Well-Being vs. Salvation

Behind a burning red fog
The great mind swims in confusion
Its blood ferments in anger
Honor and wisdom will cower

Your river's flow is damned all to hell
Your river's flow is damned all to hell

Drifting in a current to stagnate
Encircle the vision of rust

Your river's flow is damned all to hell
Your river's flow is damned all to hell
Strong hearts soar through blindness

Tearing the fog, tearing the eyes
To clarity
To a place where truth is seen

Your shell is hollow, your shell is hollow, so am I
The rest will follow, the rest will follow, so will I
So will I
(Neurosis, “Under the Surface”)

“Your will be done, on earth as in heaven” (Mt 6:10)
Lead me, Lord, in the path of your commandments.
Teach me the demands of your precepts
and I will keep them to the end.
Train me to observe your law,
to keep it with my heart.
Guide me in the path of your commands;
for there is my delight.
Bend my heart to your will
and not to love of gain.
Keep my eyes from what is false;
by your word, give me life.
Keep the promise you have made
to the servant who fears you.
Keep me from the scorn I dread,
for your decrees are good.
See, I long for your precepts;
then in your justice, give me life.
(Psalm 118)

There are only two paths in life, the one that leads to heaven and the one that leads to hell. And there are only two modes of living, salvation and well-being. One must live in the mode of salvation to end up in heaven, and the mode of well-being can only lead to hell. Heaven begins on earth when one pursues salvation, and hell is right here for those who pursue well-being. One cannot live in both modes, as they are mutually exclusive, though one can live in one and then another. It is the mode that one persists in unto the end that determines eternity. It is not that well-being is hell per se, for it is a good, though not the ultimate one, and the fruit of living the mode of salvation is true well-being in this life, the most that is possible on earth, a life of sometimes agonizing and unspeakable suffering, surely, but also ineffable peace, supernal joy, and indomitable hope. Living in God’s Divine Will is heaven itself, and it begins now. And it culminates in eternity with the most well-being possible to a creature, complete union with God. So, well-being is good, but if we seek it and not God as our main goal in this life, if it is our primary existential mode, with salvation taking a back seat, we obtain neither well-being nor salvation.

What exactly do I mean by salvation and well-being, and why are they mutually exclusive? In a fascinating 1970s book entitled, Marriage: Dead or Alive, the twentieth-century Swiss Jungian psychiatrist Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig explained that marriage was failing more than ever before because it was mistakenly portrayed and understood in the mode of well-being, where in truth it is a relationship and institution grounded in and ordered to salvation, only succeeding when understood and lived out as such. About well-being vs salvation, he writes:

Clearly not belonging to the state of well-being are tensions, dissatisfactions, painful emotions, anxiety, hatred, difficult and insoluble internal and external conflicts, obsessive searching for an undiscoverable truth, confused struggles about God, and the felt need to come to terms with evil and death. Sickness most certainly does not belong to the state of well-being. It is much easier, at any rate, for physically and psychologically healthy people to enjoy a sense of well-being than it is for the sick. “Give us our daily bread” really implies, “Give us daily our sense of well-being.”. . . As goals, salvation and well-being contradict each other. The path to happiness does not necessarily include suffering. For the sake of our well-being, we are urged to be happy and not to break our heads with questions that have no answer. A happy person sits at the family table among loved ones and enjoys a hearty meal. A person who seeks salvation wrestles with God, the Devil, and the world, and confronts death, even if all of this is not absolutely necessary at that precise moment.

The mode of salvation was modeled perfectly for us in the life of Jesus Christ, and it is only by following His model that we can attain our soul’s salvation, but it is not that the salvation mode of life only became known to us by the Incarnation. It was known to the ancient Jews as well as the pagans, and it is known to today’s Jews, Muslims, pagans, and secular humanists, for it is a fundamental part of natural human consciousness. Those who prefer this mode over the mode of well-being, and live it unto the end, are saved, regardless of what they know or do not know about Jesus Christ, unless, of course, they reject Him knowingly and deliberately. But if they are truly living within the mode of salvation, they will never do that. When Jesus comes to them three times before they die, as St. Faustina said He would, they will recognize Him as the unknown Someone they were looking for, and the reason they rejected the mode of well-being for the much less comfortable mode of salvation.

A good pagan example of the two modes in contrast is found in the two heroes of Homer’s epics, Achilles and Odysseus. Achilles is given a choice to live a long life of well-being or a short life of salvation. The mode of salvation for the warrior was a life of valor on the battlefield, seeking honor and glory more than the mere preservation of one’s life. Achilles fulfilled this mode excellently until he was deprived of the honor he deserved by King Agamemnon. Achilles reacted with a superhuman rage and offense at this affront, and this not mainly because his war-trophy bride, Briseis, was taken from him, but more because he was destined before birth to have been the new Zeus, but was deprived of this by Zeus himself. According to a Pindaric tradition, Thetis, at the behest of Zeus, acceded to marriage with the mortal Peleus instead of Zeus in order to avert the birth of a son who would be stronger than his father. Achilles would have surpassed Zeus if his mother had not consented to a marriage beneath her divine status that neutralized the threat he constituted to Zeus’s order. Achilles knew this, and so harbored in the recesses of his soul an infinite desire for divine power and glory that could never be satisfied, as well as an infinite divine rage at this existential frustration. This is an excellent image of the desire all humans have for divinization, along with the nagging sense that we were all destined for greatness but somehow lost it, and the ineradicable feeling of futility, dissatisfaction, and guilt with a mere life of well-being. Until Jesus came, we had no real ground for hope that our infinite longings could ever be fulfilled, yet some before Christ, such as faithful Hebrews and noble pagans, still chose to live in the mode of salvation, somehow knowing they were obliged to do so even without a grounded hope in an eventual successful end. Getting back to Achilles, when he was dishonored by Agamemnon, a mere mortal, it was as if his whole raison d’etre was destroyed, and he chose to leave the battle and live the mode of well-being in his tent, hanging out with his friends and playing music. When some of the Greek leaders come to his tent to try to convince him to rejoin the battle, Achilles says:

Neither Agamemnon nor any other Greek will change my mind, for it seems there is no gratitude for ceaseless battle with our enemies. He who fights his best and he who stays away earn the same reward, the coward and the brave man win like honor, death comes alike to the idler and to him who toils. No profit to me from my sufferings, endlessly risking my life in war.

Here Achilles reveals the mode of well-being he has recently adopted, with its irrefutable logic of the futility of a life pursuing salvation. For those living at the time of the Trojan War, 1200 BC or so, the afterlife in the underworld was a shadowy thing, neither punishment nor reward but a flittering, ghostlike, and passionless existence, barely alive, with no drama or purpose. In the Odyssey, Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld and is told by him that it is so lame that it is better to be a slave on the earth than to rule Hades, in other words, that there is no reason to pursue the life of salvation. But somehow, in spite of the nihilistic yet airtight well-being logic he entertains for a moment—what good is it to be a warrior if in death all are equal, and equally half-dead?—Achilles knows that a life of honor and courage and death-defying valor is obligatory for him and that it violates a primordial, cosmic law for him to allow his fellow Greeks to die dishonorably, and so when his best friend Patroclus dies in battle due to his wallowing in well-being despair, he re-establishes himself in salvation mode and kicks much Trojan ass with some bedecked and armed with god-designed armor and a cosmos-wrought shield that contains the whole cosmos, signifying that the way of salvation, and not the way of well-being, is written into the very fabric of things. And he dies soon after by getting shot by an arrow in his heel.

Odysseus lived the salvation mode until, on his way home from Troy, he is waylayed by a nymph goddess, Calypso, who “traps” him on her island for seven years. I put trap in scare quotes because in the less-literal yet more accurate reading, Odysseus was free to leave anytime he wanted, and it was just the case that he did not want to, as he now had a matchless goddess as a very willing wife, one who also shared her immortality with him. But her name means “she who conceals,” and the price he had to pay for his well-being on steroids was never again to be seen and known, and perhaps to have his life up till then never sung by bards to the future generations of Greeks. Somehow he knew (when he got the seven-year itch) that risking abominable suffering in unknown waters populated by horrendous monsters with a very uncertain prospect of ever getting home alive was worth more than an eternity of perfect, earthly well-being. So he put on the helmet of salvation, as it were, built a raft, and eventually sang his own song on the island of the Phaecians, a paradisal mecca of well-being whose king also invited him to renounce his salvation, marry his beautiful daughter, and stay forever with them before sailing him (almost) home on a magic ship.

