmodernism and Marxism. Given all of the aspersions, well-grounded or not, that Feser casts upon postmodernism and Marxism, that defense is hard to take seriously. By AOIC’s final chapter, Feser does nothing to mask his belief that CRT should join postmodernism and Marxism as ideologies condemned by the Catholic Church (127):

As noted already, Critical Race Theory essentially reformulates, in racial terms, some of the key themes of Marxism and postmodernism. Now, the Church has consistently and strenuously condemned the key ideas of Marxism and all other forms of socialism and communism, along with the relativist and other themes that are characteristic of postmodernism. It follows that CRT, which is a mere variation of these malign ideas, is no more compatible with teaching of the Church than Marxism and postmodernism are.

In other words, the apparent condemnation of CRT’s intellectual forebears is a condemnation of CRT. Feser goes on to spill more ink about the incompatibility of Marxism with Catholic social teaching while returning to the theme of genetically linking CRT and Marxism (e.g., 131, 137, & 139). And while I have never stated that Feser fails to make arguments against CRT other than genetic ones, his reliance on tarring CRT with Marxism and feathering it with postmodernism undermines AOIC’s strength. CRT is not vanquished fairly in the ring; it is kneecapped by association before the bout gets fully underway. Such a move only has the dubious benefit of appeasing an audience already committed to opposing CRT.

August 22, 2022 Books, Catholic Social Thought

Edward Feser’s All One in Christ: Initial Thoughts

This is not so much a review as it is a series of initial thoughts on Edward Feser’s new book, All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory (Ignatius 2022) (AOIC). At a mere 147 half-sized pages, this brief work attempts to restate the Catholic Church’s position against racism (and by extension chattel slavery) while also laying waste to Critical Race Theory (CRT). Feser spends more time on the latter than the former. Why? Because though Feser is correct to identify logical difficulties with certain popular presentations of CRT, most of what he says has already been hashed out before, his intended audience is undoubtedly less concerned with racism than being accused by CRT of being racists themselves. Moreover, AOIC does not read like a work intended to save misguided Catholics from embracing CRT. Rather, its CRT-related chapters come across as little more than preaching to the choir, with the “choir” being the typical Ignatius Press audience of conservative white American Catholics who typically vote Republican and support neoliberal (if not libertarian) socio-economic policies.

Feser might quickly accuse me as he accuses certain espousers of CRT of engaging in ad hominem attacks rather than engaging in a fair intellectual discussion. Ok. However, before getting there, let me say that AOIC’s first two chapters—“Church Teaching Against Racism” and “Late Scholastics and Early Modern Popes Against Slavery”—are excellent. The third, “The Rights and Duties of Nations and Immigrants,” is inoffensive insofar as it makes a number of commonsense claims backed up by papal opinions on the exercise of prudence when it comes to national immigration policy. One glaring difficulty with this chapter, one that returns several more times during the course of the book, is that Feser assumes the countries like the United States are coherent, monolithic nations with an identifiably unified socio-political culture that needs special care and protection from alien influences. Feser ignores, in the American context at least, the extent to which anti-immigration positions are backed by narrow conceptions of what it is to be “an American” that are not shared by the whole of the American population.

Turning to CRT, or in truth a small handful of popular presentations of CRT, Feser detects the vile specters of postmodernism and Marxism lurking behind it. And despite spending all of the work’s fifth chapter decrying logical fallacies allegedly embedded in CRT, Feser embraces the genetic fallacy wholesale as he dismisses CRT because of its apparent postmodern and Marxist origins. Believing (rather than proving) that both postmodernism and Marxism have been overcome (or proven invalid, wrongheaded, stupid, silly, etc. by the course of history), Feser does not perceive how CRT can survive except as another dangerous ideology that threatens the milquetoast libertarian-esque political ordo with incense that has taken a shine to over the years. Maybe if Feser had only made a passing reference to postmodernism and Marxism as intellectual antecedents to CRT, he could be forgiven for only pointing out a fact of life rather than mounting an argument. Yet time and again he returns to this connection to “demonstrate” that CRT is no darn good.

