Christianity is the only religion to exalt love, even unto death, the only religion to honor great suffering, perhaps even require it, and the only religion to respect reason.[1] Each follows from the preceding as an unfolding consequence.
I. Of Love
Christianity is a religion of virtue. It says that only something above law can guide, perfect, and satisfy us. Most religions acknowledge this, and most declare this, but in doing so, most also say that the virtues above the law leave the human scene far below. In obeying God, we oppose human cravings; in worshipping God, we put aside human adorations; and in loving God, we leave behind mere human things, distracting, paltry, even vile as they are. The greatest human virtue detaches us from human beings, say these religions, as also do certain philosophies, such as Stoicism and Epicureanism. The vita contemplativa is higher than any portion of the vita activa.
In esteeming the vita contemplativa, in seeking the Beatific Vision, in practicing monasticism, Christianity agrees, but it adds a significant, even a transforming modification, for the virtue that it exalts above the law is love, love of God yes and “with whole heart, whole mind,” but also love of all His Creation, of His Creatures and, hence, also of yourself, one specimen of His best species. Thus, it reassures man; “Man, you are loved and you are worthy of love.” Some men wish they did not have bodies, but not the Christian, for Christ’s magnificent Incarnation, His suffering life as flesh, and His promise of Resurrection declare a soul in a body superior to a soul without one. Thus, when Paul wants to make clear how one is to love one’s spouse, he says, as you love your own body.
Yet the hard command of love challenges the Christian, in at least three ways. Christ commands us to love God; He commands us to love our neighbor, who is our fellow Creature even if he should be our enemy; and He built us to love ourselves. So linked are these three loves that they often appear together. Thus in the Gospels the command “Love your neighbor” never appears apart from the acknowledgment of our self-love: “. . . as you love yourself” (Mt. 22:39; Mk. 12:31; Lk. 10:27)[2] The one builds upon the other; it does not leave it behind; in the acknowledgment is an implicit affirmation. If we did not already love ourselves, He would also command us to do that. These two linked loves, which had also appeared in the Old Testament (Lv. 19:18), are augmented in the New by Christ’s new command, “As I have loved you, . . . love one another” (Jn. 13:34). This command makes Christ’s love the measure, the model, and the basis of our love of others. “Is your love like mine for you?” it asks. “Here, I will teach you by example as well as beatitude,” it teaches. And “Look, I love you, and that will make it possible for you to love,” it reassures. This new command adds that the greatest love of another is to lay down our life for another (John 15: 13), as He did. Sometimes, then, we are to love a neighbor better than ourselves, at least better than our life. Loving yourself, it turns out, may mean sacrificing yourself. The soul is more than the self. Will we be asked to make this sacrifice? We do not know. We do know that the command itself will help us if we are asked.
Christianity is the only religion of such love. The Muslims say, “God is great,” and the Jews and Christians do too. The Jews say, “God is good” and the Christians do too. Only the Christians say, “God is great, God is good, God is so loving as to give Himself.” “God is great” means God is God and we should submit to Him in fear and with obedience. “God is good” means we should revere Him. God is the Creator and we should thank him for creating all Creation good and for crowning it with His fitting image, Man, someone whose creation renders the whole “very good.” But “God is loving” means we should love Him as He loves us, has loved us, is loving us, and will love us. God is the Loving God, who not only created Creation and its Crown out of love, but who, in addition, is willing to suffer and sacrifice for its sake, who gives Himself over to suffering as the Son for Man. He is Love-become-man.
As a consequence of Christianity’s being a religion of Love, all faults, offenses, crimes, vices, and errors are seen in the light of Love. Thus, Sin becomes possible. Sin understands all these faults, crimes, and vices as rejections of love. The man or woman who does wrong, who goes against God’s law, or His decree, or His maxim, also goes against His love. All sins are a rejection of His Love. Islam understands all such trespasses as disobedience, as punishable disobedience. Israel understands them in addition as ingratitude, as often punishable ingratitude. Punishable ingratitude is, of course, already something impossible; for how can you punish ingratitude without making this virtue calculating, that is, not virtuous? This is the difficulty in King Lear, and why a religion of creation is incomplete without a religion of love. Christianity understands all faults, flaws, crimes, and vices as evil. What among the pagans is regarded as bad is understood by the Christians as evil. An Iago, a Richard III, a Macbeth, a Stavrogin are impossible before Christianity. Before Milton, Satan was a bit player.
As a consequence of Christianity’s being a religion of Love, certain faults or errors or weaknesses become sins and then crimes. Three are infanticide, suicide and what Thomas calls fornicatio simplex (premarital sexual intercourse). Among the ancients all these are treated as, at most, mistakes or follies, and then only upon occasion. Ordinarily they are treated as matters of prudence, to be decided by asking how the good in these circumstances, at this time, in this place, might be secured, by the sagacious man. So, Aristotle treats infanticide, abortion, and family planning under prudence; the city is to decide how many new citizens are needed, the deformed are never to be raised, and the holy is to coincide with quickening (Politics, 1335b20-26).[3] Likewise did the ancients treat polygamy primarily under the civil good; one legend about Socrates tells us that he had two wives, because the city of Athens, being somewhat depopulated by the war with Sparta, needed more children (Diogenes Laertius, Life of Socrates).
The same goes for suicide. It is for the man himself to decide whether continued life is desirable, and for the great man to decide how his “noble” death, consider Cato, may dishonor his enemies and give heart to the cause he leaves behind. For a modern ‘pagan’ such as Alexandre Kojève freedom is the ground of suicide; that man can kill himself most shows his utterly free and self-determining nature[4]; for the ancient pagans the ground of suicide, what justifies it, is the dignity of the purpose that animates the suicide. Modern suicide is grounded in freedom, ancient in wisdom. Similarly, the ancients were willing to acknowledge that premarital sex might be a folly, but no more. They did not consider the body a temple to be kept clean, a gift from God, to be dedicated to his purposes, and to share with one’s one chosen, dearly beloved for life. The ancients did not understand love as a gift. Nor did they regard virginity as a part of that gift, precious because it can be bestowed only once. They were far more concerned with incest than with adultery. Tolstoy’s Anatole they would not find very hideous, nor Natasha’s degradation very great, nor Andei’s repulsion just, if perhaps extreme. They had no high conception of the bond that might be made between man and woman. Genesis uses the great word “know” (4:1) and the beautiful, mysterious, strong expression “one flesh” (2:24) to name this reality, which it would never have occurred to the ancients to think of as a fitting image of knowledge.