My last example from the ancient world is Job. According to the theology of his day, which was probably after the Flood but well before Moses, those who followed God’s law were blessed with a life of well-being, and this was a reason as good as any other to do so. If one did not experience well-being—health, long life, wealth, and a big family with lots of land and flocks—it meant that one was not following God too well, and deserved not to have it. But this was a mistaken notion of the economy of God and the true purpose for following Him, as Job was to discover. Satan challenged God by saying, essentially: “The only reason anyone ‘loves’ you and doesn’t curse you is because you reward them with well-being. Take away their well-being, and see what happens. You talk about salvation all the time. Well, they never really choose it, if it even exists. There is only well-being disguised as salvation.” God takes away all the well-being from Job, and his counselors tell him to repent of his sin. They are firmly in the well-being mode. Perhaps Job was as well at some time or another, but he meditated for a while on the dung heap, and he was now in salvation mode, as he cried, “I know my redeemer lives.” How did he know that? Everyone in the salvation mode knows it, for it is somehow knowing it that puts one into that mode. He eventually was given his well-being back, just as Jesus was resurrected, but an intimate meeting with the unknowable God was what he wanted all along, and he got it, in a terrifying whirlwind cross-examination that almost killed him. He didn’t get a comprehensible and satisfying answer to the mystery of suffering, as the mode of well-being would expect. What he got was confirmation that salvation is not at all about human well-being or the lack of it, or even being just or unjust or pious or impious. It’s something way beyond even morality, however essential that is. It’s about God, period. As St. Louis de Montfort often said: “God alone.”

Why not just call these modes religious or non-religious, or even Christian or non-Christian? It is because those who practice religion and identify as such are not necessarily living the mode of salvation, and those who say they are not religious are not necessarily living the mode of well-being. People can say they believe in God and actually practice worship and seem to live for Him while living completely or mainly in the mode of well-being, and people can say that they don’t believe or care about God or spiritual matters, and appear not to, while living completely or mainly in the salvation mode. It seems to me that the well-being/salvation modes are more fundamental and definitive than the religious/non-religious labels, or even the self-identification of Christian or non-Christian. For, they are existential and primary, residing and operating in the deepest recesses of the heart and the will. Before we consciously choose to act at any specific time in any particular way, we have always-already chosen, as it were, one of these modes, and our choices from then on are derivative from and caused by that primordial choice. Why we choose one mode or the other and persist in it is ultimately a mystery, but I would still like to say something about it later on.

We live within a global culture of well-being, an elite-imposed and artificial, totalitarian therapeutic prison, and this means that through an inexorable, ineluctable, and inescapable cultural conditioning process, well-being is the default position of the collective consciousness. Charles Taylor calls it the Immanent Frame. We are meant by our puppeteer conditioners to know of nothing other. If we do not deliberately fight to resist and escape this conditioning, it will mold and poison our souls unconsciously. But even if we somehow become acquainted while within this prison with the salvific mode of consciousness, through, say, encountering traditional religion or reading classic literature or meeting a living saint, we are programmed to translate this experience into the discourse, grammar, and social-imaginary of well-being, thereby turning it into its opposite.

If the reader is still wondering what exactly the modes of well-being and salvation are, that’s ok, for I am as well. It’s not possible to nail them down in precise language. They are too big and deep for language. The particular mode of thought, cast of concepts, and exigency of language we happen now to understand and employ derives from and is constituted by one of these modes or the other. There is no third. If we are in the mode of well-being, we see the world that way, and we will not only not understand the mode of salvation, we will despise it. Furthermore, we will not even recognize that we are in a mode at all—it is just the way things are. One has to be in the mode of salvation to understand that experiential modes even exist, and then to understand the nature of each mode and their radical opposition. For, these two modes determine exhaustively the very contours of the meaning of life itself, as they are the earthly images of the two modes of eternity. Thus, it must not be expected that they can be discretely and definitively defined in this life. They can be described, pointed to, adumbrated, suggested, intuited, exemplified, metaphorized, allegorized, unveiled, demarcated, translated, and cartographed—but never exhaustively grasped. It is these modes, after all, that define us. Nevertheless, I intend to keep describing and attempting to define them as we proceed, hopefully with increasing lucidity.

This is the clearest definition I can think of at the moment: The mode of well-being is a living hell that leads to eternal hell. The mode of salvation is a living heaven that leads to eternal heaven. And here is the most compelling reason I can think of why this is the case: Hell is the choice for the complete absence of God, Who is ultimate reality. Hell is thus the choice for ultimate unreality. Thus, the mode of well-being chosen in this life is a life of perpetual and absolute war with ultimate reality.

Perhaps an example will be helpful. The plandemic of 2020 was a test, a trial run for the Final Judgment deciding the eternity of every human being ever to live, either Heaven or Hell. What was placed before every human being was a stark existential and theological choice, a choice that was also a judgment. For those for whom this trial would be the manifestation and confirmation of their prior existential choice for well-being, or for those for whom it would be the uber-choice of their preferred long-term state, it seemed no choice at all. I mean, there was a deadly virus, you know, the deadliest one, and all you needed to do to avoid your own sickness or death and prevent the sickness and death of others was to do what you were told to do by those authorized to protect you from sickness and death. If you did that, I mean, the curve would be flattened, man. They told you to allow certain others to stick a swab in your nose, wear a mask all day, stay six feet away from other people, stay home, and close your business or school or church. They were so loving and committed to your health that they coerced these directives, rewarding you if you obeyed them and punishing you if you did not. They told you to get the vaccine or else you would most probably die and kill others, and they helped you to make the right choice by making sure that your life would be a living hell if you refused the shot. Choice? What the hell are you talking about?

The problem is that if you chose to do what they told you, you were not choosing to protect yourself and others from a deadly virus, but you were choosing hell. Now, there were some who were genuinely invincibly ignorant to the lies they were believing, at least at first, and so not culpable. But in the weeks and months after, as reality reasserted itself, it became impossible to believe the lies without fault. You were choosing hell because you were choosing unreality, and knowingly so. By choosing to obey these arbitrary and irrational prescriptions—and you knew, didn’t you? that they were arbitrary and irrational—you were choosing to believe in the Big Lie that underlay them, namely, that healthy people with no symptoms of illness are contagious. You, of course, knew this to be untrue. This is a lie, and an insane one. And you knew it was an insane lie, but you believed it anyway and acted accordingly. And you were quite proud of your mendacious insanity. You believed this insane lie because it made you feel good, in both the pleasurable and moral meaning of the word, but in doing so you put yourself under false authority. And you knew that it was false authority, because what they prescribed was all predicated on a manifest lie, and you knew it was a lie. No one thinks that healthy people with no symptoms are contagious, not even you. But you thought it anyway. “Just wear the f$%*in mask”—the first commandment of Hell. You obeyed this commandment with diabolical pleasure and took the same pleasure in torturing those who disobeyed it. Now, not everyone behaved this maliciously, and I am describing the extreme covidiot here, but all of us to some extent participated in this treasonous behavior.

Is putting oneself under false authority really so bad? Yes, it is the worst sin possible. It is the sin against the Holy Spirit, which Jesus said is unforgivable. It is calling good evil and evil good. Salvation comes from putting oneself under the authority of Truth, Who is Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, Who was with God in the beginning and is God. Damnation comes from putting yourself under the authority of untruth, whose father is Satan, the father of lies, who was a liar and murderer from the beginning. And it is this that distinguishes the mode of well-being from the mode of salvation. In well-being, one puts truth second to everything else. Truth is never first. Perhaps it is an authority, but it is never the authority. In salvation, truth is always first. It is Authority, period. One strives for well-being, for we are permitted to do so, but it is always a striving for well-being in the light of and under the authority of truth. And if believing in and obeying the truth means that one’s earthly well-being is sacrificed, then so be it. Salvation comes first. Salvation means eternal well-being, which is all that matters. Earthly well-being is a good, and those who live in the mode of salvation obtain it in its essence, which is joy and peace in union with God in this life, which no one can take away. Sometimes this joy and peace are accompanied by worldly goods, such as financial prosperity and bodily health and good reputation. But sometimes not. And it doesn’t matter one way or the other for the salvation-minded. Obedience to truth is all that matters. For the well-being-minded, a feeling of well-being is all that matters, and knowing and obeying truth is, at best, only a means to this highest end.