As Feser runs through CRT’s logical fallacies (many of which are contained in Robin DiAngelo’s pop polemic White Fragility), he posits a series of conclusions that could be true absent their espousers’ racism, albeit with little in the way of proof. And so, when it comes to income disparities among certain races, are they the result of systemic or institutional racism or differences in culture? Are blacks charged and sentenced for allegedly committing crime at higher average rates than whites because of racism in the criminal justice system or is it because blacks are often raised in single-parent households with absentee fathers? Feser notes that suggesting cultural and familial differences as a cause for negative social outcomes is evidence of racism by CRT’s lights. This is a problem, not just because it is intellectually dishonest, but because it stifles open discussion. On this point, I agree with Feser. Where I am cautious is with respect to why Feser uses these conclusions as his examples. Is it because he believes they are correct? Does he think his audience will accept them as highly likely if not undeniably true? Finally, why does Feser not posit other conclusions, like the role class plays in these problems? Perhaps Feser worries that doing so would undermine his own political commitments.

Those commitments are on muted display in AOIC’s closing chapter, “Catholicism versus Critical Race Theory.” Here Feser again turns his sights against postmodernism and Marxism to discredit CRT. According to Feser, “the Church has consistently and strenuously condemned the key ideas of Marxism and all other forms of socialism and communism, along with relativist and other themes characteristic of postmodernism.” Feser does not say in detail what these “key ideas” are, nor like many contemporary Catholic critics of socialism does he bother to define what socialism is. Given that “socialism” today means everything from total state ownership of the means of production to food stamps, it is impossible to say that the Church has ever issued a full-throated condemnation for everything that passes for (or is accused of being) socialism. Feser quotes Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (RN) approvingly on what it says against class conflict (more on that in a moment) but is silent on the principle of just wages or the topic of social safety nets, which are addressed throughout the Church’s modern social magisterium.

On the topic of class, Feser announces that “the Church has condemned the Marxist thesis that social classes, such as the rich and the poor or capital and labor, are inherently and necessarily hostile to one another.” According to RN as cited by Feser, this thesis “is abhorrent to reason and truth” because “nature has commanded…that the…classes mentioned should agree harmoniously and should form equally balanced counterparts to each other” (emphasis added). “Should” is not “do.” While Marxism of the strict observance is wrong to posit class hostility as an inevitability, neither Leo XIII nor any other pope ever taught that class conflict is empirically false. Without the establishment of a just social order, class conflict will likely persist; one need not be a Marxist to grasp that.

Feser’s class blindness coupled with his apparent acceptance of neoliberal economics leads him away from anything more than “cultural” conclusions concerning racial disparities. Even if cultural differences could explain differences in wealth, education, and crime rate, far more work needs to be done to address the development (or degeneration) of culture; its origins; and why certain cultures persist among certain populations and not others. Keep in mind that when it comes to immigration policy and foreigners, Feser appears fine with positing a unified American nation with a homogenous culture in need of safeguarding. As his eye turns inward, however, Feser sees numerous cultures, many of them bad, and many of them responsible to some degree for a plethora of social ills.

As stated at the outset of this post, AOIC is a mixed bag. The strength of its opening chapters is dampened by the intrusion of Feser’s personal policy preferences, backed up by a selective reading of Catholic social teaching. CRT’s flaws, of which there are many, are addressed, but regrettably in a manner that feeds into persistent conservative beliefs that either racism is not a genuine problem or the extent to which class exacerbates this problem. It is a shame Feser felt the need to package all of this in a book rather than a series of discrete blog posts. They would make it easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.

August 19, 2022 Books

Five Paragraphs in “Honor” of the Web-Log Being Back

During the few days this web-log was down, I had drafted several posts. Now I cannot find them (though I suspect I loaded them to one of the many cloud services I never thought I needed). Maybe that is for the best. Whenever I spend significant times pulling together posting material, I invariably lose steam. Moreover, the topics (which I will touch on below) probably do not demand their own treatment, at least not right now. Still, a few words shouldn’t hurt.

First, almost a year ago I gave a talk on Catholicism and race. Now I find out the philosopher/polemicist Ed Feser has penned a book on the subject for Ignatius Press. Naturally, I ordered a copy, but it has yet to arrive. Given Feser’s intellectual and political proclivities, the work is likely to be very informative or epically cringy. (It could be a mix of both, I suppose.) When I spoke on the topic, I relied heavily on Eric Voegelin’s The History of the Race Idea and Race and State, with only a handful of references to the Church’s magisterium. As time has ticked on, several folks offered me critiques of Voegelin’s work, which according to some is dated and maybe even “racist” (though I am not convinced). Where Voegelin is most helpful is tracing the development of race ideology; his examination of racialist politics is more timebound, but not entirely inapposite. When giving the talk, I had thought—naively—that no serious Catholic still accepted race categories as “natural.” It appears I was not paying attention since the reduction of human beings to biology alone is as acceptable to a disturbing number of Catholics as it is to other corners of the population uninhibited by Christian anthropology. I await Feser’s thoughts even if I am worried he lacks any appreciable understanding of what drives race-focused social movements like Black Lives Matter, and so forth.

