Francis Oakley on Divinity and Rule

I've been reading Francis Oakley's new trilogy on The Emergence of Western Political Thought in the Latin Middle Ages, and have been very impressed. Oakley is making an argument similar to that of Remi Brague in The Law of God, though in a more pointed fashion: that the modern phenomenon we call "liberalism," frequently understood to have its roots in sixteenth and seventeenth-century political theory, really grew and developed in the soil of medieval Christianity. In fact, both Oakley and Brague argue, several of the major tenets we associate with liberalism--e.g. natural rights, popular sovereignty, individualism, the "secular" sphere, etc.--could only have developed within Christianity, and Western Christianity at that.

This account sure beats the sloppy Machiavelli-invents-modernity account I have heard bandied about so often.

After Virtue, Again

I recently discussed the first sixty pages of After Virtue with a group of students (we're going to go through the whole thing piece by piece this semester), and one fellow brought up an interesting question. MacIntyre carries out his moral-philosophical investigation within a certain historical framework, a narrative which he believes makes the best sense of the history of moral philosophy over the last several centuries. But this student remarked that MacIntyre's historical narrative fails to be credible, as it is yet another "meta-history," an account governed by a certain moral view: in this case, a kind of ethical Aristotelianism. The student's question was whether any meta-history, a story of the past (obviously) arranged in explicit relation to the present, can be trustworthy. Is it not better to try for a (more) objective view, giving an account of each historical period according to its own self-understanding?

MacIntyre himself would answer (and does, in the pages of After Virtue), that this critique can only be made on the basis of Enlightenment presuppositions about our capacity for seeing the truth  objectively, without reference to our own moral positions. And this sort of Enlightenment stance is precisely what MacIntyre is writing to rebutt: we cannot think about the past, or about anything (he says), without making moral judgments. There is no such thing as a perfectly objective standpoint from which to view what has gone before us.

So who's right? I take it (for now) that the truth lies between the two positions: that it must be possible to make some kinds of "objective" judgments sometimes--judgments which are true without respect to our moral stances--but, on the other hand, that we really do this much less than we think. Surely we can, that is, make objective assertions about whether this or that happened in the past, and to whom and with respect to what, just as we might make similar assertions about the chemical structure of certain elements, etc. (MacIntyre, in other places, seems to deny even this sort of claim.) But as soon as we begin to think any larger sorts of thoughts, to make any larger kinds of theories--certainly about history or causality in human affairs, we are necessarily going to have to rely upon our moral understanding: our view of human nature, its ends, its principles, etc. Because we must, it seems, judge human events in terms of what humans are, and "what humans are" cannot be defined without reference to what humans ought to be--without reference to our status as moral beings.

That, at least, is where I find myself just now. Closer to MacIntyre than to the student, I suppose, though I'm still trying to negotiate the space.

Newman on Utilitarian Moral Theory

Reading Newman, The Tamworth Reading Room (1841) in preparation for teaching it later this semester. It's the most satiric thing I've read of Newman's, outside The Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), and that crazy chapter at the end of Loss and Gain--Part 3, Chap. 7 (1848). In the course of describing the Utilitarian view of the relation between knowledge and virtue, he says this:

"Mr. Bentham would answer, that the knowledge which carries virtue along with it, is the knowledge how to take care of number one--a clear appreciation of what is pleasurable, what painful, and what promotes the one and prevents the other."

Now, is it me, or is Newman the first to refer to the egoistic self as "Number One"? Is anyone aware of a prior such usage?

Filmer, Eliot, and Paleo-Conservatism

On the side (how many sides can one have?), I've been reading/collecting research on a very interesting pair of figures, whom I am beginning to think are more closely related than we have heretofore thought: Sir Robert Filmer, the seventeenth-century traditionalist political philosopher, and T.S. Eliot, the twentieth-century poet and conservative social thinker.

The interesting thing about Filmer is not (at least at first blush) his direct influence, which has been negligible, but the extent to which he has been misunderstood by the Lockeans, whose contractarian liberalism certainly carried the day against Filmer's patriarchalism. Famously, Locke responded to the argument of Filmer's Patriarcha in the first of his Two Treatises of Government, and Lockean contractarians have frequently defined themselves against a kind of Filmerian patriarchalism up to the present day: indeed, I heard exactly this opposition declared at a seminar panel earlier this year. Filmer represents for present-day Lockeans a kind of proto-paleo-con, and this is not an unreasonable construction, as a few influential paleo-cons have claimed Filmer as an important influence. I think, for instance, of M.E. Bradford, who took the side of Filmer, over against his erstwhile nemesis, Harry Jaffa, who took the side of Locke (see Bradford's "A neglected classic : Filmer's Patriarcha," in Saints, Sovereigns, and Scholars [1993]).