I mentioned earlier, and it bears repeating, that “We live within a global culture of well-being, an elite-imposed and artificial, totalitarian therapeutic prison, and this means that through an inexorable, ineluctable, and inescapable cultural conditioning process, well-being is the default position of the collective consciousness.” And this includes those, whether traditional Catholic, fundamentalist Christian, Koranic mystic, alt-right groyper, paleocon-bearded hipster, dark web gnostic, or perennialist blackpiller, all of which would seem quite immune to such conditioning and who would certainly, it seems, reject the default position. I have news for you: not necessarily. The mode of well-being has been firmly in place in the West for centuries, and it has been getting ever more well-being-ish ever since, exponentially since the year 2020. Medieval Christendom was a culture of salvation. Well-being as a legitimate mode of life didn’t exist. People sinned, of course, by choosing for well-being against salvation, but they were ashamed of it, and society let them know. Modernity, on the other hand, is a culture of well-being as The Good, a culture in which the mode of salvation is utterly shameful.

The Catholic Church is the mode of salvation on Earth, for it is the mystical body of the Incarnate Savior. If this mode existed in cultures before Christ and His Church, it was solely due to His providential grace in anticipation of and preparation for His Church, the soul and lifeblood of the world with its various cultures. At the present moment, the human infrastructure and clerical personnel of the Church, in league with her unbaptized external enemies, are at war with her divine core, and Satan is in control of the majority of the clerical human personnel and all of her external enemies. Satan’s hegemony over the Church and thus the world has been building since the 1900s but really in earnest after 1962. Leo XIII and Our Ladies of Akita and Fatima had prophesized it and told us what to do to prevent it, but most didn’t listen.

What this means is that there has never been a time in the history of the human race in which the mode of salvation has been more eclipsed and difficult to live out, and the mode of well-being more pronounced, seductive, irresistible, ubiquitous, and easy to practice, than today. One might think of the time before Christ as comparable or even worse than now, but consider that the corruption of the best is the worst, that nothing could be worse than a counterfeit of salvation replacing the true one, and such could only be possible after the historical manifestation of the full salvific truth of Jesus Christ. What we have today is much worse than paganism, and much worse than even the most corrupt and “dark” of post-Incarnation ages of years past. What we have is a culture of well-being that wears the mask of salvation, with the salvation mode practically counterfeited out of existence. Even the best of the salvation-mode sub-cultures are more or less compromised and tainted by the ubiquitous well-being culture, and they easily end up becoming mirror images of it, appearing to be solidly salvific but surreptitiously and subtly counterfeit. They talk salvation but walk well-being.

This is all I've known
A way to be
True to all
All that inspires

A torch in a black sea
Our stones still stand
To remind us of loss
A loss mirrored on our souls

A watchfire brings strength
Breathe in the heat
In the eternal path
Armoured against life
(Neurosis, "Watchfire")

Human beings were created by God for happiness in the worship of God. For reasons entirely inscrutable to human beings (all of the best reasons that have been offered cannot adequately explain it), God decided to make this happiness a personal choice for which we are responsible. This means that humans can choose not to worship God, that is, choose unhappiness over happiness. Why would a human being choose unhappiness and reject the very reason he was created? No one knows the answer to this question, for it is a mystery, the unfathomable and inscrutable mystery of evil. All we know is that we cannot escape this choice. Whether we obtain eternal happiness in the worship of God or eternal unhappiness in the refusal of this worship is entirely up to us, and any of us is capable of choosing against his own happiness. If you end up in hell for all eternity, it is because you wanted while alive and want now to be there. You refused to worship God, and you did so knowing it would mean eternal hell, and you chose it anyway. Think this is impossible? Think that God would and could never allow anyone to suffer eternal separation from Him? Well, have fun hanging out with know-it-all spiritual morons like David Bentley Hart and engage in gnostic spiritual masturbation, but just know that the Hell you deny awaits you if you persist in rejecting truth.

What does the choice for hell look like? The Catholic Church teaches us that if we die in a state of unrepentance, in a state of mortal sin, we go to hell. What is it to commit a mortal sin, and what does a state of unrepentance look like? Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” and “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” At its core, mortal sin is the refusal to know and obey truth, which is to say, to reject reality, for truth is the conformity of our souls with reality. At the core of reality is the Good, which is reality qua desirable. And since Jesus Christ is the truth, reality incarnate, then every refusal of reality, refusal to know and obey truth, is a rejection of Jesus, the Incarnate Good. Unrepentance means that we persist up to the moment of death in this rejection in the knowledge that we are choosing hell because of it. We end in up hell if we persist in our rejection of reality, truth, and Jesus Christ.

Why would anyone reject reality and truth and the Good and Jesus Christ? The obvious answer is due to a mistake. For whatever reason, we are not in a right relationship with reality and so misunderstand the truth about it. We reject what we do not know is truth. This is certainly possible, but why do we not know the truth? We are personally responsible for the relationship we have with reality when we die, and if it is not a right one, it is ultimately our fault. Not knowing something is the truth at one time or another can certainly be the fault of someone else whom we depend on for knowing what is true, such as a parent or a teacher or a culture, but this is a temporary and remediable situation. The injustice done to our souls by false authorities may not be our fault, but we have the ability and responsibility to rectify this injustice. Even though it is the case that reality is mediated to us by human authorities that could be mistaken or lying about the truth, and mediated by our own faculties of knowing that might be, due to ourselves or others, damaged or faulty, this does not excuse us from the personal responsibility of doing all we can to ensure that we are in a correct relationship with reality and thus know what is true. And we have the responsibility of not only knowing what is true, but also loving and obeying it. If we did not have this responsibility, hell would not exist, for we would always have a legitimate excuse that renders us not personally responsible for our not knowing and not loving truth. There would be no real guilt.

How do we overcome the damage done to our souls by others and ourselves that has caused us, right now, not to be in a right relationship with reality and thus not to know or love what is true? If we are dependent on others for knowing certain truths, and even for the development in us, especially when we are young, of the habit of being docile to truth, how do we overcome this dependency when it has led us into a soul-state of untruth? The answer is that we are always able to choose between well-being, in which truth isn’t a priority, and salvation, where it is the only priority, regardless of how badly we might have been damaged. Indeed, if we had always chosen salvation over well-being, we would not be damaged right now in the first place, for when in a state of salvation, we are immune to the damage done to our souls by the truth-treason of others. The problem is, of course, that we were not and are not now fully in a state of salvation, and so have been damaged. But we can begin to undo this damage by choosing, right now, to be in the salvation mode, and we can keep choosing until the moment we die.

Consider the situation of a Pharisee at the time of Christ. He was badly damaged by the Jewish culture in which he was raised, for it was thoroughly corrupt, even though it was given to the Jews by God Himself. Jesus gives a very clear picture of this culture:

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean. . . . Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Imagine being raised as a Pharisee in this culture. It was now a culture of well-being, not salvation, due to the Jewish leaders’ treason against God. No Pharisee was forced to participate in this corrupt culture, for he still had access to uncorrupted scriptures and traditions. He could have resisted the corruption and even called it out, as Jesus did, but this would have required consistently being in and acting from the mode of salvation, which would have been quite difficult with all the pressure to and rewards from being in the mode of well-being masking as the mode of salvation. Who was modeling it for them? No one. It was the opposite. Everyone was modeling Satan, whom Jesus called their father. But Jesus, the perfect embodiment of the uncorrupted scriptures and tradition, was now present in their midst; now they had a model and thus the ability to compare themselves to the Good and see and repent of their evil. He made their evil quite clear to them, and there was no reason not to believe Him, for He had no hypocrisy in Him, and He spoke to them in love and from the mode of salvation. Perhaps before Jesus came they had some excuse for their evil, but not now.