Second, and sticking with the topic of race, I have been deep diving into the problem the Marxist social critic Adolph Reed, Jr. calls “race reductionism.” According to Reed, “[r]ace reductionism is ultimately a couple of things,” namely the “presumption that race as a category can explain social phenomena” and “that every grievance, injustice, beef that in any way affects a person of color, or a person of non-color, can be reduced to race, or can be reduced causally to race or to racism.” Those miffed at Reed accuse him of “class reductionism.” However, even a cursory glance at Reed’s works, including his recent book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, reveals his dynamic approach to socio-political problems. Reed takes race seriously, but it is not his idol—and for that he is castigated unfairly by those who should be most interested in aligning with him.

Third, if you enjoy the Dune serious, you should acquire the ongoing graphic-novel adaption of the original book. The second of three volumes came out last week. Although their vision of the novel differs at points from what was presented in Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film, there are striking convergences as well.

Last, having recently finished Harnack’s monograph Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, I find myself down a Marcionite rabbit hole with Dieter T. Roth’s The Text of Marcion’s Gospel and Sebastian Moll’s The Arch-Heretic Marcion. These works, in addition to a collection of articles I have picked up, carry on—and in some substantial ways modify—Harnack’s sympathetic portrait of the second-century dissenter whose intellectual efforts, though lost to the sands of time, still offer, via scholarly reconstruction, a fascinating window into early Christianity and the formation of the Christian Biblical canon. Harnack’s appreciation of Marcion’s religiosity is more than a bit infectious. Recent popular attempts to rehabilitate Marcion and the so-called Marcionite Christian Church are less impressive. It is altogether easy to praise Marcion’s portrait of a loving, redeeming God; it is exponentially harder to accept Marcion’s theology and its brutally ascetical implications.

August 15, 2022 Church, Politics

Weaponizing the Rosary

Much handwringing is underway over Daniel Penneton’s online piece at The Atlantic, “How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary.” Having a sneaking suspicion that many of those decrying it have not read it, I would recommend they do so. In fact, I recommend anyone who is interested in contemporary American politics and Catholicism take a gander, not because Penneton gets it exactly right (he does not) nor because he exhibits knowledge of the rosary’s history (again, he does not), but because the phenomenon he touches upon is real: the degradation of an authentically spiritual devotion in the service of worldly politics.

Penneton stretches his thesis a tad too far by making direct links between “gun culture” (which is also real, by the way) and the rosary, though certainly there are those involved in the former who like to parade their beads around on social media as a weapon—and not a spiritual weapon. Martial imagery and metaphors have long accompanied the rosary devotion, though the war they pointed toward was a spiritual war against the devil, not a political war, especially a petty political war over the meaning of the Second Amendment or whether one can defend themselves in court as a “sovereign citizen.” This is not to say that there are not legitimate evils in society which at their root are spiritual. Such demons may only be driven out by prayer, repentance, and fasting; posting cringe-worthy selfies with the rosary-as-practical weapon wielded in the service of nothing accomplishes nothing.

Some are curious about the origins of the phenomenon Panneton points to. Online culture can be, well, weird and Catholics are no exception to weirdness, particularly when they embrace it on Twitter and other social-media fora. How that is supposed to attract or edify is beyond me, but it happens nonetheless. What also happens to an embarrassing degree are (mostly young) males, lacking a compass for their (self-)repressed masculinity, promoting the rosary like it’s an actual broadsword that should be run through the gullets of heretics, schismatics, feminists, leftists, Muslims, Jews, and so on and so forth. Some of these folks cling to (neo-)integralism, which loosely aligns with their trite medieval vision of a well-functioning political order. Most appear attracted to more secularized alt-right postures, though as I have discussed elsewhere, these pathologies are not necessarily incompatible with integralism.