The root of all these differences is the idea of the gift. The man who thinks he has a right to commit suicide, the magistrate who authorizes the exposure of babies, the mother who justifies the abortion of her child, and the human being who defends promiscuity as freedom, all think life belongs to them. Not so the Christian who greets life, in himself and in all others, with gratitude, because he knows life is a gift, a gift of the loving God, and consequently also a vocation (or both together in one word, a munus, an exalted task). Thus the Christian sees suicide as an offense against Creation and the Creator; suicide makes a hole in the whole. So too infanticide and foeticide; both are transgressions of the divine commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Both are murder. They are not violations of some right, as Locke and his students might style them, for there is no right-to-life in any of the three Biblical religions,[5] only a prohibition of murder and a duty to love thy neighbor, including the poor, the innocent, the vulnerable, and the small. In Christianity this protection is potently extended to the unborn by the Incarnation. Since the great gift of life begins at conception, so should the love of life.
As a consequence of Christianity’s being a religion of Love, all faults, offenses, crimes, vices, and errors are seen in the light of Love. If all these now are Sins, all are also forgivable. Christianity is a religion of forgiveness; we are to forgive others as we hope for forgiveness. Salvation itself is always forgiveness. And it could not be obtained without it; we are to forgive others before we are forgiven. Perhaps we are even to forgive ourselves before we are forgiven. And yet we could not forgive ourselves, since we are interested parties, unless we knew that God has already extended forgiveness to us. So, for example, that great criminal, Shakespeare’s Richard III, in his final conversation with himself (also his first true one) comes honestly to see how hideous the story of his life is, hideous to himself, whatever it may be to others; but honesty is not forgiveness, and in such a case as his, it is despair. Only if he could believe that he, even he, is already forgiven could he forgive himself and let love start up again in his furious heart.[6]
We see, then, that the very Love that Christianity commands in us depends upon the Loving Creator, even as it may call us to suffering.[7]
II. Of Suffering
Buddhism recognizes suffering, that suffering is at the heart of life, but then Buddhism rejects life because life is suffering. Good Buddhists are not meant to suffer. They are meant to transcend suffering, to transcend life. When they discover that life is nothing, they are to enjoy nirvana, the blissful sentiment of nothing, which is certainly not the same as joy. Not so the Christian. The Christian knows that life is something, that anything that is something must be good, that this mortal something is to be savoured. And if savoured, then to be suffered for as well, suffered with joy even.
The nobility of Buddhism is without passion; it is not noble enough. Only Greek tragedy, whose presiding god is the suffering god, Dionysus, approaches Christianity. However, love is not central to Greek tragedy; Dionysus does not suffer mortal life out of love. So, although the suffering Greek tragedy asks us to celebrate is noble, even very noble, it is not most noble. The extremity of Antigone’s giving and risking all is at the expense of the human good, both civil and familial. Christ’s Passion is not. The Greeks were laconic in their suffering; that is their greatness; but Christ was taciturn. He could have said so much more than the near nothing He did. In Greek tragedy the plot is supreme; in the tragedy that sprang from the Gospels, in Shakespeare and in Tolstoy, and in the Gospels themselves, the passions are supreme, and most supreme when they choose only a few words; consider the laconic love of Cordelia or consider the increasingly reticence of Christ Himself. Still Homer, whose Odysseus weeps for home, and all Greek tragedy seem, in respect to suffering, as true an Old Testament to our New as the Hebrew Bible.[8] In Dionysus, a god who dies for mankind, we have a type of Christ (as the Nietzsche who remained silent about the greatest thing in his Birth of Tragedy perceived[9]). And the trial and death and the cheerfulness of Socrates are closer to the trial, death and sadness of Christ than anything else.[10]
The important exceptions to this claim, which almost overturn it, are the Psalms and Job. There is nothing like the Psalms among the ancients, no one in Greek tragedy expresses desperation like the suffering Psalmist, thirst for justice like the obedient Psalmist, or delights in the Lord like the sweet Psalmist. Nor is there anything like the suffering psalms of Job. No one suffers or reasons so well as Job,[11] and no one speaks so mightily of comforting, terrifying, and yet satisfying things as God does out of the whirlwind. In a small voice in the wind He declares the high revealed source of nature; He, the Creator, delights in the whinny of a horse, He smiles upon the sports of Leviathan, He permits Satan, and He affirms the suffering inquiries of Job. And what are the sufferings of Cassandra compared to those of Isaiah? However, in Israel these magnificent voices are secondary to the law and later even tertiary to the Rabbinic elaborations, and to the elaborations of the elaborations by Rashi and the other remarkable commentators.[12] Within Judaism the voices of suffering become not merely secondary but exceptions to the rule, almost forgotten ones. After all, Job is not a Jew. It is Christ that makes these exceptions central; words from the Psalms are constantly on His lips, especially in sorrow, and also in joy, not words from the law, which He aims to reform, partly restoring, partly setting aside, and more than partly surpassing. One of the unexpected ways He is the Davidic Messiah is in His fondness for David’s Psalms; suffering links Christ who wept over Lazarus with David who wept over his dying child. As to Job, the connection comes through Satan. The only persons in the whole Bible Satan takes a personal interest in are Job and Christ.[13] Well might the loving, suffering Christ find in the suffering Job a type of His ordeal; being stripped of wealth, scourged in body, reviled by righteous men, and misunderstood by friends, yet never abandoning trust in the reasonable goodness of God. Indeed, it is “hard to dance with the Devil on your back.”[14]
Being a religion of love, Christianity sees the nobility of suffering. We do not suffer the most because we are flesh, or because we are mortal, or because we are subject to accident, chance, disease, and pain. We suffer more from boredom, anxiety and inconstancy (Pascal’s three), and yet we suffer more from something else. Not the thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to but the one almost supernatural shock we are heir to makes us suffer most. We humans suffer from love more than from anything else. No other religion knows this and teaches this but Christianity.
We suffer from love in many ways. We suffer through loving others — because they suffer, we suffer; and we suffer because those who love us suffer with us and we know it; and we also suffer from loving others, both because we see our very love makes them suffer and because we suffer with them suffering. And we may suffer from having no one to love and, perhaps most, from not being loved by anyone.
Thus, we suffer with those we see suffer. A boy falls ill, his father watches; “In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not,” concludes the father. A school arises, draws good souls to it, and ennobles them, but mediocrity usurps, and a teacher watches. Thus, Christ Himself weeps for others, twice, for Lazarus dead, even though He will raise him, and for Jerusalem soon to be destroyed. Or consider what it is like to see a daughter in grade school suffer from unrequited friendship. Or to see a daughter freely enter into an unwise marriage. Indeed, we may wonder if we suffer more when those we love suffer than they do. (Does God the Father suffer the Crucifixion more than Christ? Or purely delight in the goodness of the Son? And what of Mary?)