All a Pharisee had to do was to pose one question to himself: “Is He the evil one, or is it I?” This is a question anyone at any time can ask, and it is a question evoked by the existential mode of salvation, a mode anyone at any time can adopt in the deepest recesses of his soul. Saul became Paul when he adopted this mode and asked this question, a question prompted by a shocking mystical encounter with the Risen Lord that knocked him to the ground and left him physically blind. God will always provide the precise experiences we need to get into the salvation mode and begin asking salvific questions, but only if we first desire to exist in the mode by which such questions will be salvific. Saul must have desired this in the core of his being, and Jesus saw this and helped him to fulfill it. Jesus knew how evil was the culture that produced Saul the Christ-hating Pharisee, and He provided him a way out. Of course, the desire and ability to live in the salvific mode is itself a gift of God unmerited by us without which we could never be saved. But it is always offered and made available to us. We must simply choose it.

A good culture is one that forms its denizens to be in a right relationship to reality, causing the mind to know it and the will to love it. A good culture makes it easier to know and love truth, and a bad culture makes it harder. The Pharisee culture of the Jews in Saul’s day was a bad culture, for it disposed its leaders to reject Jesus Christ. The rejection of Jesus Christ is at the very heart of Western culture in our day, and has been so for a long time, though harder to recognize in past centuries. Our present culture makes it very easy not to know and love truth, for it makes it all but impossible and undesirable to ask questions from the mode of salvation, especially this question: “Is it true?” It thus makes it very easy to be, live, and act in the mode of well-being while thinking one is in the mode of salvation, or not even knowing that there is any other mode than well-being, or that one is in any “mode” at all. How can we be saved from this most perilous deception? Alasdair MacIntyre:

We have within our social order few if any social milieus within which reflective and critical enquiry concerning the central issues of human life can be sustained…. This tends to be a culture of answers, not of questions, and those answers, whether secular or religious, liberal or conservative, are generally delivered as though meant to put an end to questioning.

Paul Evdokimov:

The outdated religious person and the modern sophisticated irreligious individual meet back to back in an immanence imprisoned within itself…. The denial of God has thus permitted the affirmation of man. Once this affirmation is effected, there is no longer anything to be denied or subordinated… On this level total man will not be able to ask any questions concerning his own reality, just as God does not put a question to himself

The totalitarians ruling us are satanists, whether officially or not, and they want to abuse us to such an extent that we no longer ask questions in the mode of salvation in obedience to the ultimate authority of Truth and thereby save our souls. Asking questions indicates a soul that is aware of her dignity as a responsible creature, personally responsible to know and obey the authority of truth, not human counterfeits of it. The satanists want us to degrade ourselves by choosing idols over God, and they want us to do so knowingly and deliberately. This is why they hate questions more than anything. Ultimately, they want us to feel we are so worthless and stupid and deserving of nothing but abuse and death that we voluntarily murder ourselves. They’d rather we do it to ourselves, for it would mean more souls in hell. The first step to obtaining their goal is to get us to stop asking questions and caring about the Truth. God is the answer to all questions. They want us to see them as God. If we stop asking questions about the claims and actions of any human being, we are obeying their satanic command. Origen once wrote: “Every true question is like the lance which pierces the side of Christ causing blood and water to flow forth.” It is the blood and water that saved the Centurion, and it will save us if we so desire it. All we need to do is continually ask ourselves these questions: “Is it true? Am I pursuing salvation right now, or well-being?” And God will do the rest.

O divine Redeemer! As a victim of love for the Church and souls, I surrender myself to you and abandon myself to you! Please, I pray, accept favorably my offering, and I will be happy and confident. Alas! It is very little, I know, but I have nothing more, and I give you everything. I love my poverty and weakness because they bring me all your mercy and your most tender concerns. My God, you know my fragility and the bottomless abyss of my misery… If I were ever to be unfaithful to your sovereign will for me; if I were to shrink back from suffering and the cross and desert your sweet path by fleeing the tender support of your arms, oh! I beg and implore you, grant me the grace to die instantly. Hear me, O most loving Heart of my God, hear me by your sweetest name of Jesus, by the love of your Most Holy Mother, by the intercession of Saint Joseph, Saint John the beloved, and all the other saints, and by your divine ardor to fulfill in all things the will of your Father. (Servant of God Marthe Robin).

Thaddeus Kozinski teaches philosophy and humanities at Memoria College. His latest books are Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos, and Words, Concepts, Reality: Aristotelian Logic for Teenagers. He writes here.

Featured: Crucifixion, Basilica di San Marco, Venice, ca., 1200.

The Collapse of Modern Civilization and the Future of Humanity

The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria – love of money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak. 

The Greek concept of hubris involved egotistic behavior causing injury to others. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the debtor against the creditor. 

That protection is what rulers were expected to provide in serving the gods. That is why rulers were imbued with enough power to protect the population from being reduced to debt dependency and clientage. Chieftains, kings and temples were in charge of allocating credit and crop-land to enable smallholders to serve in the army and provide corvée labor. Rulers who behaved selfishly were liable to be unseated, or their subjects might run away, or support rebel leaders or foreign attackers promising to cancel debts and redistribute land more equitably. 

The most basic function of Near Eastern kingship was to proclaim “economic order,” misharum and andurarum clean slate debt cancellations, echoed in Judaism’s Jubilee Year. There was no “democracy” in the sense of citizens electing their leaders and administrators, but “divine kingship” was obliged to achieve the implicit economic aim of democracy: “protecting the weak from the powerful.”

Royal power was backed by temples and ethical or religious systems. The major religions that emerged in the mid-first millennium BC, those of Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Zoroaster, held that personal drives should be subordinate to the promotion of overall welfare and mutual aid. 

What did not seem likely 2500 years ago was that a warlord aristocracy would conquer the Western world. In creating what became the Roman Empire, an oligarchy took control of the land and, in due course, the political system. It abolished royal or civic authority, shifted the fiscal burden onto the lower classes, and ran the population and industry into debt. 

This was done on a purely opportunistic basis. There was no attempt to defend this ideologically. There was no hint of an archaic Milton Friedman emerging to popularize a radical new moral order celebrating avarice by claiming that greed is what drives economies forward, not backward, convincing society to leave the distribution of land and money to “the market” controlled by private corporations and money-lenders instead of communalistic regulation by palace rulers and temples – or by extension, today’s socialism. Palaces, temples and civic governments were creditors. They were not forced to borrow to function, and so were not subjected to the policy demands of a private creditor class. 

But running the population, industry and even governments into debt to an oligarchic elite is precisely what has occurred in the West, which is now trying to impose the modern variant of this debt-based economic regime – U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism – on the entire world. That is what today’s New Cold War is all about.

By the traditional morality of early societies, the West – starting in classical Greece and Italy around the 8th century BC – was barbarian. The West was indeed on the periphery of the ancient world when Syrian and Phoenician traders brought the idea of interest-bearing debt from the Near East to societies that had no royal tradition of periodic debt cancellations. The absence of a strong palace power and temple administration enabled creditor oligarchies to emerge throughout the Mediterranean world. 

Greece ended up being conquered first by oligarchic Sparta, then by Macedonia and finally by Rome. It is the latter’s avaricious pro-creditor legal system that has shaped subsequent Western civilization. Today, a financialized system of oligarchic control whose roots lead back to Rome is being supported and indeed imposed by U.S. New Cold War diplomacy, military force and economic sanctions on countries seeking to resist it.

Classical Antiquity’s Oligarchic Takeover 

In order to understand how Western Civilization developed in a way that contained the fatal seeds of its own economic polarization, decline and fall, it is necessary to recognize that when classical Greece and Rome appear in the historical record a Dark Age had disrupted economic life from the Near East to the eastern Mediterranean from 1200 to about 750 BC. Climate change apparently caused severe depopulation, ending Greece’s Linear B palace economies, and life reverted to the local level during this period. 

Some families created mafia-like autocracies by monopolizing the land and tying labor to it by various forms of coercive clientage and debt. Above all was the problem of interest-bearing debt that the Near Eastern traders had brought to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands – without the corresponding check of royal debt cancellations. 