It is important to bare in mind that these cyber crusaders are an extreme minority of all Catholics, including Catholics who pray the rosary regularly. Although exact studies are lacking, again it appears that the online “rosary wielders” are primarily angry young man, sometimes derided as “incels” or “edgelords” by their social-media peers, who are grasping for a stature they never had and likely never will. Instead of huffing burn pit fumes like actual military service members, they spew quasi-Tolkienite tripe while giving nods to a romanticized past where men were men; women knew their place; families had a dozen children; and society run on “traditional moral values.” Many of these persons will grow out of this phase. Some will not. And of course, some will dabble in more extreme (and practically dangerous) online cultures.

Traditional Latin Catholics, who are more variegated than Penneton recognizes, often shoulder the brunt of these criticisms, though the are hardly to blame. A well-formed traditional Catholic should be able to distinguish between the rosary as a powerful spiritual weapon and the rosary as a blunt cultural instrument of little value. A so-called rosary crusade for the good of the Church and society is laudable; paying for violence against one’s enemies, real or imagined, is not. For those critical of Catholicism, online cosplaying with rosaries and images of crusader helmets and other such nonsense only feeds into their narrative that Catholics are dangerous, demented, and disloyal to American democracy.

August 12, 2022 Integralism, Politics

A Note on David Bentley Hart Contra Integralism

I do not want to continue harping on (neo-)integralism, at least not for the moment. Having learned recently there is a critical book in the works, my suspicion is that I should await publication and fill in any “gaps” that may appear in the narrative. This is not to say that I will never mention integralism again. I simply do not want this web-log to become an anti-integralist hub in the way I once, modestly speaking, used it to promote integralism. (Those interested in the topic are free to comb the archives; I still stand by some of what I wrote.) Where integralism crosses over into public discourse, I may have a thing or two to say. I remain very interested in what the critics pen, though historically I have been unimpressed by anti-integralist screeds. Most miss the mark by failing to understand what integralism is, or at least what integralism is intended to be. These days, I am a tad more forgiving because integralism has casually blended with all sorts of noxious right-leaning ideologies and movements. Nobody is wrong necessarily to think of integralism as degraded Trumpism with incense.

It should surprise no soul to find out that David Bentley Hart is not a fan of integralism. He has some choice words for it in his recent book, Tradition and Apocalypse, and continues to berate it over at his Substack, Leaves in the Wind. Not wanting to interfere with Hart’s hustle, I won’t block-quote too much of the content he has tucked behind a paywall, but rather recommend his ongoing series regarding Christian politics (or, as he calls it, “Notes Toward the Definition of a Christian Political Sensibility”). Hart has touched on politics in the past, including bringing the ire of the Acton Institute down upon him for suggesting that early Christianity was communist.

According to Hart, integralism “is basically a neo-Falangist fascism.” Hart continues:

Predictably, [integralism] professes a special solicitude for the working class, for revered cultural institutions, and for the nuclear family, as all fascisms do. But this does not mean that labor, revered institutions, or families would be protected from state coercions under Integralist rule. These Integralists believe in nothing so fanatically as the duty of the “crown” to determine the licit forms of all civil associations. Nor is there any extremity of the state’s coercive powers—capital punishment not excepted—that they see as illegitimate for the suppression of heresy, blasphemy, sexual immorality, and other deviations from the sacral social order.

As I mentioned in my prior post, “[i]tegralism’s primary pathology is an obsession with power,” a feature that Hart also detects. Where I perhaps part ways with Hart is his seemingly dismissive attitude toward the “special solicitude” integralism (and fascism) ostensibly has for “the working class, for revered cultural institutions, and for the nuclear family[.]” This “solicitude” is not always insincere among fascists and indeed may always be very sincere, albeit poorly expressed. With respect to integralism, it is at its core a white, educated, upper-income movement with nothing approaching a faint echo of legitimate sympathy toward the working classes among its members. While integralists pay lip service to Catholic social teaching, economic encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno play almost no role in its socio-political imaginings. The raw exercise of authority is what matters.

Due to integralism’s easygoing mixing with Trumpism, QAnon Catholicism, and other detestable elements of the so-called alt-right, labor rights and unions are likely seen as an impediment to the “common good” (whatever that means). Race plays little-to-no role in integralist thought, though it is possible to find some adherents who will gin up conspiracy theories about racial politics or act as if racial divisions are either “natural” or in some sense “prudent” in order to maintain good social order. And of course class conflict is anathema; “class cooperation” under the watchful eye of a centralized power is needed. And even if integralism could devise an economic ordo that takes into account just wages and wider property distribution, the elites—that is, those white, educated, upper-income individuals (almost exclusively male) who promote integralism—must remain at the top of the hierarchy lest too much localized self-governance disrupt what is ultimately integralism’s final end, that is, an aesthetic state painted in the gaudy colors of romantic longing for an age that never existed.

