Sense and Nonsense: Political Theory, War, and Religion

Nor could Mrs. Thatcher forget, she said, the Berlin Wall (of which her first sight last month so powerfully impressed her.) It was “a grim monument to a cruel and desolate creed, concrete evidence that the Communists know that when people are free to choose, they choose to be free.  ∼ The Times, London, Nov. 16, 1982

Archbishop John Roach of St. Paul-Minneapolis, President of the National Conference of Catholic, Bishops, said in summing up the bishops’ two hour critique of the (nuclear war) pastoral that “he could not specify an instance in which any of the bishops who spoke appeared to have been influenced by the (Judge William) Clark letter (on the Administration’s position).  ∼The Washington Post, Nov. 19, 1982

But the fact is that if we were to sacrifice deference to the needs of the welfare state, the day might come when we should have neither peace nor freedom, nor be able to provide our people with the schools, the hospitals and all the other elements of a modern civilized state. Mrs. Thatcher opposed unilateralism. The thesis that one-sided disarmament by the West would reduce international tension was “the great illusion of our time.” She pointed to the “massive superiority” in the Soviet intermediate range nuclear forces with 132 more SS20 warheads positioned this year, facing Europe.  ∼ The Times, London, Nov. 18, 1982

While watching television one morning during the heavily covered November episcopal discussions on nuclear war, I was rather astonished to hear three different interviews in which 1) the Archbishop of St. Paul likened nuclear war to abortion, 2) the Archbishop of Washington compared it to suicide, while 3) the Archbishop of Chicago affirmed, on close questioning by a lady reporter, that defence workers need not quit their jobs after all, though they do need to resolve their responsibility by following their “consciences.” Now, as I think that there is a rather pronounced difference of principle between war and abortion, however much both touch innocent life, that suicide is the opposite of death in defence of justice, and that the principle of subjectivism is no more valid for war than birth control and other such pleasantries, I had to ask myself what are we witnessing here, listening to these ecclesiastical opinions on television?

I will try to think out loud and frankly about this. So public has it become, simultaneously so obscure, that we must assume everyone, not just the hierarchy, is locked in public debate. This debate, however, is no longer limited to our time or to our country. We have yet to hear from German or French bishops, and perhaps all other national hierarchies, including the Russian. When we think about it, this prospectus alone must make us realize why we need a papacy, which has in fact already spoken very well on this very topic. This makes us wonder especially why the discussion has come up now and in the fashion it did. Are we witnessing the formation of an “American National Church,” as some wonder.

Catholics are, above all others, bound by the truth of their tradition, which is rooted in revelation and reason, which itself must account for the “practical reasonableness” of men and women actually responsible for making military and political decisions about actual human lives and values, something which the bishops do not themselves have to do. I have argued in recent years that a careful reading of anti-war, anti-nuclear literature reminds one of nothing so much as Hobbes. C.S. Lewis had rightly worried about this from the very beginnings of the nuclear era. Substantially, we seem to be holding a position which elevates the fear of death to the highest known norm of morality, before which all estimates of either consequence or principle must yield. It is common place that the opponents to nuclear defence, including the draft documents of the bishops so far presented, misunderstand an actual enemy’s power and the workings of the politics designed to contain it. In this context, the very formulation of the immorality of war becomes the perfect formula by which a smart and forceful enemy can guarantee his success, by himself following the norms restricting his enemy. The Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, put it well, “The bishops believe that they can oppose such attacks (on military targets in or near civilian areas) on the ground that civilian losses will be disproportionate, despite the clear intention to attack only military installations. Have the bishops considered, however, that the practical moral consequence of such a prohibition will be to encourage our adversaries to locate their forces in or near civilian areas?” (Wall Street Journal, November 15, 1982) Precisely this sort of common sense of the active, careful man responsible for actual situations seems to indicate the direction in which the real problem lies.

From an intelligent enemy’s point of view, then, the way to conquer an enemy is not by war, but by the mind, so that the moral arguments of the religious leaders become precisely the ones employed to guarantee success on the side of the force not, ex professo, ruled by classical reason. Thus, if it be held absolutely “immoral” to use nuclear weapons on cities, the only “rational thing” to do is to move the citizens to where the weapons are or the weapons to where the cities are, precisely to disarm morally one’s enemy! In other words, the very arguments about the “morality” of nuclear weapons are themselves weapons to be used against those enunciating the immorality of not using them. War remains an extension of policy. And policy remains the question of liveable and unliveable regimes. Mere “staying alive,” then, cannot be the moral principle of this debate.