Out of this situation Greek reformer-“tyrants” arose in the 7th and 6th centuries BC from Sparta to Corinth, Athens and Greek islands. The Cypselid dynasty in Corinth and similar new leaders in other cities are reported to have cancelled the debts that held clients in bondage on the land, redistributed this land to the citizenry, and undertaken public infrastructure spending to build up commerce, opening the way for civic development and the rudiments of democracy. Sparta enacted austere “Lycurgan” reforms against conspicuous consumption and luxury. The poetry of Archilochus on the island of Paros and Solon of Athens denounced the drive for personal wealth as addictive, leading to hubris injuring others – to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis. The spirit was similar to Babylonian, Judaic and other moral religions.

Rome had a legendary seven kings (753-509 BC), who are said to have attracted immigrants and prevented an oligarchy from exploiting them. But wealthy families overthrew the last king. There was no religious leader to check their power, as the leading aristocratic families controlled the priesthood. There were no leaders who combined domestic economic reform with a religious school, and there was no Western tradition of debt cancellations such as Jesus would advocate in trying to restore the Jubilee Year to Judaic practice. There were many Stoic philosophers, and religious amphictyonic sites such as Delphi and Delos expressed a religion of personal morality to avoid hubris.

Rome’s aristocrats created an anti-democratic constitution and Senate, and laws that made debt bondage – and the consequent loss of land – irreversible. Although the “politically correct” ethic was to avoid engaging in commerce and moneylending, this ethic did not prevent an oligarchy from emerging to take over the land and reduce much of the population to bondage. By the 2nd century BC Rome conquered the entire Mediterranean region and Asia Minor, and the largest corporations were the publican tax collectors, who are reported to have looted Rome’s provinces.

There always have been ways for the wealthy to act sanctimoniously in harmony with altruistic ethics eschewing commercial greed while enriching themselves. Western antiquity’s wealthy were able to come to terms with such ethics by avoiding direct lending and trading themselves, assigning this “dirty work” to their slaves or freemen, and by spending the revenue from such activities on conspicuous philanthropy (which became an expected show in Rome’s election campaigns). And after Christianity became the Roman religion in the 4th century AD, money was able to buy absolution by suitably generous donations to the Church.

Rome’s Legacy and the West’s Financial Imperialism 

What distinguishes Western economies from earlier Near Eastern and most Asian societies is the absence of debt relief to restore economy-wide balance. Every Western nation has inherited from Rome the pro-creditor sanctity of debt principles that prioritize the claims of creditors and legitimize the permanent transfer to creditors of the property of defaulting debtors. From ancient Rome to Habsburg Spain, imperial Britain and the United States, Western oligarchies have appropriated the income and land of debtors, while shifting taxes off themselves onto labor and industry. This has caused domestic austerity and led oligarchies to seek prosperity through foreign conquest, to gain from foreigners what is not being produced by domestic economies driven into debt and subject to pro-creditor legal principles transferring land and other property to a rentier class. 

Spain in the 16th century looted vast shiploads of silver and gold from the New World, but this wealth flowed through its hands, dissipated on war instead of being invested in domestic industry. Left with a steeply unequal and polarized economy deeply in debt, the Habsburgs lost their former possession, the Dutch Republic, which thrived as the less oligarchic society and one deriving more power as a creditor than as a debtor.

Britain followed a similar rise and fall. World War I left it with heavy arms debts owed to its own former colony, the United States. Imposing anti-labor austerity at home in seeking to pay these debts, Britain’s sterling area subsequently became a satellite of the U.S. dollar under the terms of American Lend-Lease in World War II and the 1946 British Loan. The neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair sharply increased the cost of living by privatizing and monopolizing public housing and infrastructure, wiping out Britain’s former industrial competitiveness by raising the cost of living and hence wage levels.

The United States has followed a similar trajectory of imperial overreaching at the cost of its domestic economy. Its overseas military spending from 1950 onwards forced the dollar off gold in 1971. That shift had the unanticipated benefit of ushering in a “dollar standard” that has enabled the U.S. economy and its military diplomacy to get a free ride from the rest of the world, by running up dollar debt to other nation’s central banks without any practical constraint. 

The financial colonization of the post-Soviet Union in the 1990s by the “shock therapy” of privatization giveaways, followed by China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 – with the expectation that China would, like Yeltsin’s Russia, become a U.S. financial colony – led America’s economy to deindustrialize by shifting employment to Asia. Trying to force submission to U.S. control by inaugurating today’s New Cold War has led Russia, China and other countries to break away from the dollarized trade and investment system, leaving the United States and NATO Europe to suffer austerity and deepening wealth inequality as debt ratios are soaring for individuals, corporations and government bodies. 

It was only a decade ago that Senator John McCain and President Barack Obama characterized Russia as merely a gas station with atom bombs. That could now just as well be said of the United States, basing its world economic power on control of the West’s oil trade, while its main export surpluses are agricultural crops and arms. The combination of financial debt leveraging and privatization has made America a high-cost economy, losing its former industrial leadership, much like Britain did. The United States is now attempting to live mainly off financial gains (interest, profits on foreign investment and central bank credit creation to inflate capital gains) instead of creating wealth through its own labor and industry. Its Western allies seek to do the same. They euphemize this U.S.-dominated system as “globalization,” but it is simply a financial form of colonialism – backed with the usual military threat of force and covert “regime change” to prevent countries from withdrawing from the system.

This U.S. and NATO-based imperial system seeks to indebt weaker countries and force them to turn control over their policies to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Obeying the neoliberal anti-labor “advice” of these institutions leads to a debt crisis that forces the debtor country’s foreign-exchange rate to depreciate. The IMF then “rescues” them from insolvency on the “conditionality” that they sell off the public domain and shift taxes off the wealthy (especially foreign investors) onto labor. 

Oligarchy and debt are the defining characteristics of Western economies. America’s foreign military spending and nearly constant wars have left its own Treasury deeply indebted to foreign governments and their central banks. The United States is thus following the same path by which Spain’s imperialism left the Habsburg dynasty in debt to European bankers, and Britain’s participation in two world wars in hope of maintaining its dominant world position left it in debt and ended its former industrial advantage. America’s rising foreign debt has been sustained by its “key currency” privilege of issuing its own dollar-debt under the “dollar standard” without other countries having any reasonable expectation of ever being paid – except in yet more “paper dollars.” 

This monetary affluence has enabled Wall Street’s managerial elite to increase America’s rentier overhead by financialization and privatization, increasing the cost of living and doing business, much as occurred in Britain under the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Industrial companies have responded by shifting their factories to low-wage economies to maximize profits. But as America deindustrializes with rising import dependency on Asia, U.S. diplomacy is pursuing a New Cold War that is driving the world’s most productive economies to decouple from the U.S. economic orbit. 

Rising debt destroys economies when it is not being used to finance new capital investment in means of production. Most Western credit today is created to inflate stock, bond and real estate prices, not to restore industrial ability. As a result of this debt-without-production approach, the U.S. domestic economy has been overwhelmed by debt owed to its own financial oligarchy. Despite America’s economy’s free lunch in the form of the continued run-up of its official debt to foreign central banks – with no visible prospect of either its international or domestic debt being paid – its debt continues to expand and the economy has become even more debt-leveraged. America has polarized with extreme wealth concentrated at the top while most of the economy is driven deeply into debt. 

The Failure of Oligarchic Democracies to Protect the Indebted Population at Large

What has made the Western economies oligarchic is their failure to protect the citizenry from being driven into dependency on a creditor property-owning class. These economies have retained Rome’s creditor-based laws of debt, most notably the priority of creditor claims over the property of debtors. The creditor One Percent has become a politically powerful oligarchy despite nominal democratic political reforms expanding voting rights. Government regulatory agencies have been captured and taxing power has been made regressive, leaving economic control and planning in the hands of a rentier elite.

Rome never was a democracy. And in any case, Aristotle recognized democracies as evolving more or less naturally into oligarchies – which claim to be democratic for public-relations purposes while pretending that their increasingly top-heavy concentration of wealth is all for the best. Today’s trickle-down rhetoric depicts banks and financial managers as steering savings in the most efficient way to produce prosperity for the entire economy, not just for themselves.

President Biden and his State Department neoliberals accuse China and any other country seeking to maintain its economic independence and self-reliance of being “autocratic.” Their rhetorical sleight of hand juxtaposes democracy to autocracy. What they call “autocracy” is a government strong enough to prevent a Western-oriented financial oligarchy from indebting the population to itself – and then prying away its land and other property into its own hands and those of its American and other foreign backers.