August 10, 2022 Integralism, Roman Catholic Church

Further Remarks on (Neo-)Integralist Pathologies

By way of follow up on my post from the other week, “Distributism vs. (Neo-)Integralism: Some Remarks,” I want to make mention of a handful of pathologies evident in the integralist or, rather, neo-integralist outlook. This list, which is admittedly impressionistic, is hardly exhaustive. Moreover, I am going to bypass drawing distinctions between integralism, which I still have some faith in as a spiritual-intellectual project, and neo-integralism, which is the dominant (and distorted) contemporary iteration of that “tradition of thought.” Although integralism is a Catholic tradition at its core, its influence and connections are detectable outside of strictly Catholic circles.

Victor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, is an integralist hero despite being a member of the Calvinist Hungarian Reformed Church. The charlatan pseudo-journalist Rod Dreher, who has made a living off appropriating Catholic intellectual currents while simultaneously crapping on the Catholic Church, is ostensibly an Eastern Orthodox Christian; his political idol, Russian President Vladimir Putin, is allegedly one, too. Dreher once locked horns with integralists online, but he has found common cause with them as of late due to his recent divorce (from reality). Various online pockets of far-right miscreants, the sort who thought storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was “cool” until the FBI got involved, express integralist sympathies at times even if they are not invested in smells n’ bells Catholicism.

Integralism’s primary pathology is an obsession with power. While integralists pay lip service to power being exercised in accordance with divine and natural law, few (if any) integralists are prepared to incorporate thick conceptions of either into their work. The closest they come is so-called “common good constitutionalism” which appears plastic enough to ordain a plethora of political arrangements without regard to right. Banal examples of common good constitutionalism in practice, such as having elemental rules of the road rather than chaos on the highways, does little to assuage skeptics’ fears that this integralist offshoot desires only basic background rules that allow a society to “flourish.” Such a conception of law is little different than the classical liberal legal order suggested by libertarian scholar Richard Epstein, whose Simple Rules for a Complex World is at least honest in its aims.

Why integralists are reticent to “fill in the blanks” on common-good constitutionalism or any other political-legal concept they promote is because it is important to them that it align with the wishes of a concrete (and at least mildly sympathetic) political authority. Integralists mortgaged their credibility during the Trump Administration by overtly or covertly embracing the “neo-Constantinian” justification for supporting a borderline madman unfit for office. Some in the integralist camp really believed that with a second Trump victory would come positions of power for themselves; the disappointment over his uncontestable defeat was bitter.

Another integralist pathology is tribalism. With their guru Adrian Vermeule leading from behind, integralists quickly circled their wagons online to ensure no “false thinking” weaved its way into their ranks. When brown-shirted thuggery on social media fails to work, integralists quickly dispatch their heads into the sand lest they acknowledge serious challenges to their sideways outlook. At times integralists will decry the downfall of academic freedom (or, really, their place at the discussion table since “academic freedom,” like “free speech,” is a sullied principle in their eyes), but they have a limited interest in real scholarly engagement. Even fellow Catholics who question the integralist project, particularly in light of post-Vatican II Church teaching, are often ignored or shouted down. And though integralism felt compelled in the early stages of its reemergence to connect deeply with Catholic social thought, few if any integralists bother these days.

All of this points to a third pathology in integralist thought, namely its irreconcilable endorsement of hyper ultramontanism with an empty anti-liberalism. Nary a word is mentioned concerning the sea change that occurred in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council, particularly with respect to the relationship between church and state. For integralism to be coherent, the 19th and early 20th century socio-political encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, and to a lesser extent Pius XII need to be in play. Yet integralists routinely reject what is called the “hermeneutic of rupture” approach to Vatican II in practice, though I know of no serious hermeneutical theory advanced by an integralists on this matter. Whether he considers himself an integralist or not, Thomas Pink surely comes the closest with his detailed analysis of Dignitatis Humanae and whether it represents a policy rather than a doctrinal change. Even if Pink’s assessment is correct, that does not paper over the fact that most integralists are wary to wade into hermeneutical waters lest their comedic fealty to whoever happens to be the pope is questioned.