In the effort to “understand” just what this whole issue is about, that it reaches far deeper than we are wont to imagine, I am encouraged by the remarks of Archbishop Oscar H. Lipscomb, who almost alone of the statements I have seen — Bishop John J. O’Connor, of course, excepted — has grasped how the nuclear debate, as it is currently argued, may well reveal a serious misunderstanding of both revelation and reason. “My concern is that we have appropriated a secular value in a subtle but real way as the summum bonum,” Archbishop Lipscomb wrote with great perception.

We speak of the “existence of our planet” almost as one absolute, and our very concept of peace can easily be equated with the merely temporal order. We seem to assign the human species itself a right to eternity. This is certainly not the “biblical vision of the world at the heart of our religious heritage.” The worst evil that can befall us is not the loss of our life, or of even all human life. It is sin and the consequent loss of that life in the Father through Christ by means of the Spirit that we rightly call “life everlasting.” Should this world and our species remain in such a way that such life in the Father is not possible to generations that would follow then we have threatened not just the sovereignty of God over the world, but the victory of Christ over sin and death. (New York Times, Nov. 19, 1982)

This, I repeat, is a remarkable passage, the only episcopal statement that I have seen which seems to understand the major issue presented by the way the nuclear war debate has been presented.

The effort to raise the “species” over the individual, the replacement of personal immortality and hope of resurrection by the ongoing life of the species on this planet, the reduction of the personal life of each to a new form whose “structure” or “form” is man-controlled and man-made, such are the issues that arise directly out of the nuclear debate and ought not to be avoided. This is why, no doubt, the bishops’ teachings have suddenly, almost for the first time in the modern era, had such “modernist” support. It is recognized that an historical rapprochement may be in the offing here. Thus, that the philosophical origins of this sort of thinking be properly located and defined is of great significance, as it is not so benign as it might appear at first sight. Surely Archbishop Lipscomb is correct in sensing that what is going on here may well be the very possibility of a Christian understanding of man on this planet, a possibility jeopardized by the intellectual quality of the debate itself.

Central to the underlying issues is the question of the relation of modern political theory to revelation, particularly Christian revelation. Many perceptive political thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Joseph Cropsey recognize something is wrong here, in Christianity’s understanding of itself. Since the death of Maritain and Gilson, we have not had any really adequate understanding of what might be the trouble. The terms of argument in the public forum by which the very possibility of revelation has been defined usually come from philosophers with Jewish backgrounds, thinkers who have understood the relation of classical political thought to modernity in intellectual terms. This question lies at the heart of the nuclear war debate and ought, but does not so far, provide a place for the voice of Christian revelation, in its intelligible implications, to be heard. The curious Catholic hostility to the one voice that does seem correctly to estimate the problem, that of John Paul II, is to be noted. This opposition derives from the same intellectual source. To grasp why the Pope’s approach to the nuclear issue has not been accepted as sufficient in this country is to begin to understand the core of the real problem.

Several bishops were heard recently to suggest that “nuclear war is the greatest moral issue of our time.” At first sight, this seems perhaps like exaggerated rhetoric. But if taken seriously, as I think it must be, we can appreciate how it is open to a theory of political philosophy, coming from Machiavelli and Hobbes, that holds success in staying alive, particularly for the human race, to be the essential and ultimate principle of political activity, if not of metaphysics. This is not, however, classical or Christian in origin. This is why modern political philosophy, what Leo Strauss called “the modern project,” has at its roots the rejection, one by one, of the classical and Christian understandings of man. Nuclear war is, then, presented in such a fashion that it must be avoided at all costs, as obviously it must be if it be defined as the worst evil.

However, if this premise is granted, it means that religion must now be conceived as if its main “mission” is to justify, to a people believing this theory about war, that they must live under the worst regime. The much discussed alliance of theology and socialism, be it remarked, has this as its long-range purpose, under the general rubric of “liberation theology.” This “moral” duty to accept the worst regime is no longer the mere accident of having been defeated or having been born in a worst regime. Rather, it means the religious duty to join voluntarily and to live under the worst regime seen as necessary by virtue of the moral argument about nuclear war. This is, I think, what Archbishop Lipscomb meant when he wondered about our “species” remaining in a world wherein belief was rendered precisely impossible. There is both a totalitarian state side of this argument and a genetic control side, and they are not unrelated. Indeed, this is why, for many of us, there is some philosophical relation between the anti-nuclear war effort and the endeavor to “tame” the anti-abortion movement, so that its energies and organizations become subsumed into the theoretical anti-war effort.