Knowing this, that others suffer with us, without being able to prevent our suffering or even sometimes to help us, we suffer with them as well as for ourselves. (Just as Christ did, knowing how His Father suffered because of Him, not being able to intervene or even to help very much, lest He compromise the free virtue of faith required of the Son in order to redeem Man?) Consider how a good son or daughter knowing they are doing the right thing, in choosing their life mate for example, but also knowing that their parent cannot for some reason, some reason perhaps linked up with their very virtue, understand their decision, consider how they will suffer for their parent, even though they know that they are right in the decision that the parent cannot yet understand and rejoice in. (Here there is no analogue in Christ’s relation to the all knowing Father, only an analogy between Christ and His human family, as for example when He rebukes His mother for asking Him to perform tricks before His time, before such miracles would have a place in His heavenly Father’s plan, or when He must be about His Father’s business in the Temple, even if His mother and father cannot understand [Lk. 2:41-52].)
And, of course, we suffer a great deal when those we love most suffer — we must admit — from our love. To know that your beloved suffers is painful but to know that she suffers because of you is terrible. When Othello realizes how the gentle Desdemona has suffered from his offended love, he is destroyed. Othello is Othello throughout. To love and not to be loved in return is terrible for him. Othello kills Desdemona for what? For not, as he comes to believe, returning his love. Even if true, would it have been a crime or misdeed? The pangs of despised love are nearly unbearable for us humans.[15] Christ in the Garden up all night suffered them. He had offered mankind the Kingdom, they had rejected it. Soon He was to offer Himself, they would reject Him, too. To the Pearl, all would play swine. “Man, man, why do you not love me?” is His silent cry. Perhaps when none of His disciples stayed awake with Him, He was tempted to feel, “No one loves me” and even to feel “I have no one to love.” If so, He rejected it; it is always our choice; there is always someone to love. He was leaving, they should have given Him a farewell dinner; instead He gave them one, one that is never finished.[16]
That He suffered the unreturned love of man, a greater pain than the Crucifixion, seems to be the greatest suffering as a human. The cry “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” may be even more terrible, for perhaps Jesus bore the pangs of despised human love through the night in the secure faith in the Father’s love, but lost that faith as He proceeded. Was He saying “Why did you send me to love men knowing they would reject me. Not a one accept the gift of the Kingdom. Not a one stay up the night with me.” And yet it is clear that there is a nobler suffering, not to suffer because your love is not returned, but to suffer for those who suffer, and even to suffer, that is, to sacrifice yourself for them, and to do so deliberately, willingly, lovingly. “Lord, let me love more than I want to be loved,” as St. Francis prayed. This Christ had already prayed, when he prayed, “Father, forgive them.” “Thy will be done,” He had said.
In being then a religion of virtue and in counting love the greatest virtue, Christianity is necessarily a religion of suffering.
It was, therefore, not accidental that in the tenth century after Christ’s Passion, Christianity should begin to sponsor public dramatic presentations of the Passion that gradually both amplified the story with striking details and likely episodes and united the community in witness to His great suffering; nor that these plays should become linked to the Feast of Corpus Christi, with its hymns written by St. Thomas Aquinas himself; for at the center of Christianity stands the suffering body of Christ on the Cross. The long consequence of this sponsorship of drama, in the center of which stands His great suffering, is the tragic drama of the revived Europe, including scoffing Marlowe, sweet Shakespeare, serious Moliére, and severe Racine. Nor are the sad, passionate narratives of Mme. de Lafayette, Constant, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Dinesen, which differ so from the serious narratives of Stendhal, Melville, and Conrad, possible without the Passion.[17] A suffering Christ, recognizably human, one whose body droops of its own weight, first appeared in Europe around the year 980 on the Cross of Gero of Cologne (still there) and on the back of the Cross of Lothair at Aachen (still there). This was a novelty, earlier crosses having celebrated the Resurrection, and yet this novelty was truly a mere consequence of His novelty. At about the same time, St. Anselm asked Cur Deus Homo? and answered with his new declaration of the Incarnation, and its Gospel premise: that God became man recognizes the dignity of human life, which we are to suffer with love, not flee.
III. Of Reason
God became man, but this Man was a disappointment to his native, political community, the Jews; instead of triumphing, He surrendered; instead of living, He died; instead of governing, He taught. And not only was his teaching reasonable, and withal wittily delivered, but in its highest pitch acknowledged the adequacy of reason below it. Christ was reluctant to perform miracles and, above all, refused to be the miracle the multitude expected as the Messiah. The virtue He taught was above reason, but His refusal to meet His students’ expectations eventually taught them they were capable of reason.
Only Christianity says its revelation accords with reason. According to its best teachers on this point, Pascal and Thomas, there can never be an enduring, deep conflict between the unaided human intellect and the one true revelation. In his Pensées Pascal argues that reason must conclude that life is wretched; it is a misery made more painful by traces of original grandeur; and Christian revelation agrees. Thus, an honest thinker will reason his way through distraction, comfort, and vanity to suffering, and there Christ will meet him and teach him the “joy, joy, joy” beyond it — will or not, since grace is not merited, although you must have merit to be worthy to receive it, have the “grace to be graced.” We know, says Pascal, too much to be skeptics and too little to be dogmatists. Thomas agrees that reason and the true revelation can never disagree, but he holds that Creation, including even fallen man, is good and that revelation agrees. Since Thomas sees the love of God everywhere — he would never say with Pascal: “Le moi est haïssable.” — it is understandable that Thomas and his view have prevailed in Christianity, the religion of love, as the most reasonable.[18] If “the me” is hateful, then we should hated everyone as we hate ourselves. That the love of God is to be based, and only based, in the hatred of oneself is the doctrine of Marcian, Luther, and Andrens Nygrenm, not Christ.[19]
We may, then, always proceed in two directions. We may proceed from what is evident to reason to check the claims of any thing claiming to be revelation; if they disagree with reason, it cannot be true revelation. This does not mean that reason understands all that Revelation tells of, only that the two can never disagree; Revelation might exceed what merely agrees with it. We may additionally proceed from reason to revelation, as love of wisdom seeking wisdom; for only if philosophy could declare that it has become wisdom, that it can give a complete account of the whole, could it exclude the possibility that its dearest desire is satisfied, only satisfied, by revelation.[20] In this way philosophy is reason seeking revelation. But we may also proceed from Revelation, from its truths, to examine Creation; Revelation then might give tasks, questions, hints, and problems to reason to work on. Revelation would then be, in St. Anselm’s words, faith seeking understanding. Thomas writes for the one in the Summa Contra Gentiles and for the other in the Summa Theologiae.[21]
Because reason can never disagree with true revelation, we are free to inquire as we can. We are even enjoined to. Our powers of mind are a gift of God; we are meant by Him to exercise them; we are meant to investigate Creation and its Crown, ourselves, with these powers. The twenty-five hundred, closely reasoned, double columned pages of the nonetheless incomplete Summa Theologiae were for beginners at the University of Paris, good Christians, brought up in Christian homes, and called, many of them, to the priesthood, yet in need of all that instruction. And in need of all that exercise in inquiry; for the form of the debated question in which Thomas casts his thoughts, previously given to advanced students not freshmen, is a formalization of the Socratic conversation, with others and with oneself.[22] This means that philosophy, as a way of life and not merely as a subject in a curriculum, an “area of study,” or a discipline, has a legitimate place in the life of Christianity. To philosophize is to please God. Philosophy is a calling, a vocation, a mission.[23] Together with his teaching, philosophy as a holy way of life is recognized in Christianity in the canonization of Thomas Aquinas as the Common Doctor of the Church. It is the only religion one can imagine asking a philosopher to be its pope.
