With the American release of Houllebecq’s Submission [Soumission], I thought this was worth re-blogging for those who might have missed it.
Remarks on Taking Erik Peterson Seriously
In summarizing Erik Peterson’s provocative and still-timely 1937 essay, “Witness to the Truth,” Michael Hollerich writes that for Peterson “[a]ny regime that does not recognize Christ is ipso facto in the service of Christ’s enemy.” According to Hollerich, Peterson’s critique of the present age, one carried out through a penetrating reflection on martyrdom, is “orient[ed] . . . to the coming New Age rather than to a disappearing and irretrievable past[.]” Oddly, however, Hollerich remains uncertain what Peterson’s piece “has to say to those of us who live today with middling contentment, in the shambling structures of liberal democracy[.]” Hollerich recognizes “Witness to the Truth” to be “a powerful summons to resistance,” but for whom? It is at this point in his summary that Hollerich provides a list of potential audiences, editorializing on their relative worth at the same time before breaking off to allow readers to explore Peterson’s writing for themselves.
Erik Peterson on Liberalism, Politics, and Theology
The liberalism that asserts that theology and politics have nothing to do with one another, was the same liberalism that separated Church and State in politics and for which in theology the membership in the Body of Christ was only a matter of personal opinion and Christian dogma was only a mere subjective expression of opinion. It is clear that a privatization of faith, such as that carried out by liberalism, had to have a detrimental effect on every aspect of dogmatics. There God was stripped as far as was possible of his transcendent character so that he could be absorbed into a private religious relation. There the God become Man became a liberal bourgeois who in fact worked no miracles but made up for it by preaching humanity, whose blood was not in fact a mystery but died for his convictions, who in fact did not rise from the dead but lived on in the memory of those close to him, who in fact did not proclaim the end of the world and his Second Coming but taught us to see the beauty of the lilies in the countryside. There the Holy Spirit also was no longer honored as the third person of the Trinity but only related psychologically to the so-called religious experience of one’s own soul. The assertion that politics and religion have nothing to do with one another could therefore be implemented by liberalism only in such a way that the Christian faith was heretically distorted.
– Erik Peterson, Unpublished Manuscript (quoted in Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Expanded Edition pg. 10, fn. 25)
Protecting Souls and Banning Books
Though it’s been awhile, my latest contribution to Ethika Politika, “The Protection of Souls and the Banning of Books,” is now up online. Here is an excerpt:
What emerges from this unfortunate state of affairs is a culture of contempt for both the Church and traditional morality. It is now widely assumed rather than proven that the Scriptures are comprised of pious legends; natural law and teleology are untenable in the light of modern science; and that capitalism, liberalism, and democracy are the highest civilizational achievements in the history of mankind. What for ages had been, for the good of society and souls, prohibited is now permitted, and all under the guise of “enlightenment.”
Not every individual is capable of separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to disagreeable works, particularly when such works demand a great deal of intellectual sophistication. A well-meaning soul cognizant of the social principles set forth in magisterial statements such as Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, but with no formal training in economics, can be led astray by propagandist works from a certain marginalized school of free-market thought, particularly when those works are hybridized with ostensibly Christian thinking. In fact, there is an entire institute dedicated to that project.
You can read the full article by following the link. As always, I welcome thoughtful — including critical — feedback.
Augustus Sol Invictus
For a variety of reasons I miss teaching, and not just because I think young and impressionable minds ought to be subjected to my every intellectual whim and fancy. (That’s what blogs are for.) I miss it because teaching provided me with both the chance to sharpen my thinking on the subjects I taught (primarily aviation and trade law) and to interact with a fairly diverse group of students who routinely brought a surprising amount of intellectual energy to the classroom. I know not every professor, former or current, can say that, even at the law school level. Having had the luxury of teaching niche international-law classes which, generally speaking, attracted students with a genuine enthusiasm for the material, I doubt that my five years as a faculty fellow at DePaul University College of Law were in any sense typical. Adding to the atypical dynamic of my time at DePaul were the personalities of certain students, perhaps none more fascinating and offsetting than that of Augustus Sol Invictus. Yes, you read his name right, and if you have been following the news, then you know he is not only running for Marco Rubio’s former U.S. Senate seat, but apparently sacrificed a goat and drank its blood, too.