There can be no serious doubt that Pope Francis is not an integralist, yet the ultramontane integralists rabidly defend him in their usual thuggish manner. The papacy, like Catholicism itself, has instrumental value for integralists. It represents a seat of seemingly unlimited power, one that has the benefit of lying beyond human convention. It is a “model” of sorts for them, albeit a poor one. Cast in a Schmittian light (such as what the former Nazi penned in Roman Catholicism and Political Form), the papacy is uninfected structurally with liberalism. (No words of comfort are offered on whether papal policies can be infected with liberalism.) This is perhaps why integralists are not bothered by papal blessings for liturgical deforms and doctrinal distortions; if they come from the top, they must be defended as good.

August 3, 2022 Eastern Orthodox Church, Reading, Theology

David Bentley Hart Is Not a Marcionite

Far be it for me to get too embroiled in one of many online fisticuffs over the works of David Bentley Hart, the recent fallout over Tradition and Apocalypse is as baffling as it is ridiculous. Tradition, which at its core is a critique of Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Doctrine, also features what I have elsewhere dubbed an “iconoclastic critical-historical reading of the Fall narrative.” This, along with some of Hart’s earlier remarks on various Old Testament lessons, has prompted some mental midgets to accuse Hart of—wait for it…—Marcionism!

Marcionism, in the popular polemical lexicon, is an empty-headed rejection of the Old Testament (Hebrew Scriptures) that was vanquished successfully in the early centuries of Christianity. Marcion of Sinope, that deeply religious man who promoted what he believed to be the authentic Gospel of Jesus Christ as found in a large portion of the Pauline corpus and an edited version of St. Luke’s Gospel, is the ancient villain; his contemporary disciple is apparently Hart. Others who are either accidentally or intentionally ignorant of the Old Testament are sometimes accused of Marcionism as well. Indeed, I have heard at least one Orthodox cleric chide his co-religionists for being de facto Marcionites. Perhaps he has a point, though what I think this priest is actually lamenting has less to do with an ancient heresy and more to do with general ignorance of the Scriptures.

The problem with accusing Hart or almost anyone of Marcionism, particularly when the concern is that a person either rejects the Old Testament or, in reading it, submits it to a critical-historical interpretation, is that it ignores Marcion’s own views. Marcion did not deny the historicity of the Old Testament; he believed it to be literally true. In his groundbreaking monograph Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, Adolf von Harnack goes to great lengths to demonstrate the degree to which Marcion took the Old Testament books seriously with nary a thought given to the possibility that they were distorted through alterations and interpolations as Marcion believed much of the New Testament had been. Moreover, Harnack also reveals that despite his low view of the judgmental “creator-god” of the Old Testament and his inferiority to the merciful “alien-god” of the New, the Old Testament remained a source of instruction.

Hart, by his own lights at least, falls into the orthodox Christian exegetical tradition where allegory and typology can have their say. These abominable interpretive twins were anathema to Marcion. Equally critical is the fact that Hart has never posited two deities, and despite accepting the findings of critical-historical scholarship concerning the origins of certain Old Testament narratives, he makes clear in Tradition that these stories are not without theological value. If anything, Hart appears much more interested in where these narratives, regardless of their “empirical” origins, fit within the story of salvation history rather than casting them aside as irrelevant myths that need not occupy serious Christians.

It is all but impossible to be a Marcionite in any legitimate sense without accepting Marcion’s unqualified belief that the creator-god of the Old Testament is not the alien-god of the New, that is, the merciful and loving Father of Jesus Christ. Although there will always be limits to what we can confidently believe about Marcion’s true thoughts, enough remnants of his intellectual work remain in the extant writings of his most rabid theological opponents for us to be sure that Marcionism had nothing to do with a radical rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Some might opine that this is all beside the point. Hart is dangerous, unorthodox, misleading, corrupting, vile, and so on and so forth; it matters not if he is truly a Marcionite. Maybe. If Hart were a Marcionite, presumably he would stay in line with the movement’s namesake by telling all with ears to hear about the higher alien-god of the New Testament, the one who remained hidden from human history until he revealed himself exclusively through the Gospel preached by St. Paul and kept, following some precise excisions and emendations, in Luke. A rhetoric of love, mercy, and peace would likely flow from Hart’s fingertips, not vitriolic dismissals carrying enough scorn to make the creator-god blush.

Hart, like most of his followers and critics, remains thoroughly Christian, however.