The consequences of this true Revelation’s confident view of reason are immense. Christianity is the only religion to found institutions devoted to the inquiries of reason. The University, one of the distinctive institutions of Europe, is the work of Christianity. Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Wittenberg, Greifswald, Padua, Solerno, Naples, Uppsala, they were all founded by the Christian Church. Antiquity knew of places devoted to such inquiries, the Academy and the Lyceum are the most renowned, but their connection to the cities of men in which they arose was always tenuous and their relations tense. The cities regarded philosophers as proud and disloyal, and the philosophers found citizens to be unknowing, uninquiring, and unjust; the citizens always being in the majority, the philosophers adopted esoteric writing and esoteric living as a way of preserving their lives and, more important to the best, the possibility of students . For calling the city a cave in need of philosophic rulers and showing why no philosopher would want to, ironic Socrates was hemlocked; and for attempting to reconcile gentlemen to philosophy and philosophy to indirect rule through gentlemen such as Alexander, Aristotle would have been hemlocked, had he not fled Athens. Ancient philosophy and ancient religion, however much the former was indebted to the latter,[24] were always in fundamental tension.
Perhaps that is also true in Christianity; after all, Paris was over with as a place of great study soon after the all-too-nearby Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, condemned some theses in Thomas in 1277, and as Dostoyevsky suggested, it is most likely that if Christ came to teach again, He would be treated much the same way in Christendom as in Jewry. However, on the other side, the Church has again and again instituted the requirement that its priests study philosophy, especially that they study Thomas.[25] Christianity seems to be the only religion to require such study. Certainly Islam does not require it of its priests; Al Ghazali even forbids it.[26] Philosophy died out in Islam long ago. There have never been Muslim universities called Al Farabi or Ibn Sina or Ibn Rushd or Ibn Tufayl University. About Judaism, which honors the teacher or rabbi and so encourages study, the bar mitzvah being a ceremony in which the young Jew joins the adult community by sharing the fruits of his first studies, it is hard to say something simple. Perhaps it is most telling that while the Rabbis may study Maimonides, it is the Mishna that they would first turn to; and that while they are permitted to study the Guide, they would never be required to; one wonders whether the greatest Jewish philosopher was not so through esotericism.[27] While there are no Jewish universities called Maimonides, there are Christian ones called Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas More, Robert Bellarmine, Ignatius Loyola, and John Henry Newman. It would seem that only where reason and revelation are understood to be in harmony can there be such an institution as the University.
A second great consequence of Christianity’s confident view of reason is the whole endeavor of modern science. Christianity says not only “Go investigate Creation,” but, believing that the Creator God knows minute, moving particulars, as He has to in order to be a Loving and Provident God, Christianity suggested to some that there could be a science of such minute, moving particulars. That is exactly what modern mathematical physics is a science of, and that is exactly the way it differs from ancient science, which knows no mathematics of fusis.[28] Christian theology is a necessary presupposition of modern science.[29] This is not to say that modern science as a project, aiming to master nature for the relief of man’s estate, is a Christian project; for in Christianity the true relief of man’s estate is and always will be salvation, and the true “conquest of nature” is and will be always Christ’s Resurrection, not the abolition of natural death.[30] That there is something diabolical about this project is felt even by struggling atheists such as Melville, whose Ahab will put a hook in the very Leviathan Job was hushed by and, thus, whose spirit personifies the anti-theological ire at work in the conquest of nature.
IV. Of Statesmanship
There is a third important consequence of the Christian view that its revelation cannot disagree with reason. When Aristotle gives two definitions of man, as the “political animal” and as the “rational animal,” he indicates that there is some connection between reason and politics. Oscar Wilde put the connection with his usual succinctity: “Man is the rational animal who, when asked to be reasonable, gets very angry.” This is true; there is some reason in anger and some spiritedness in reason. In human beings rationality and sociality are so connected that it is natural for us to wonder how much reason can rule in human affairs.
According to Thomas, God rules Creation like the president of a federal republic. He is glad to encourage local autonomy; He knows virtue cannot be had without liberty; and He also knows that liberty requires government, lots of it, though most of it self-government. Not unlike Bach, He likes order within order. So the universe is hierarchically ordered, yet federal; ruled from the capital, but administered by the states, cities, and towns, magistrates, officers, and selectmen. It is hard to say whether the order exists for man (for man is the crown of Creation), or whether man exists for the order, since it is greater than him; certainly man does best when he fits himself to that order, in obedience, love and wonder.
In any case, God delights in the plenitude of being; He rejoices in the variety and kind of beings; and, above all, He smiles upon the virtues He has instilled in man, intrinsic to his created, given being, present despite the self-chosen fall, and with grace sufficient to govern himself. Of all the beings in the universe, men only have prudence (and only men need it). Prudence is men’s attempts to act providentially toward each other.[31] Although men need the grace of supernature to gain salvation, for the most part they need only act well according to the natural light to keep the peace and be just. Thus, the Christian Thomas Aquinas had nothing to fear in meeting pagan Aristotle, and so he taught the Church it had nothing to fear. Thus the Christian aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, had no great fear of democracy in America or Europe; he could even take considerable pleasure in the freely chosen marriages it promoted, in which affection is “deep, regular, and peaceful.” In no other nation has there been such domestic tranquility, and as a consequence, comparative political tranquility, too.[32] And thus the Declaration of Independence could distribute its four references to God so as to suggest the proper relation between the executive, legislative, and judicial offices.[33]
God in the Old Testament is the very pattern of the executive statesman, whose plans for his people need continual adjustment, as his expectations prove too high, who is often disappointed, and often tempted either to resign his office or to destroy his people as unworthy, who must often overcome his despair or his indignation, and who must constantly cast his mind far ahead of his people, have many plans and when these fail, fashion new ones, and always subordinate his just wish to be appreciated to their good. Thus, we witness how Adam and Eve are not equal to God’s gift of Eden; Cain needs to be told not to kill his brother; the generation around Noah deserves drowning; each time God has to be patient and make another plan. Even after He chooses a part of mankind to work with, the Israelites are disappointing; although oppressed in Egypt, they have to be led to liberty and then kept at it. Without Moses they might have returned to slavery and without forty years in the desert, without that hardening of the new generation, they might not have been able to hold the homeland promised them. Later they beg for a king, and God the enduring, grants them this dubious substitute for Himself. Nor is this concession enough. To balance the priests and kings, special prophets are regularly needed. Finally, nothing but exile and captivity seem likely to educate these most stubborn of pupils, but a good teacher is hard on his pets. Lest they lose heart utterly, and accuse Him of indifference, God the merciful removes the exile, and then lest they hanker for what had never worked, God the statesman offers a new way and sends His Son. For here, too, in politics, Christ is the answer to the contradictions of the Old Testament.