No one exemplifies the dimensions of this issue better than Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In his Harvard Address, he had already suggested that the loss of precisely “civic courage” was the most serious problem we face as a culture. We must, in this context, recall that the classical tradition about the virtue of courage, beginning in The Apology of Plato and The Ethics of Aristotle, reminded us that there were higher things than merely “staying alive.” The “common good” for which we might die was an order of virtue and transcendence. Courage, though the lowest of the practical virtues, was, nevertheless, the one which guaranteed that “right” would not be sacrificed to mere continuation in being at whatever cost to truth. Truth in this tradition ruled freedom and virtue.

At the political level, then, there was a direct link between the lack of both courage and moderation and the embracing of the worst regime, a link Solzhenitsyn directly made, along with the experience of having lived in such a regime. In a most graphic passage, Professor Sidney Hook, commenting on this, put his finger on what worries more and more people about what many bishops at least appear to teach. “Sometimes the worst thing we can know about a man is that he has survived,” Hook remarked. “Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have already written for themselves an epitaph of infamy.” (Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, Washington, Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980, p. 97.) The “logic” of the nuclear war argument leads to the same result for a nation, a religion, or a culture, when it affirms that there is nothing higher collectively than “staying alive.”

Thus, when a real “worst regime” forces the terms of debate so that there is no alternative but death or surrender to it, we have arrived at a point where the “modern project” is fully embraced. The “modern project” — the term is that of Leo Strauss — sees, as Hobbes argued, nothing higher than “staying alive” or “successful survival” as the heart of human value and ethic. Fear of violent death for oneself or the race becomes the operative, ultimate, practical evil. What is doubly strange here is that it is now not an argument coming from actual politicians or even political philosophers as in the past, but precisely from religious leaders. This implies a failure to understand the nature of political philosophy and of statesmanship, something the central tradition from Augustine to Aquinas never allowed. It also implies a secularization in the ultimate goals of religion, the Enlightenment project. The teaching on nuclear war, in so far as it does not allow a serious, risky, practical defence, in the name of that life that is more than mere life — the living well, rather than mere living, to follow Aristotle — against an understood, powerful, aggressive totalitarian system, itself arising articulately out of western religious and political philosophy, seems to be teaching that survival, no matter into what system, is the highest good, the “summum bonum”, as Archbishop Lipscomb called it.

The principle of survival over death, thus, has become the basic philosophic position by which we organize society to guarantee “universal peace,” to use Kant’s phrase. The current teaching about war seems to use this principle against the classical and Christian (just war) tradition, in which natural and revealed norms were taken to be primary over survival at any cost, even the cost of death. Having cleared away the classical norms, which were based on Socrates’ dictum that we ought not to use our “wits to escape death by any means,” modern theory is in a position to deal with what is left with no norms, namely, with a man presupposed to no standards, these having been removed by the fear of death principle from public discourse. This “modern project” now reconstructs man in his own image, in which the worst regime no longer appears as the worst regime. That is, by overturning all criteria, the worst regime, which now, as The Republic suggested, “seems” to be good, can be conscientiously embraced as the “best” thing, when the alternative of death is squarely presented as the alternative. Sights are thus lowered in a double sense, to use Machiavelli’s notion, the transcendent personal end is made political, and the political is lowered to the mere keeping alive of the species, as Hannah Arendt showed in The Human Condition.

The natural distinction of good and evil, re-enforced by revelation, on which the classic virtue of civic courage was based, no longer applies, since this distinction, on the Hobbesian principle, is now to be decided by personal feeling and civil law, presupposed to no natural or rational norms. Those who, like Socrates, would argue that death for “principle” is a higher good retain the philosophic or religious idea that man is personally something beyond the ongoing species. The actual death of an individual or the whole species (the presumed worst in the nuclear war) is to be judged good or evil, not by the fact of death itself, but for what reason the death took place. The difference between the martyr or the hero and the suicide is thus the most radical of all. In the newer norm, however, the continuation of the species is the norm before which all should yield, not the norm of begetting but the norm of staying alive at any cost. Autonomous human reasoning comes to be defined as “humanism” as such, a humanism that claims complete mastery over what it is to be “human.” The project of “Christian” humanism is thereby abandoned.

Surely this is exaggerated, it will be observed. The bishops of all people would not be so foolish as to fall into such a trap. We are loathe to think so, no doubt. Yet, by going to the public forum in the way they did, by elevating the issue of war and peace and, a pari, all those issues about life subordinate to it, to the central religious issue, we are likewise being taught that “staying alive,” at whatever cost, is better than death. The teaching about death was the central concern of both Socrates and Christ. Christ’s teaching about death has, significantly, become less stressed over against his role as activist or prophet in the world, in which his function is merely an aid or inspiration in keeping us alive, no matter what, usually for ends found in the ideology that wins the “non-fought war,” which results from accepting the argument that it is immoral to defend oneself.