Interestingly, it now seems that the influence of Sir Robert on the paleo-conservative tradition has been mediated through T.S. Eliot, who appears to have written a couple of unsigned reviews of Filmer in 1828, a fact unearthed a few years back by David Bradshaw, a British scholar of modernism (see "Lonely Royalists: T.S. Eliot and Sir Robert Filmer," Review of English Studies 46.183 [1995]). As Bradshaw's argument suggests, Eliot's political thinking seems to have been influenced by Filmer's thought at a critical junction in his career, and in ways we haven't adequately realized yet. This could be an interesting trail to follow, because T.S. Eliot exerted a great influence on the American conservative Russell Kirk, and thus on what became the paleo-conservative movement as a whole (esp. important here are his Idea of a Christian Society [1939] and Notes Toward the Definition of Culture [1948]). So the historical tension between (Lockean) neo-conservatism and (Filmerian) paleo-conservatism does seem to go back at lest to the earlier Twentieth Century, even if we can't see much of it in the Nineteenth.

I said originally, though, that the Lockeans misunderstood Filmer, and here is what I meant: as a number of scholars have shown over the past few decades, Filmer was responding in the Patriarcha, not to Hobbes or some other proto-Lockean political thinker (though he did write against Hobbes, Milton, and others elsewhere), but to the late-scholastic political philosophy of Robert Bellarmine and Francisco Suarez, who had been developing Thomistic theories of natural rights, regicide, etc., over the half-century prior to Filmer's work. So while Locke's followers (and perhaps Locke himself) have tended to see the political-theoretical choice as between Filmerian patriarchalism and their own brand of secularized contract theory, that binary now seems too simple. Certainly, it was not so simple at the time Filmer and Locke were writing. So now, since we could very much use a fresh (yet theoretically dense and historically grounded) view of human nature and how to think about it in the modern world, it seems we might do well to look at Suarez and Bellarmine, and consider the extent to which they provide a tertium quid, a third way for those of us not entirely satisfied with either paleo- and neo-conservatism.

Stegner's English Professorly Novel

Just finished Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety last week, which struck home for at least three reasons (aside from being very pleasantly written and constructed):

1. It is an English professor's novel: about the challenges, pleasures, and injustices of the academic world (I remember one line to this effect: "Sure, Jesus was a great teacher, but what has he published?"). That said, it made think of what a large percentage of our intelligent contemporary novels are written by professors. Sure, I (an English professor) enjoyed Stegner's subject matter a great deal, but I'm not sure everyone would catch fire with it in the same way.

2. It is a book about getting used to New England yankees, an experience I have also had, as I married a Lexington, Mass. girl. Stegner's depiction of a strong, old-model New England woman is remarkable.

3. It is a book about being married to a strong woman, and this is another way of life about which I know a few things (and to be clear, I wouldn't trade my own strong wife for the world). Again, delicious insights into the way a powerwife operates: Charity Lang, the novel's central strongwoman, will be emblazoned on my memory from hence, a kind of archetype of her kind.

Belloc on the Early Years of Chesterton's Marriage

"Frances and Gilbert have a little flat
At eighty pounds a year and cheap at that
Where Frances who is Gilbert's only wife
Leads an unhappy and complaining life:
While Gilbert who is Frances' only man
Puts up with it as gamely as he can."

--scribbled on the wall of Chesterton's first study (which was lined all round with brown drawing paper, so C. could illustrate the room as he worked)

Ker's Chesterton Biography

Taking a break from Aeneid prep to read Ian Ker, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford, 2011), for a review due later in the summer. So far, I like it: other reviewers have accused Ker of including too much, and thus delivering a torpid, overstuffed biography no one will read. But Chesterton was great--he contained multitudes--and I can imagine Chestertonians passing through this large book quickly and with great enjoyment. We'll see whether I still feel the same in a few more days, though...