Among the things Christ leaves men free to choose is the regime. Although Christianity might be said to favor a mixed regime, with a federal system, and even a separation of powers, executive, legislative, and judicial, in accord with God’s own governance and His three persons, nevertheless it blesses all regimes in which the good can flourish, whether ruled by one, by a few, or by the many. It also encourages both a prudent endurance of the bad forms of the same and a sagacious alteration of the regime or its ruler when such alterations lead to an improvement proportionate to the trouble in securing it, as we see from St. Thomas’ On Princely Government, To the King of Cyprus, where the permission and even the duty to revolution are recognized, but quietly, along with the considerations that ought to dictate whether a people and its magistracy exercise it. The separation of priests and rulers, which eventuated in the modern separation of Church and State, is also Christian, as we see from St. Augustine’s not always invidious distinction between the city of God and the city of man,[34] the long separation, if also tension, between Pope and Emperor, and the present solely spiritual power of the Pope. While Judaism seems to prefer kingship, looking to the restoration of the nation through a David redivivus, and Islam sets forth a complete plan of human society, public and private, ruled by a theocracy, Christianity believes that God-given human reason suffices to order politics. In doing so, it is, however, not utopian; it does not expect perfect happiness from a polity comprised of imperfect souls, a reformation of humanity without human beings first reformatting themselves, nor the greatest political happiness to reach the level a single soul can enjoy. It makes sense to die for your country, said C. S. Lewis, but not to live for it.
The Gospel basis for this qualified confidence in the capacity of man’s natural powers of self-governance would seem to rest on Christ’s distinction between the things of Caesar and the things of God and those of His deeds that flow from it: that He befriended several Roman soldiers, never telling them to disobey or resign, that He considered the Romans perfectly capable of ruling (Mt. 22:15-22), and that even when His own life was in danger, He left Pilate and his superiors in place. (So Dante may not be wrong to think the Empire a blessed instrument of God’s will.) Christ did more, however. When He told the Mother of the Sons of Zebedee that ruling means, first, last and always, serving the good of others, He brought a new purpose to political life. Politics is a province in the kingdom of charity. In ruling others, the magistrate expresses love of neighbor, even unto the third generation. In being a religion of love, Christianity could not but scorn ambition and depreciate honor and yet encourage statesmanship; the sagacious care of a great man for those less gifted than himself is in some wise the image of Christ’s own charitable care for man. Thomas More showed this in his silent resistance to tyranny, Shakespeare shows it in his Henry V, staying up alone the night before Agincourt, and Lincoln lived it day to day unto death until our American house was no longer divided.
All three examples go to show what must be added to mere reason in politics: the suffering of the statesman. In Socrates’ sketch of the Cave, there is no reason for a philosopher to forsake the good of his own soul, descend to men, and rule them. For a man with such a rich mind ruling would mean spending many hours and many minutes with very boring persons. The philosopher has no incentive and also no duty to rule. No city ever introduced a potential philosopher to philosophy. The philosopher owes the city nothing. Not so according to Christianity. The Christian statesman is commanded to rule. Loving means serving. In promoting the good of the political association, the Christian may fulfill the duty to love others. And if his talents are rich in happier directions, it is a sacrifice, and thus an image of “as I have loved you.”
In being, then, a religion of love, Christianity must necessarily be a religion of reason, for the love that is Creation wants separate beings, capable of moving, to a considerable degree, on their own. Love is Creation, Creation is separation, and separation is only possible with reason.[35]
V. A Stumbling Block and an Absurdity
In a famous letter, Paul writes that Christ is a stumbling block to the Jews and a stupidity to the Greeks. What troubled the Jews was the way virtue supersedes the law; that the Law was made for virtue and not virtue for the Law seemed to compromise the Law and even to insult the Law-abider. Christ taught primarily by example and by precept, not code and casuistry; and what He primarily taught was virtue, above all the virtue of love, even unto forgiveness. While this teaching spoke to the wretched, to the self-knowing sinners, to the multitude, it offended the “good” and the “just,” especially the Pharisees, who diverted the multitude from Him and then sent it against Him. Others watching were offended that He was not the Messiah of their imagination.
As Pascal stresses, the Old Testament is written esotericly, in prophecies, proofs, and figures, discernible only to he who seeks, whole heart and whole mind, to others darkly, and to the proud not even darkly. At supper in Emmaus, Christ teaches exactly how He is the meaning of all the difficult passages; before that last supper, He had done so in His Passion, but none, none had learned; writing later, the Gospel writers often record how an event in His life or one of His speeches clarifies by fulfilling a passage in the Old Testament.[36] The Jews, the people of the book, a people of great readers if there ever were one, were not good enough readers, readers of their own book. Christ did not correspond to what they already very well knew from previous readings. It was not that Christ was and is hard to understand that troubled the Jews. Thus, few of them were puzzled at how He could be man and God at once; only His assertion that He was the Son of God troubled them, as blasphemy, as transgression of the Law. The Jew was and is willing to accept the mysterious God; there can be no theology, no logos of a God whose name, YHWH, cannot be pronounced. That God is the Word, the Logos, the reason, that He loves enough to become man, and that men can imitate His love, for example by forgiving one another, is unacceptable to the Law-abider.
Contrariwise, what troubled the Greeks was that Christ could not be understood. They had no great difficulty in understanding that virtue is above law. What troubled them was what puzzled them. How can love be the crown of the virtues? How can God be man also? How can this man also be God? How can providence and free will be reconciled? How can there be Creation? How can mankind have a story? A story broken in two and also bonded together by this Redeemer? We see these puzzlements in the Greek form of Christianity, especially in its theology, in its attempt to have an exact account of a mystery. Perhaps the characteristic Christian experience of this mystery is Thomas’, that day in December of 1273 when he stopped writing the Summa Theologiae and, to his perplexed pupil, Reginald, said quietly, “All I have written is straw.” Christianity cannot cease trying to discern how far reason goes and where revelation begins, and yet for that very reason must from time to time rest in silence.
So, Christ was like the medicine of Mary Poppins, with this difference: that there was something bitter in Him for everyone, what was bitter to one being not bitter at all to another; but bitter He was to every one in some way, before He could be sweet.