The Orwellian Doublethink of calling oligarchies “democracies” is followed by defining a free market as one that is free for financial rent-seeking. U.S.-backed diplomacy has indebted countries, forcing them to sell control of their public infrastructure and turn their economy’s “commanding heights” into opportunities to extract monopoly rent.

This autocracy vs. democracy rhetoric is similar to the rhetoric that Greek and Roman oligarchies used when they accused democratic reformers of seeking “tyranny” (in Greece) or “kingship” (in Rome). It was the Greek “tyrants” who overthrow mafia-like autocracies in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, paving the way for the economic and proto-democratic takeoffs of Sparta, Corinth and Athens. And it was Rome’s kings who built up their city-state by offering self-support land tenure for citizens. That policy attracted immigrants from neighboring Italian city-states whose populations were being forced into debt bondage.

The problem is that Western democracies have not proved adept at preventing oligarchies from emerging and polarizing the distribution of income and wealth. Ever since Rome, oligarchic “democracies” have not protected their citizens from creditors seeking to appropriate land, its rental yield and the public domain for themselves. 

If we ask just who today is enacting and enforcing policies that seek to check oligarchy in order to protect the livelihood of citizens, the answer is that this is done by socialist states. Only a strong state has the power to check a financial and rent-seeking oligarchy. The Chinese embassy in America demonstrated this in its reply to President Biden’s description of China as an autocracy:

Clinging to a Cold War mentality and the hegemon’s logic, the US pursues bloc politics, concocts the “democracy versus authoritarianism” narrative … and ramps up bilateral military alliances, in a clear attempt at countering China.

Guided by a people-centered philosophy, since the day when it was founded… the Party has been working tirelessly for the interest of the people, and has dedicated itself to realizing people’s aspirations for a better life. China has been advancing whole-process people’s democracy, promoting legal safeguard for human rights, and upholding social equity and justice. The Chinese people now enjoy fuller and more extensive and comprehensive democratic rights. 

Nearly all early non-Western societies had protections against the emergence of mercantile and rentier oligarchies. That is why it is so important to recognize that what has become Western civilization represents a break from the Near East, South and East Asia. Each of these regions had its own system of public administration to save its social balance from commercial and monetary wealth that threatened to destroy economic balance if left unchecked. But the West’s economic character was shaped by rentier oligarchies. Rome’s Republic enriched its oligarchy by stripping the wealth of the regions it conquered, leaving them impoverished. That remains the extractive strategy of subsequent European colonialism and, most recently, U.S.-centered neoliberal globalization. The aim always has been to “free” oligarchies from constraints on their self-seeking. 

The great question is, “freedom” and “liberty” for whom? Classical political economy defined a free market as one free from unearned income, headed by land rent and other natural-resource rent, monopoly rent, financial interest and related creditor privileges. But by the end of the 19th century the rentier oligarchy sponsored a fiscal and ideological counter-revolution, re-defining a free market as one free for rentiers to extract economic rent – unearned income. 

This rejection of the classical critique of rentier income has been accompanied by re-defining “democracy” to require having a “free market” of the anti-classical oligarchic rentier variety. Instead of the government being the economic regulator in the public interest, public regulation of credit and monopolies is dismantled. That lets companies charge whatever they want for the credit they supply and the products they sell. Privatizing the privilege of creating credit-money lets the financial sector take over the role of allocating property ownership. 

The result has been to centralize economic planning in Wall Street, the City of London, the Paris Bourse and other imperial financial centers. That is what today’s New Cold War is all about: protecting this system of U.S.-centered neoliberal financial capitalism, by wrecking or isolating the alternative systems of China, Russia and their allies, while seeking to further financialize the former colonialist system sponsoring creditor power instead of protecting debtors, imposing debt-ridden austerity instead of growth, and making the loss of property through foreclosure or forced sale irreversible.

Is Western Civilization a Long Detour from where Antiquity seemed to be Headed?

What is so important in Rome’s economic polarization and collapse that resulted from the dynamics of interest-bearing debt in the rapacious hands of its creditor class is how radically its oligarchic pro-creditor legal system differed from the laws of earlier societies that checked creditors and the proliferation of debt. The rise of a creditor oligarchy that used its wealth to monopolize the land and take over the government and courts (not hesitating to use force and targeted political assassination against would-be reformers) had been prevented for thousands of years throughout the Near East and other Asian lands. But the Aegean and Mediterranean periphery lacked the economic checks and balances that had provided resilience elsewhere in the Near East. What has distinguished the West from the outset has been its lack of a government strong enough to check the emergence and dominance of a creditor oligarchy.

All ancient economies operated on credit, running up crop debts during the agricultural year. Warfare, droughts or floods, disease and other disruptions often prevented the accrual of debts from being paid. But Near Eastern rulers cancelled debts under these conditions. That saved their citizen-soldiers and corvée-workers from losing their self-support land to creditors, who were recognized as being a potential rival power to the palace. By the mid-first millennium BC debt bondage had shrunk to only a marginal phenomenon in Babylonia, Persia and other Near Eastern realms. But Greece and Rome were in the midst of a half-millennium of popular revolts demanding debt cancellation and liberty from debt bondage and loss of self-support land. 

It was only Roman kings and Greek tyrants who, for a while, were able to protect their subjects from debt bondage. But they ultimately lost to warlord creditor oligarchies. The lesson of history is thus that a strong government regulatory power is required to prevent oligarchies from emerging and using creditor claims and land grabbing to turn the citizenry into debtors, renters, clients and ultimately serfs.

The Rise of Creditor Control over Modern Governments

Palaces and temples throughout the ancient world were creditors. Only in the West did a private creditor class emerge. A millennium after the fall of Rome, a new banking class obliged medieval kingdoms to run into debt. International banking families used their creditor power to gain control of public monopolies and natural resources, much as creditors had gained control of individual land in classical antiquity.

World War I saw the Western economies reach an unprecedented crisis as a result of Inter-Ally debts and German reparations. Trade broke down and the Western economies fell into depression. What pulled them out was World War II, and this time no reparations were imposed after the war ended. In place of war debts, England simply was obliged to open up its Sterling Area to U.S. exporters and refrain from reviving its industrial markets by devaluing sterling, under the terms of Lend-Lease and the 1946 British Loan as noted above. 

The West emerged from World War II relatively free of private debt – and thoroughly under U.S. dominance. But since 1945 the volume of debt has expanded exponentially, reaching crisis proportions in 2008 as the junk-mortgage bubble, massive bank fraud and financial debt pyramiding exploded, overburdening the U.S. as well as the European and Global South economies. 

The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank monetized $8 trillion to save the financial elite’s holdings of stocks, bonds and packaged real estate mortgages instead of rescuing the victims of junk mortgages and over-indebted foreign countries. The European Central Bank did much the same thing to save the wealthiest Europeans from losing the market value of their financial wealth. 

But it was too late to save the U.S. and European economies. The long post-1945 debt buildup has run its course. The U.S. economy has been deindustrialized, its infrastructure is collapsing and its population is so deeply indebted that little disposable income is left to support living standards. Much as occurred with Rome’s Empire, the American response is to try to maintain the prosperity of its own financial elite by exploiting foreign countries. That is aim of today’s New Cold War diplomacy. It involves extracting economic tribute by pushing foreign economies further into dollarized debt, to be paid by imposing depression and austerity on themselves. 

This subjugation is depicted by mainstream economists as a law of nature and hence as an inevitable form of equilibrium, in which each nation’s economy receives “what it is worth.” Today’s mainstream economic models are based on the unrealistic assumption that all debts can be paid, without polarizing income and wealth. All economic problems are assumed to be self-curing by “the magic of the marketplace,” without any need for civic authority to intervene. Government regulation is deemed inefficient and ineffective, and hence unnecessary. That leaves creditors, land-grabbers and privatizers with a free hand to deprive others of their freedom. This is depicted as the ultimate destiny of today’s globalization, and of history itself.

The End of History? Or Just of the West’s Financialization and Privatization?