Fratantuono on Aeneid, Book Two

Fratantuono's commentary (Madness Unchained) has been good so far: unlike some other Aeneid commentaries I've looked at, he is everywhere concerned with the literary interpretation of the poem, bringing his considerable knowledge of the classical and Virgilian tradition to bear on the work's own inner trajectory. One small regret is that he does not spend any time trying to interpret the scene, early in Book Two, where the two Trojans, Capys and Thymoetes, argue about whether the Horse ought to be brought within the walls of the city. I (with my small Latin and less Greek) have been inclined to interpret their names as etymological hints: "Capys," which seems to hint at caput--the head--is arguing against bringing the horse in, while "Thymoetes"--pretty clearly drawn from the Greek thumos, for spiritedness or heart--urges that the colossus be brought within the city walls. The heart wins out over the head and the thing happens, to their downfall. This interpretation seems to jive with the Aeneid's general emphasis on rational rule over spiritedness and the passions, but is there a more-than-apparent connection in the Latin? I'm not the one to ask...

Meanwhile I hear the voice of my old Greek professor echoing in my ears: "etymology by sound does not make for sound etymology."

Loeb Library, Downloadable

Working my way through Virgil again, I wanted to look something up in Lucretius, and found this marvelous webpage, where a guy (who looks to be a practicing radiologist) has collected links to all the available public-domain volumes in the Loeb Classical Library--all available in different places for downloading.

MacIntyre, and on to Virgil

Finished the review of Mong Ih-Ren a few days back (it was horrible--plagiarism on top of poor style), and finished re-reading a good part of After Virtue, but unfortunately I need to put off Whose Justice? Which Rationality? for now--the imperative of getting through a few classroom texts is gaining force. Maybe I'll still get to WJWR before the end of the summer...

One smaller thing: I re-read MacIntyre's very sharp essay from a few years ago, "Transformations of Enlightenment: Plato, Rosen and the Postmodern" (in Logos and Eros, ed. Nalin Ranasinghe (St. Augustine's P, 2006), which appreciates and critiques the thought of the Straussian philosopher Stanley Rosen. I don't know of any other place where MacIntyre actually confronts Straussianism, other than a review he wrote a few years back of a book by Thomas Pangle (but M. didn't seem to understand what was going on in that book). His critique of Rosen is thoughtful and illuminating, and basically turns on the claim that Rosen's Platonism and modified liberalism rely upon a version of Nature he is unwilling to credit as existent.

Now, as part of a class prep, I'm reading through Robert Fagles' translation of the Aeneid for the first time (I've usually read Fitzgerald before now), and I'm going through Lee Fratantuono's commentary, Madness Unchained: A Reading of Virgil's Aeneid (Lexington, 2007), at the same time. Fagles is pleasurable, though I find myself second-guessing his florid renderings from time to time. Fratantuono seems solid and very interesting so far, displaying some of the reading habits of his erstwhile mentor, the late Seth Benardete, but without descending into the maddening fog of Benardete's obscurantist prose.

Radner on Gregory

Read Ephraim Radner's review of Brad Gregory's Unintended Reformation (2011) in the new First Things. Pretty harsh. He sees Gregory's narrative as merely the latest instantiation of a problematic Catholic tradition of historiography, a tradition whose greatest representative was the 19th c. Catalonian Jaime Balmes (acc. to Radner). Against the Balmes/Gregory line, which traces Modernity's violence and division back to the Reformation, Radner calls for a "chastened Whig intepretation of history . . . reformulated in terms of Christian moral irresponsibility." Not sure exactly what that means, but he seems to be saying that the modern "progress" really has been a positive move away from the disappointing violence within Christianity, and this ought to chasten faithful Christians. At any rate, the whole review seems like an early advertisement for Radner's book A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church, which is coming out in October.

It's a very important question: how are we to understand Christianity's relation to the development of modernity. I'm inclined to be skeptical of the straight Balmes/Gregory line also, which lays all the blame at the feet of the Reformers (and Scotus and Ockham before them), but Radner's view seems problematic, in that he wants to think of modernity's origins as rooted above all in problematic Christian practice, while downplaying the importance of Christian thought. That's an either/or I don't want to choose between.

Now back to the reading I really should be doing: Mong's book on Newman (which is poor enough in quality to make periodicals look tempting!).

A first post

Reading Ambrose Mong Ih-Ren, The Liberal Spirit and Anti-Liberal Discourse of John Henry Newman (Peter Lang, 2011) in order to review it. Very interesting topic, but some unfortunate ESL problems already in the prose. More to come.

On the side, looking at John Alvis, Nathaniel Hawthorne as Political Philosopher (Transaction, 2012), a book by one of my old profs. Re-reading MacIntyre's After Virtue, and hoping to get to Whose Justice? Which Rationality? before the summer is out.