VI. Of Marriage
We may discern these three features of Christianity, love, suffering and reason, in the kind of marriages it promotes. Much as most religions esteem marriage, Christianity is the only religion to understand it as a great mystery.
As Vico says, where there is civility, there will be marriage. Every human society distinguishes mere copulation, lawless cohabitation, and even contractual concubinage from marriage, by the latter’s ceremonious, public beginning, its expected permanence, its inclusion of more than pleasure in the bond, and its purposeful attention to the happiness of more than the wedded two, especially to their possible children, but also to the welfare of the four parents of the couple, and even to the welfare of the nation, especially of Israel. Only in certain cities in the West and only very recently has the model of a couple, isolated from children by deliberate, lifelong contraception and isolated from their own parents by shunting the care for them in their infirmity off onto insurance, the state, and Florida, appeared.[37] As a replacement for mother, father, marriage and the children thereof, such a couple is revolutionary. From this couple to indifferency as to their sexes is a short step.[38]
Everything that has gone into the making of the West cries out against this model. To the Greeks it would seem Persian, fit for slaves, and their fleeting pleasures, whether living in tents or palaces. To the Romans it would seem the ultimate victory of the plebeians, unable to inherit, marry, or bequeath. To the Israelites, it must seem wholly lacking in that spark of divine likeness vouchsafed to those whose union is likely, the Lord willing, to bring into existence new, separate, human beings, male and female. “And he knew her”; what without marriage might be mere copulating is understood by Israel as acting very much in the image of the Creator; as the mark of creation is separation, so the mark of procreation is the separate fruit of it, a child. Israel knows that procreation is perhaps the activity in which man is most like God; this is something very great indeed.
Christianity includes this and more; for Christian marriage is more than a ceremoniously inaugurated union of a couple, soon likely to become a family, and to take its place in the order of families. The marriage Christ rededicated the Jews to and brought to the Gentiles is sacramental marriage. It is indissoluble, because it is one in purpose and because that purpose extends to eternity. It is not only to arrange a household, it is not only to procreate children, but to promote the salvation of the couple, of their children and of all the souls they and their children might spread the good to. Just as the sacrament of the Eucharist unites good things whose goodness is evident to reason, bread and wine, to things whose goodness partakes of revelation, namely Christ Himself, so marriage connects a great good in this life with the greatest good of the next. Just how these are connected is a mystery, to be lived. Christian marriage is something holy. The Song of Solomon, not adopted into the canon until after Christ, shows this, shows the state of soul a union of flesh is to promote and be a sign of, all at once. And all this for the sake of salvation, that is, for the sake of the souls. For how could one member of a full marriage be saved and not the other. Although there are to be no marriages in heaven, there may well be persons there because of the marriage they made on earth.[39]
St. Thomas More was probably not the only Christian husband to hope so, and even to see in heaven the possibility of meeting merrily with all he ever loved. “One of these ladies, my wife in the days of my youth, has made me father of a son and three daughters; the other has been as devoted to her stepchildren (a rare attainment in a step-mother) as very few mothers are to their own children. The one lived out her life with me, and the other still lives with me on such terms that I cannot decide whether I did love the one or do love the other more. O, how happy we could have lived all three together if faith and morality permitted. Well, I pray that the grave, that heaven, will bring us together. Thus death will give what life could not.”[40] Thus, runs the epitaph Thomas More left for his wives. He was a great lover, a great statesman, a great sufferer, and — might we say? — a great husband. And if we consider his education of his daughters, which make him the patron saint of all home-schoolers, he would seem to be the Christian for all seasons indeed.
As a consequence of Christianity’s high understanding of marriage, what the ancients understood as friendship, as a partnership for intellectual good, and limited to men with each other, became a possible aim of marriage, between a man and a woman. The ancients speak of friendship as “one soul with two bodies,” Christ thinks of a higher union of “two souls become one flesh.” The highest union known to the ancients is union through participation in the intelligibles or what was later called the active intellect; second to that was sharing in the quest for the intelligibles. The highest union known to Christians would be union with God; second to that is the union of two souls in one flesh, itself employed as a likeness by Christ (and by others) for the even higher unions. At the same time as friendship between man and woman was made possible, the scope of the good that might come from their friendship was expanded; it could now include family good and city good. Plato might think of a philosopher king and acknowledge, in his radical suggestion about the education of women, the possibility of a philosopher queen, but it was not until Christ that the world might think of philosopher dual monarchs. Shakespeare’s unprecedentedly intelligent women are one result.
As a consequence of its understanding of love, Christianity made marriage stricter. Neither the polygamy of the Muslims nor the divorce they (and the Jews) readily permit, the latter by the male saying “I divorce you” three times, are to be countenanced. In giving permission to polygamy, the Muslims overlook all the trouble that invariably flows from its practice by the patriarchs in the Old Testament, which they regard as a testament, however it is to be replaced by their prophet’s new, the Koran. Four wives, so many slaves. Christ gives no permission whatsoever to such treatment of woman. Although He everywhere sets virtue, especially love, above the law, he restores the full strictness of the original pre-Mosaic “law” with regard to marriage. For Him the teaching of love requires the protection of marriage. So, it is not accidental that he, unlike anyone else in the Bible, goes back to prelapsarian Genesis to speak of leaving, cleaving, and becoming one flesh. Mankind is capable of something like prelapsarian happiness, He is saying, if it will now obey these prelapsarian precepts. When Christ makes divorce forbidden, except for harlotry, He affirms the fleshly bond that unites husband and wife (Mt. 5:31).[41]
Although a Stoic, a man in despair, or a self-torturer might say “No philosopher would ever marry twice,” and although a philosopher might say, “Divorce is like suicide — the thought of it gets one through many a bad night,” a Christian, philosophic or not, will say that we do not know whether the suffering that comes from our choices is not part of the good of them, perhaps the better part, but that in any case, the good in marriage, as well as what it is meant to lead to, is most likely to be secured by the greater efforts you will surely make in the case where you know there is no way out. Such a Christian will say that, “The thought ‘no divorce’ may give one a bad night, but more often than not, gets one to many a better day. What God has united He is sure to bring good out of.”
Have you been in love? Then ask yourself what you and your beloved wanted, really wanted. What does love in a couple most want? Doesn’t it want a full union, for life, dedicated to a more than personal good, and ceremoniously begun in the celebrating presence of friends and family? Doesn’t a good couple want their one-fleshing to bring forth a new person? Doesn’t such a couple want to protect, nourish, rear, and educate their children, want a home to do these things in, want a community in which to have this home, and a nation in which to have this community? Such a couple want their union to be a conspiracy for the good and they want it to be forever. They want eternity. “I love you. It seems I always have. I always shall. I love you forever,” is what Love says. And all this is exactly what Christ recognized, taught and instituted. In part, it was a renewal. No one had noticed the words in Genesis about leaving, cleaving and becoming one flesh, until Christ did, and He mentions them twice. To these words, which occur before man’s disobedience and consequent ouster from Eden, He added the vista of eternity, the promise of salvation, and the great challenge, “Would you be willing to lay down your life for your beloved spouse?” as I have laid down My life for you.