 The neoliberal pretense is that privatizing the public domain and letting the financial sector take over economic and social planning in targeted countries will bring mutually beneficial prosperity. That is supposed to make foreign submission to the U.S.-centered world order voluntary. But the actual effect of neoliberal policy has been to polarize Global South economies and subject them to debt-ridden austerity. 

American neoliberalism claims that America’s privatization, financialization and shift of economic planning from government to Wall Street and other financial centers is the result of a Darwinian victory achieving such perfection that it is “the end of history.” It is as if the rest of the world has no alternative but to accept U.S. control of the global (that is, neo-colonial) financial system, trade and social organization. And just to make sure, U.S. diplomacy seeks to back its financial and diplomatic control by military force.

The irony is that U.S. diplomacy itself has helped accelerate an international response to neoliberalism by forcing together governments strong enough to pick up the long trend of history that sees governments empowered to prevent corrosive oligarchic dynamics from derailing the progress of civilization.

The 21st century began with American neoliberals imagining that their debt-leveraged financialization and privatization would cap the long upsweep of human history as the legacy of classical Greece and Rome. The neoliberal view of ancient history echoes that of antiquity’s oligarchies, denigrating Rome’s kings and Greece’s reformer-tyrants as threatening too strong a public intervention when they aimed at keeping citizens free of debt bondage and securing self-support land tenure. What is viewed as the decisive takeoff point is the oligarchy’s “security of contracts” giving creditors the right to expropriate debtors. This indeed has remained a defining characteristic of Western legal systems for the past two thousand years.

A real end of history would mean that reform stops in every country. That dream seemed close when U.S. neoliberals were given a free hand to reshape Russia and other post-Soviet states after the Soviet Union dissolved itself in 1991, starting with shock therapy privatizing natural resources and other public assets in the hands of Western-oriented kleptocrats registering public wealth in their own names – and cashing out by selling their takings to U.S. and other Western investors. 

The end of the Soviet Union’s history was supposed to consolidate America’s End of History by showing how futile it would be for nations to try to create an alternative economic order based on public control of money and banking, public health, free education and other subsidies of basic needs, free from debt financing. China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was viewed as confirming Margaret Thatcher’s claim that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to the new neoliberal order sponsored by U.S. diplomacy. 

There is an economic alternative, of course. Looking over the sweep of ancient history, we can see that the main objective of ancient rulers from Babylonia to South Asia and East Asia was to prevent a mercantile and creditor oligarchy from reducing the population at large to clientage, debt bondage and serfdom. If the non-U.S. Eurasian world now follows this basic aim, it would be restoring the flow of history to its pre-Western course. That would not be the end of history, but it would return to the non-Western world’s basic ideals of economic balance, justice and equity.

Today, China, India, Iran and other Eurasian economies have taken the first step as a precondition for a multipolar world, by rejecting America’s insistence that they join the U.S. trade and financial sanctions against Russia. These countries realize that if the United States could destroy Russia’s economy and replace its government with U.S.-oriented Yeltsin-like proxies, the remaining countries of Eurasia would be next in line. 

The only possible way for history really to end would be for the American military to destroy every nation seeking an alternative to neoliberal privatization and financialization. U.S. diplomacy insists that history must not take any path that would not culminate in its own financial empire ruling through client oligarchies. American diplomats hope that their military threats and support of proxy armies will force other countries to submit to neoliberal demands – to avoid being bombed, or suffering “color revolutions,” political assassinations and army takeovers, Pinochet-style. But the only real way to bring history to an end is by atomic war to end human life on this planet.

The New Cold War is Dividing the World into Two Contrasting Economic Systems

  NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the catalyst fracturing the world into two opposing spheres with incompatible economic philosophies. China, the country growing most rapidly, treats money and credit as a public utility allocated by government instead of letting the monopoly privilege of credit creation be privatized by banks, leading to them displacing government as economic and social planner. That monetary independence, relying on its own domestic money creation instead of borrowing U.S. electronic dollars, and denominating foreign trade and investment in its own currency instead of in dollars, is seen as an existential threat to America’s control of the global economy.

U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by “freeing” the wealthy classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of wealth, and ultimate decline and fall. Imposing trade and financial sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries that resist U.S. diplomacy, and ultimately military confrontation, is how America intends to “spread democracy” by NATO from Ukraine to the China Seas. 

The West, in its U.S. neoliberal iteration, seems to be repeating the pattern of Rome’s decline and fall. Concentrating wealth in the hands of the One Percent has always been the trajectory of Western civilization. It is a result of classical antiquity having taken a wrong track when Greece and Rome allowed the inexorable growth of debt, leading to the expropriation of much of the citizenry and reducing it to bondage to a land-owning creditor oligarchy. That is the dynamic built into the DNA of what is called the West and its “security of contracts” without any government oversight in the public interest. By stripping away prosperity at home, this dynamic requires a constant reaching out to extract an economic affluence (literally a “flowing in”) at the expense of colonies or debtor countries.

The United States through its New Cold War is aiming at securing precisely such economic tribute from other countries. The coming conflict may last for perhaps twenty years and will determine what kind of political and economic system the world will have. At issue is more than just U.S. hegemony and its dollarized control of international finance and money creation. Politically at issue is the idea of “democracy” that has become a euphemism for an aggressive financial oligarchy seeking to impose itself globally by predatory financial, economic and political control backed by military force. 

As I have sought to emphasize, oligarchic control of government has been a major distinguishing feature of Western civilization ever since classical antiquity. And the key to this control has been opposition to strong government – that is, civil government strong enough to prevent a creditor oligarchy from emerging and monopolizing control of land and wealth, making itself into a hereditary aristocracy, a rentier class living off land rents, interest and monopoly privileges that reduce the population at large to austerity. 

The unipolar U.S.-centered order hoping to “end history” reflected a basic economic and political dynamic that has been a characteristic of Western civilization ever since classical Greece and Rome set off along a different track from the Near Eastern matrix in the first millennium BC. 

To save themselves from being swept into the whirlpool of economic destruction now engulfing the West, countries in the world’s rapidly growing Eurasian core are developing new economic institutions based on an alternative social and economic philosophy. With China being the largest and fastest growing economy in the region, its socialist policies are likely to be influential in shaping this emerging non-Western financial and trading system.  

Instead of the West’s privatization of basic economic infrastructure to create private fortunes through monopoly rent extraction, China keeps this infrastructure in public hands. Its great advantage over the West is that it treats money and credit as a public utility, to be allocated by government instead of letting private banks create credit, with debt mounting up without expanding production to raise living standards. China also is keeping health and education, transportation and communications in public hands, to be provided as basic human rights. 

China’s socialist policy is in many ways a return to basic ideas of resilience that characterized most civilization before classical Greece and Rome. It has created a state strong enough to resist the emergence of a financial oligarchy gaining control of the land and rent-yielding assets. In contrast, today’s Western economies are repeating precisely that oligarchic drive that polarized and destroyed the economies of classical Greece and Rome, with the United States serving as the modern analogue for Rome.

Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of several important works in economics. His website is here.

Featured: Aeneas fleeing from burning Troy, by Kerstiaen de Keuninck; painted ca. 1610.

Remembering Who We Are: Identity and Tradition to Resist Globalism

In the time of the “night of the world,” visions of being installed in a naive realism and flooded with high ideological doses, which dissolve the possible in the existing, prevail as the only horizon. The imposed ontology, the one functional to the dominant class, is centered on the untransformability of the order of things and, at the same time, on the primacy of the technical act, which instrumentalizes entities with a view to the infinite increase of the will to power.

As we have tried to show in Idealismo o barbarie, the first revolution consists in the change of the ontological frame of reference and, specifically, in the variation of the coefficient of inevitability. To the mystique of necessity and the absolutism of the given reality, that is to say the two ontological principles on which the hegemony of the dominant pole is founded (according to the theorem of there is no alternative), it is necessary to oppose an ontology of historical possibility. The latter must be based on a conception of being not as an unmodifiable datum, but as history and possibility, therefore capable of transformation through the process of collectively organized subjective praxis.