It is not my intention to speak in any depth on the personality or academic performance of Augustus. The former is apparent enough from his various YouTube videos, interviews, and Internet scribblings; the latter is nobody’s business. What fascinates me is what his “political orientation”—a strange brew of libertarianism and neo-paganism—says about the failure of American political ideology, one which historically took the liberal ethos and attempted to fuse it with Christianity (or, at least, Christian religious symbolism). Based on a perusal of Augustus’s writings, housed at his law firm’s website, it seems he is attaining to libertarianism’s apotheosis, namely the freedom from all reasonable constraint without any horizon or vision. Of course, there exists a tension between Augustus’s libertarian politics and neo-paganism. For while the libertarian wants a life free of demands and full of entertainment—the very thing which nauseated Carl Schmitt enough to come out swinging against liberalism in his seminal work The Concept of the Political (a book Augustus has perhaps read)—the pagan’s (though perhaps not the neo-pagan?) existence has cosmological meaning, albeit of a fated variety. Augustus, the good libertarian, doesn’t want fate; he just wants Lebensraum for guns and narcotics.
This confusion of the spheres is not entirely Augustus’s fault. Having been subjected to a run-of-the-mill undergraduate experience coupled with a “legal education” (I use that expression lightly given the current orientation of most law schools), he’s no doubt been taught how to huff hard the paint-thinner of secular-liberal ideology while embracing his “individuality.” That stab at individualism seems to have decayed ironically into an unspectacular internalization of the worst aspirations of American culture. Many may be nauseated by some of Augustus’s extracurricular activities, to say nothing of his personal beliefs, but he is fighting—or grandstanding—to defend them. He’s doing the same for society’s intermundane desire for six figures, semi-automatic rifles, good coke, 1.3 kids, and a porn-packed iCloud as well. Who are we to judge? We deserve him representing us.
Maybe Not So Difficult to Coopt Today
Pater Edmund Waldstein, over at his excellent web-log Sancrucensis, has posted an interesting quote from Alexandre Kojeve, the Russian-born French philosopher best known as being one of the intellectual architects of the European Union and a lifelong sparring partner of Leo Strauss. It reads thus:
The political and economic investment provided by France in view of the creation of a Latin Empire cannot, and should not, occur without the support of the Catholic Church, which represents a power which is immense, although difficult to calculate and even more difficult to coopt.
Kojeve wrote that in 1945. Today the situation may not be so simple. For while it may be difficult for outsiders to coopt the power of the Church, it has been disastrously easy for insiders to do so. No ideologically warped earthly force had to break down the doors; those entrusted with the keys, intentionally or not, opened them up to a spirit of questionable progress, all under the belief that somehow, someway a “New Springtime” would emerge. Well, it didn’t, and it hardly seems likely that, barring a miracle, the situation will change anytime soon.
Read Christian Democracy
You should read Christian Democracy, and not just because they were kind enough to re-publish my recent piece on “Employers, Laborers, and Just Wages.” Read it because the editor, Jack Quirk, wrote a blistering critique of the Acton Institute’s Dylan Pahman. Read it for the dozens of other articles which thoughtfully and faithfully engage Christian social ethics, including the Catholic Church’s social magisterium. Read it because it’s good.
Review: Stepan Bandera
Grzegorz Rossolinski’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult (Verlag 2014) is a straightforward book about an immensely complicated man with an exponentially more complicated legacy. In the aftermath of the Maidan in Ukraine, Bandera’s cult reemerged in such a profound way that for perhaps the first time ever, mainstream Western media, both in and outside of Europe, took notice. Fiercely nationalist at a time when that meant being rabidly anti-Polish and anti-Russian (or anti-communist), Bandera is an easy figure to rally around for Ukraine’s minority, albeit still formidable, far-right movements. Although Russian officials and media have been keen to label these groups “neo-Nazi,” the truth is that most of them trace their heritage back to Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) which, for better or worse, never saw the Nazis as much more than convenient bedfellows at a time when the Soviet Union appeared as the great Satan on the horizon.
Contra Acton – A Sampling
Since J. Arthur Bloom, in writing a take-down of Samuel Gregg over at The Mitrailleuse, was kind enough to refer his readers to this blog for posts critical of the Acton Institute and its propagandists, I thought I would offer a sampling from the archives on that subject. Enjoy.
- Acton, Progressives, and Orthodoxy
- Comments on Acton, Zmirak, and Integralism
- Acton Attacks Distributism (Again)
- Acton University and Blasphemy
- Acton University
- Pahman Contra Francis
- A Note on Pahman and Liberalism
- Samuel Gregg and the Rule of Law
- Scapegoats and Caricatures
- The Anti-Third Way Myth
- Libertarian, Or Not
- Capitalist Distractions
- The Crony Capitalism Claim
- Catholic Libertarianism
The Pluralism of Errors and Lies
If diversity becomes the highest principle, there can be no universal human values. . . . If there is no right and wrong, what restraints remain? If there is no universal human basis for it, there can be no morality. ‘Pluralism’ as a principle degenerates into indifference, superficiality: it spills over into relativism, into tolerance of the absurd, into a pluralism of errors and lies.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nashi Pliuralitsy