In being then a religion of love, Christianity could not but be a religion of solemn, sacramental, high marriage.
VII. Christianity is, then, the only religion to properly appreciate love, reason, suffering and marriage. If we look, then, to these sensible goods in human life, including the discernible good of suffering (for we would not wish life without it), we find evidence for the truly revealed character of Christianity. The only religion to teach the truth about love, suffering, reason, and marriage must very probably be true. Thus saith Reason itself. And to this, Revelation might add, “Only because I taught these things first, came down to human life and suffered it to teach them, did you, dear Reason, have the opportunity to discover them on your own.” And Reason might nod, and agree, and pray in thanks. And if Revelation be faithful, Reason’s reward will be a beauty ever elating, a wisdom ever wondrous, and a happiness ever perfectly mixing loving and being loved.[42]
Michael Platt
Friends of the Republic
This essay was published in Saints, Sovereigns, and Scholars: Essays Presented to Frederick D. Wilhelmsen ed. Fr. James Lehrberger, Robert Herrera, & Mel Bradford (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 211-230. This text above restores my chosen words and includes some improvements.
ENDNOTES:
[1] This apology was originally prepared for a certain student, dismayed at my recognizing myself a Christian (to him a dismaying reversal not a recognition), so that he might see the steps that prepare the mind for it, in particular our studies together, and thus at least deem it no scandal. That this apology might also speak to the desires of his soul was my hope as well. The scene of these events was the University of Dallas, which while its founders (Louise and Donald Cowan) were still present brought together Christian teachers, such as Fritz Wilhelmsen, and ardent seekers, such as this student.
[2] Thus, while self-discipline, self-denial, and readiness to bear a cross are praised, self-hatred is forbidden. The point is important in an age inclined to self-destruction, with multitudes of souls in a state of hatred, hating themselves, hating others, hating everything. Strange to say, it is no more easy to love thyself than to love other selves. Thus, a person who regularly burns himself in the kitchen has reason to learn from Montaigne’s “Of Experience” what he did not notice the stove teaching him.
[3] Note that Aristotle disapproves of all abortion after quickening. His and Hippocrates’ teachings are, then, not enduringly opposed to Christianity; neither, for example, supports current Roe v. Wade practices; Aristotle simply did not recognize, as modern biology has discovered and the Incarnation knew, that distinct life begins at the first union of sperm and egg; might one not ask, or even presume, that good biologist Aristotle would revise his view of infanticide accordingly? That modern biology has confirmed a teaching implicit in the Incarnation is, we may remark, a good example of the way the revealed doctrines of the Christian faith give reason something to investigate.
[4] One may doubt whether an absolutely self-determining being has a nature, and whether modern ‘pagans’ are pagan, since they do not worship any of the pagan gods or any others.
[5] Vis à vis the Creator there can be no right to life; consider Isaac, or Ps. 123, or Christ Himself.
[6] See my essay on Richard III: “Can There Be a Christian Tyrant?” Interpretation, Vol. XX or so; or the relevant chapters of my Shakespeare’ Christian Prince (Lanham: University Press of America, 1992).
[7] Thus, it is not easy to distinguish, for the purposes of this essay, Judaism and Christianity. After all, for a Christian, Christianity includes Judaism, even if it goes beyond it. Yet for a Jew, suffering Christ cannot be the princely Messiah, the New Testament does not cancel the Torah, God cannot become man, and there is no logos of the God, YHWH, whose name cannot be spoken, thus no theology.
[8] Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity (among the Ancient Greeks) trans. Elizabeth Chase Geissbuhler, (Boston: Beacon Press, n. d.).
[9] As Nietzsche said in his later “self-criticizing” Preface. It is worth noting that in the middle of his most trenchant criticism of Christianity, Der Anti-Christ, Nietzsche provides a most glowing portrait of Christ. Not for nothing is love the highest virtue for this suffering man. Or as Romano Guardini once said of Nietzsche, “A Pascal in a cold age.” (This remark I had from Helmut Kuhn.)
[10] Awaiting execution in the Tower, Thomas More, who was a gentleman, a Platonist, and a saint, wrote the Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation . In it we read:
And for to prove that this life is no laughing tyme but rather the tyme of wepyng, we fynd that our saviour hym selfe wept twise or thrise, but never fynd we that he laughed so much as onse, I will not swere that he never did but at the lest wise he left us no samples of it.
As the author of the Utopia surely knew, exactly the opposite is true of Socrates; Socrates never weeps but laughs twice or thrice, for example, at the end of the Phaedo. See Volume 12 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), Book I, Chapter 13, p. 42. Cf. Kierkegaard, Philosophic Fragments (1844) and Romano Guardini, The Death of Socrates and The Lord, for pointed confrontations between Socrates and Christ.
[11] See Thomas Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on Job, excellently ed. and interpreted by Martin Yaffe (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989).
[12] A very important exception is Robert Sacks, once the student of Leo Strauss, whose Lion and Ass attempts to read the duodecateuch, which Spinoza first deconstructed, as if it were a kind of Homeric epic; the results are remarkable. See successive issues of Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, vols. VIII 2/3 to XII 2/3. Unfortunately the reprint of these, by Mellen Press, is poorly paginated and expensive. Cf. Umberto Cassuto, Commentary on the Book of Genesis: From Adam to Noah; Commentary on the Book of Genesis: From Noah to Abraham; Commentary on the Book of Exodus all trans. from the Hebrew by Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: at the Magnus Press, Hebrew University).
[13] My thanks to Miss Holly Weaver for this observation. (I leave aside the identification of the Serpent with Satan.)
[14] I cite the old Shaker song, “The Lord of the Dance”; about it, performed by Jack Langstaff and the Revels, a thoughtful unbeliever said rightly, “It almost makes you believe.” I am grateful to Eric Salem for playing it.
[15] The worthiness of Owen Wister’s Virginian is shown when he puts the happiness his beloved Molly might enjoy without him above the happiness he always believed he could only attain with her. He loves more than he wishes to be loved. It is not accidental that he says such a story as Othello should never be shared. Good men are better than mere heroes as much as good literature is than great.
[16] For this insight, I am grateful to the preacher at St. Austin’s in Austin, Texas, Holy Thursday, 1985. For another dinner, a year earlier, given to my Russian novel students and to me, I am grateful to Louise and Don Cowan; at its center was the sufferings of the Karamazovs, yet the recognition of them turns a tragedy into a comedy, not unlike the community that supper with Christ makes.