August 1, 2022 Catholic Social Thought, Integralism

Distributism vs. (Neo-)Integralism: Some Remarks

The following are some loosely formulated comments on the differences, or tensions, between distributism and integralism. As I am working on an article (or two) addressing this topic, it seems worthwhile to play around with it first on this web-log. Everything written below is provisional, even highly provisional. Two not-inconsequential problems that afflict a side project like this is that people disagree, sometimes vehemently, what distributism and integralism even are.

For integralism, many rely upon Pater Edmund Waldstein’s oft-cited “Integralism in Three Sentences.” Although I have immense sympathy for this definition, it points to an intellectual conception of integralism divorced from what I typically dub neo-integralism, that is, a power-intoxicated ideology that seeks to selectively blend medieval ecclesiastical history, papal pronouncements, neo-Scholastic philosophy, and atheistic authoritarianism into a practical political program. This worldly form of integralism pays lip service to the common good, but what it aims for is a hierarchically ordered society with technocrats holding the levers of power with divine and natural law serving as a distracting rhetoric to fig-leaf reality. For neo-integralism, religion, specifically Catholicism, has an instrumental purpose, and its pretense toward ultramontanism is in service to this open deception.

The meaning of distributism is also difficult to pin down, though an introduction to the topic by John Medaille is instructive: “Its key tenet is that ownership of the means of production should be as widespread as possible rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few owners (Capitalism) or in the hands of state bureaucrats (Socialism).” The mechanism of distribution remains contentious. Economic liberals, such as those affiliated with the Acton Institute, believe that distributism requires top-down economic planning with heavy taxation and regulation leveraged to disperse property far and wide. Socialist critics of distributism complain that it does not go far enough. Rather than serve as a viable economic ordo, distributism is an aesthetic that is unlikely to come to fruition through voluntary cooperation; the state must get involved.

Noting this, some might argue that since integralism or, rather, neo-integralism possesses a zest for state intervention, it can incorporate distributism. That assumes, of course, that a top-down solution is consistent with distributism; it is not. As Medaille and others have argued, distributism is not another form of Keynesianism or other economic ideology that seeks to constantly re-distribute wealth through taxation and/or regulation. Medaille in particular distinguishes between income (re-)distribution and property distribution, favoring the latter over the former. In Medaille’s view, if workers were paid just wages consistent with the tenets of natural law (and discussed in part by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum), then property would be more widely distributed as workers throughout the economy would have the means to acquire it. As neo-integralists tend to shy away from a thick conception of natural law, preferring instead to make mention rather than operationalize it, that solution is probably not on their radar. Additionally, given that neo-integralism is, by and large, promoted by white, educated males, with most holding incomes higher than the national average, distributive questions are likely peripheral; the power to make distributive choices, right or wrong, is far more enticing.

Two other tenents of distributism, which are also tenets of Catholic social teaching writ large, are solidarity and subsidiarity. According to Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, “Solidarity refers to the virtue enabling the human family to share fully the treasure of material and spiritual goods” while “[s]ubsidiarity is the coordination of society’s activities in a way that supports the internal life of the local communities” (Address to the 14th Session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (May 3, 2008)).

Neo-integralism defies both of these principles. Embracing to a toxic degree Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction, neo-integralists oppose the idea of a human family, that is, a single human race made in the image of God. There are, for neo-integralists, “natural” enemies, namely all of those who oppose their attenuated political Catholicism. These proverbial Dalits are only redeemable to the extent they can either support or provide cover to neo-integralist ambitions for power. (That these ambitions have and likely will forever go unfulfilled is beside the point; it is the allure of power that animates neo-integralist thinking.) As for subsidiarity, the neo-integralist administrative state, which models itself off of the current administrative state present in the United States, it is of no use. Local communities cannot be depended on to care for themselves. A plurality of voices expressing reasonable disagreements under the umbrella of a shared moral, social, and political grammar cannot be left to stand if those who have vested themselves with centralized control disagree. Technocratic uniformity is the highest end.

In closing (for now), it is not clear that distributism has a direct answer to integralism outside of what should be the Church’s answer, and that is well and good. While neo-integralism purports to conform with Catholic social teaching, it does so with as much sincerity as the Acton Institute when it informs young people that Leo XIII was a crypto-Lockean and Pope John Paul II baptized capitalism. And because distributism, like other attempts to put Catholic principles into practice, refuses to fit neatly within the structures of late-modern ideological systems, particularly those that feed the libido dominandi, it remains unattractive to moral miscreants.