Classical Christianity was not surprised at the multiplicity of actual regimes, none of which was the best, because, as Augustine knew, the best was not and cannot be in this world. By teaching that avoidance of war is the greatest issue of morality, we are taught that the best regime can perhaps be in this world, as Hobbes thought. This is the Enlightenment project, not the classic or Christian one, the elevation of politics to the highest rank, something classical and Christian theory protected us from. Classical and Judaeo-Christian political theory are directly related to each other, which is why the so-called “revival” of each is precisely the proper way to understand what is being taught by the elevation of the “principle of survival” to the first rank through the manner in which the nuclear issue is presented to us. What concerns those who know political philosophy is that Christianity in particular now seems to have become the primary advocate for the modern project.

Professor Joseph Cropsey’s essay, “The United States as a Regime,” is most perceptive here:

“No one who is aware of the tendencies strong in the schools of divinity can doubt that actual Christianity is not free of every influence coming from natural science, socialism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis. Furthermore, it is not in their pure form but rather as they have sunk down into common understanding that science, socialism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis have come to bear not only on Christianity but through Christianity or directly in their own names, on life itself.” (Political Philosophy  and the Issues of Politics, University of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 6)

The United States is the regime in which the struggle over modernity is taking place. The controversy over nuclear war, the understanding of what is at issue in Central America, of the “political” tendencies in the USCC, which Professor Brian Benestad recorded in his valuable The Pursuit of a Just Social Order, of the understanding of the causes of “poverty,” and of efforts to “tame” the anti-abortion movements so that the modern project might continue, all of these are not best understood as the overflow of contemplation into action, or of faith into practice, as John Paul II has noted from Puebla on as the right order of things, but as philosophical efforts to harness the Christian churches as the spiritual wing of this very “modern project.” What we need is a clear intellectual understanding of why this is not what either faith or reason is about.

To sort all of this out is the great issue facing the Catholic Church today and through it the other churches.  There are, fortunately many younger scholars and critics who grasp this — Thomas West at Dallas, Ann Carson Daly at Notre Dame, Philip Lawler at Heritage, Edward Peters at Claremont, Terry Hall at AEI, George Weigel in Seatte, Michael Jackson at Georgetown, Christopher Wolfe at Marquette, John Hittinger at Benedictine College, Ellen Wilson, and many others. The bishops seem to have little awareness of these newer intellectual currents. Many of these men and women are students of Michael Novak, Gerhart Niemeyer, James Hitchcock, Ralph Mclnerny, Charles N.R. McCoy, Fredrich Wilhelmsen, Francis Canavan, Russell Kirk, Ernest Fortin, Stanley Jaki, Vernon Bourke, Germain Grisez, Claes Ryn, James Collins, John Finnis, or Henry Veatch. Many note the influence of Voegelin, Strauss, Hannah Arendt or their disciples. Furthermore, we are beginning to realize the importance of Dawson, Belloc, Chesterton, Maritain, Gilson, Pieper, and deLubac. Moreover, in active politics we have many younger politicians who sense that an organizational crisis is upon us about the basic structures of public life and its relation to an increasingly politicized religion. In a way, the church has never been more “clericalized” in areas in which competence ought to fall primarily on the laity.

In his Eulogy on the death of Leo Strauss, Professor Harry Jaffa remarked that Strauss had “laid bare the Machiavellian roots of modernity.” The understanding of what this means in relation to classical, Jewish, and Christian thought, how it relates to issues of war and peace, is the necessary presupposition for any positive Catholic intellectual force in the modern world. At present, more and more, it is looking to many that Catholics will not be opponents to, but proponents of this philosophic “modernity” of man-made norms. This is why Archbishop Lipscomb’s comment was so significant, since it does sense this root issue.

Professor Cropsey went on: “Christian love, of which the present-day political equivalent is liberalism, marches in step with the beneficence of science, and with that tolerant subjectivism of science that now supports relativism.” (p. 14) There is nothing in the current debate about war that would lead us to think that Professor Cropsey does not have a sense of the real problem. (Cf. my “From Compassion to Coercion,” Vital Speeches, July 15, 1982) Margaret Thatcher, who is as close to classic western sensibilities on this issue as anyone in public life (see her UN Address, NYT, June 24, 1982), was right in thinking we may be near to sacrificing “all the elements of a modern civilized state” by not defending ourselves, that “when people are free to choose, they choose to be free.” And “the worst evil that can befall us is not the loss of our life, or of even all human life.” To hear such words from a stateswoman and from a Catholic archbishop, to say the least, is comforting.

Author

  • Fr. James V. Schall

    The Rev. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books and countless articles for magazines and newspapers.

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