[17] Consider the parallel thesis: that the tragic seriousness with which modern writers, such as Flaubert, Balzac, and Woolf, treat events of mundane life is the consequence of the Gospels’ mixing of high and low styles, in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, 1953). For Dinesen, consider “Babette’s Feast” and “Sorrow Acre” with its preference for the Roman over the Norse gods and the justice of the ancien regime rather than the Revolution.
[18] Here let me put, for examination, this query: is there much place in the reasonable and revealed world of Thomas for suffering? Insight, as with almost all the philosophers, save Pascal and Nietzsche, would seem to mean that suffering is unnecessary. Thus, if you find yourself in a painful dilemma, from which there is no painless escape, that must mean you made a culpable mistake earlier, says Thomas. And thus the Beatific Vision is not necessarily the highest reward of martyrdom, nor does it seem even to require prior suffering.
[19] Luther: Est enim dilegere scipsum odisse. See Anders Nygren, Eros und Agape:Gestaltwandlungen der christichen Liebe Two Vols (Gütersloh, 1930, 1937); for the Luther’s declaration, see II, 533; illuminating on love is Josef Pieper’s Über Liebe (Kösel-Verlag: München, 1972); English edition Francisdan Herald, 1974. .How I wish I had read it before visiting Pieper in his later years.
[20] See the three part lecture series by Leo Strauss, entitled “Progress or Return”; the first two parts published, unfortunately in an edited version, as “Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization,” in Modern Judaism, Vol. I (1981), pp. 17-45; and the third part entire, as “The Mutual Influence of Philosophy and Theology,” Independent Journal of Philosophy, Vol. III (1979), pp. 111-118. See also M. B. Foster, Mystery and Philosophy (London: SCM Press, 1957).
[21] See my essay “Why Did Thomas Write Two Summas?” forthcoming sometime, I hope.
[22] See my essay “The Thomistic Question” forthcoming sometime, I hope.
[23] An account of the life of the mind as a spiritual calling is to be found in A. D. Sertillanges, O. P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, trans. from the French by Mary Ryan (Cork: Mercer Press, 1948), itself a much expanded commentary on Thomas’ “Letter to Brother John”; since 1987 a reprint of this thoughtful guide has been available from Catholic University Press.
[24] See Michael B. Foster, The Political Philosophy of Plato and Hegel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935).
[25] See the Introduction to the Leonine edition provided by Pope Leo XIII.
[26] See Al Ghazali and Averroës in The Incoherence of the Incoherence ed. Simon van den Bergh (Princeton University Press, 1954). ***Mention better edition.
[27] See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing and his introduction to the Schlomo Pines translation of the Guide (University of Chicago Press).
[28] Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra trans. Eva Brann (M. I. T. Press, 1968), orig. in German in 1936.
[29] See Michael B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” Mind, Vol. XLIII (1934); “Christian Theology and Modern Science of Nature (I),” Mind, XLIV (1935); and “Christian Theology and Modern Science of Nature (II),” Mind, XLV (1936); the first of these excellent, neglected articles has been reprinted in Creation: The Impact of an Idea, eds. Daniel O’Connor & Francis Oakley (New York: Scribner’s, 1969).
[30] The first and still the best thinking about man’s potential mastery of life is to be found in C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947); cf. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper, 1977); about our potential mastery of death, see the present author’s “Would Human Life Be Better Without Death?” Soundings, LXIII (3), Fall 1980, pp. 321-338; about man’s mastery by technological death, first and best is Winston S. Churchill, “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” Amid These Storms: Thoughts and Adventures (New York: Scribner’s, 1932).
[31] See Thomas on prudence; the importance of this virtue is prudently and pleasingly emphasized in the works of Josef Pieper, especially The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame, 1954).
[32] Mme. Bovary was, in the America he visited, unthinkable. See Alexis de Tocqueville, La Dêmocratie en Amêrique, Vol. II, Part Three, Chapters 9-12. He had one great apprehension, that there would be “no Pascals” in America. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln would satisfy him.
[33] This was first pointed out to me by George Anastaplo. That two of the four were insisted upon by the committee, not drafter Jefferson, only strengthens the point and, perhaps, the Providence.
[34] Augustine’s distinction between the city of God and the city of man, although it teaches that there is a very great difference between the great goodness of the one and the great concupiscent sinfulness of the other, is not entirely invidious because he acknowledges that, on the whole, justice among men and just peace among nations promotes salvation. Although Augustine was hard on the political virtues, calling the virtues of the pagans but splendid vices, charity checked him from going further. The proof is that he permits Christians to serve as magistrates, rulers, and soldiers and that he recognizes just wars. If anything, his distinction is harder on the Church, since it suggests that the best life is monastic; to be an abbot or, better, a solitary monastic, seems to make one more nearly a dweller in the city of God than being a bishop.
[35] On separation as the link between making and knowing, see Leo Strauss, “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” L’Homme, janv.-mars 1981, XXI (1), pp. 5-20.
[36] Thus, the alarm expressed by some Christians at Leo Strauss’ discovery of esotericism in the philosophic tradition (in his Persecution and the Art of Writing for example) seems to coincide with a lack of reflection upon the Christian scriptures.
[37] In justice, it must be added that the current generation of oldsters in the West are the same that as parents created the Teenager by orphaning their own children; see my “Souls Without Longing,” Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, XVIII, 3, (1991) pp. 415-465.
[38] On this swift decline, see J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man (Spence Publishing, 2004).
[39] Aside from Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and the Gospels themselves, the best accounts of courtship and marriage I know of are to be found in Walter Trobisch, The Complete Works (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity, 1987), several of whose points I incorporate, gratefully. I am aware that Luther, in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and some other Protestants deny that marriage is a sacrament; however, many, including Luther, do recognize it as a great mystery, newly instituted or reinstituted by Christ.
[40] Quoted from Thomas J. McGovern, Sir Thomas More: The Making of a Saint (New Rochelle: Scepter Booklets, 1981). For a union of such loves this side of heaven, read James Hilton’s Random Harvest.
[41] Jerome translates the Greek, pornaias, with the Latin, fornicationis.
[42] What I owe to teachers and friends and the gratitude I feel to them, Helen Boyden, Marvin Kendrick, Leo Strauss, Bob Fastiggi, Jan and Aleida Assmann, Seth Benardete, Eric Salem, Michael and Suzy Waldstein, Pamela Hall, the Heribert Boeders, Louise and Don Cowan, Holly Weaver, Tom Susanka, Richard and Kathy Ferrier, Martin Yaffe, Patricia Ellen Murphy, and John Senior, is abiding. Here is also the place to express thanks to Ed Sparrow, Fr. James Lehrberger, John Crosby, and Leon Holmes for comments on this apology.
Caboose: in NT “disciple” 269 times, “Christian” on 3 times
Friends Of The Republic 