In conformity with the subject-objective ontology theorized by classical German idealism, the Object, far from being res separata to which the Subject must adapt (adaequatio rei et intellectus), is always mediated by the Subject itself: fatum non datur. With Hegelian syntax, it is necessary to think die Substanz als Subjekt (“Substance as Subject”), being as mediated by subjective doing. Consistent with these general ontological foundations, reality is a process in act—with Hegel, Wirklichkeit and not Realität—and does not coincide with that which simply “is”: rather, it is the sum of that which “is,” that which “has been,” and that which, from that which exists and that which has already been, “could be.” Thus, in what we would call with Marx the present “realm of strange beings to which man is subjugated,” to act means to rely on the free decision to realize the unfinished possibilities of history itself, transforming the past into a reservoir of virtualities that can be implemented through the concrete encounter between anticipatory decision and transformative praxis: in Heidegger’s words in Being and Time, “the decision, which returns upon itself and is self-transmitted, then becomes the repetition of a transferred possibility of existence,” revitalized and placed in tension with the present in which it finds itself.

The repetition of the past, therefore, is not the ritual celebration of that which no longer exists, nor the sterile seduction exercised by a past that is believed to be able to return as it was. It is, on the contrary, the active gesture of transmitting and recalling the possibilities preserved in that which has been and which can incubate multiple possibilities for the future: die Wiederholung ist die ausdrückliche Überlieferung, das heiBt der Rückgang in Möglichkeiten des dagewesenen Daseins, “repetition is the explicit transmission, that is, the return to the possibilities of being-there-that-has-been-there”. Again, with Heidegger’s syntax, Dasein (“being-there”)—both of the individual and of peoples—is a synthesis of the three dimensions: of the future of the project, of the present of the decision and of the past of the origin. And, turning now to Hegel, it is the bearer of historical consciousness and of the consciousness of contradiction as the root of being.

Even if it is different and, at times, incommensurable with respect to that of Being and Time, the subjectivity questioned by Hegel in the pages of the Phenomenology of Spirit has in common with the former the historical temporality in its tri-articulation, assumed as the very foundation of being in the world of man. The Hegelian Subject is, by its essence, the bearer of a progressive historical consciousness. It gradually conquers the historical consciousness of itself as a unitary subject, which objectifies itself in temporality according to increasingly rational forms. Such forms are, in turn, conceived in their authentic subject-objective nature of historical products, and not of given and presupposed suchness.

The conception of Substance as Subject, defined in the Phenomenology of Spirit, implies that Totality is given as the movement of its own development and that the Concept is resolved in the dynamic that makes it become truly itself; with the Phenomenology, “it is Spirit itself that moves: he is the Subject of the movement (er ist das Subjekt der Bewegung) and, at the same time, the movement itself, that is, the Substance through which the Subject passes,” which therefore exists indispensably in the dimension of time and of becoming, that is, of its history. That is precisely why the Spirit is time or, as Hegel specifies, erscheint der Geist notwendig in der Zeit, “the Spirit necessarily manifests itself in time,” as processual self-consciousness and as a series of practical objectivations.

Beyond the obvious differences, both the Dasein of Being and Time and the communitarian Subject of the Phenomenology of Spirit are equally “discharged” by the logic of the flexibilization of coessential identities to the new spirit of the de-anticized and absolute system of needs. The homo instabilis, co-originary with respect to the new made-precarious anthropological profile, cannot decide freely since, more and more ostensibly, he appears as an external and directed pawn, considered in the same way as all other commodities on demand. It does not have, Hegelianly, historical consciousness and communitarian eticity, nor, Heideggerianly, projective temporality and remembrance. It cannot enjoy a free ek-static projectuality directed to the future, condemned as it is to the precarious life that, by its essence, denies the very foundation of ek-sistence as a claimed transcendence of the present to reach desired futures.

Finally, the postmodern homo instabilis is deprived of mnestic memory and of his own historical roots. The absolute mobility to which he is condemned renders him uprooted and deterritorialized, projected in the pure ahistorical and aprospective immanence of the eternal flexible present, of which he is a nomadic and unstable inhabitant. One of the fundamental bases of Dasein, whether individual or collective, is thus deconstructed.

The “global I” of homo instabilis, deprived of memory and tradition, is therefore mutilated of soul, if we take for granted, as St. Augustine affirms in his Confessions, that sedis animi est in memoria. At the same time, the sphere of prospective and the mnestic dimension is dissolved, that is, the capacity to recall tradition and to draw inspiration from it in a projective key (“the self is memory,” Hegel reminded us). Only the mens instans survives, as Leibniz called it, the “instantaneous mind” incapable of remembering and projecting, of thinking and imagining, entirely absorbed in the reified immanence of calculation and know-how. The construction of the identities of individuals and communities is always based on the stratification of experiences, on their sedimentation in the form of memory. There is no cultural identity in the absence of historical memory. Uprooted man is deprived of historical consciousness and lives, with a necessary false consciousness, the time of flexible accumulation as a natural and eternal destiny. “The ahistoricity of consciousness is the messenger of a static state of reality,” as Adorno pointed out.

The humanism of classical civilization, expressed, for example, in Cicero’s Brutus (§ 257), is denied by techno-nihilistic barbarism: non quantum quisque prosit, sed quanti quisque sit poderandum est.

It is a question, mutatis mutandis, of the same distinction established by Kant, in the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), between price and dignity: that which has a price—Kant explains—can be exchanged for its equivalent, while that which has no price, having no equivalent, is that which possesses only dignity.

Diego Fusaro is professor of the History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.

Featured: The Painter’s Studio, by James Digman Wingfield; painted in 1856.

Nowhere Fast. Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century

The latest book by Brian Bolger has just been published. Nowhere Fast. Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century is a close and thorough analysis of the structural and cultural decline of western democracies, particularly the UK. The book examines the economic crisis of globalization, the emergence of a new “knowledge class,” and the phenomenon of populism. We are happy to bring you an excerpt from it.

Please consider supporting this worthy work by purchasing a copy and spreading the word.

There seemed to be an inevitability in the talk of globalisation and the ‘end of history’ which ushered in the twenty first century.  This emanated from the post World War 2 era of New Deals and free trade, and of a dollar hegemony supposedly built on a dichotomy of liberalism and democracy. There was a broad consensus amongst academics and liberals, combined with a myopic belief in the progressive benefits of technology, that a brave new world consensus was forming and that war and discontent was ebbing away like the tide from an old broken Empire. 

Economists tend to measure globalisation in ‘Trade in Goods’ and FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) flows across borders. Yet this is like sailing a passenger ship in the North Atlantic with ‘Icebergs’ disabled from the navigation system. There are Icebergs floating around… and lots of them. ‘Trade Openness’ (calculated as Exports plus Imports as a % of GDP) grew steadily from 1945 onward. It reached its peak in approximately 2005 and has since begun to tumble.  There is now a trend to onshoring with the dual impacts of Covid and Ukraine. There are declining rates of return on investments  and the problems of geopolitical uncertainty. The world, effectively, is splintering into blocs (Grossraums, ‘great spaces’) and the result is chauvinistic assertion manifested in military conflicts. But the reasons for the collapse of interrelated economies goes deeper. It is not purely economic. There is an underlying shift in what Carl Schmitt called the ‘Nomos of the Earth’.

Whilst the twentieth century may have been one of globalisation and trade, it was also one of a ‘total mobilisation’ of resources and human resources for a system of capital accumulation – which heaps excessive demands on international relations. 

In political philosophy it often takes a period of nuanced reflection to assess the real ‘telos’ or ‘nomos’ of what occurred before or what is transpiring. At first Colonialism appears as a philanthropic and mercantile escapade. The ‘nation state’ appears to be the solution to the Holy Roman Empire and the despots of monarchical Europe. Democracy appeared to be the solution to the woes of the nineteenth century. However,  when the dialectic unfolds, we are left with the real ‘Nomos’ (law, ‘lex’ in Latin or ‘right to the land’). The ‘Nomos of the Earth’ was the concept which Schmitt outlined which, having begun with the discovery of the ‘New World,’ the Americas  replaced the ‘Old World’ of Europe and Asia. The ‘nomos’ is the real title to land, to a culture, and it is beyond International Law. In this however came the ambivalent nature of US policies of interventionism and isolationism. Establishing an American ‘Grosssraum’, as in the Monroe Doctrine, becomes problematic. The maritime Empire of the British was another ‘Grosssraum’. The nation state, however, works in contradistinction to this reality. It only works out in an international system of agreed law, of equal liberal nation states. When this breaks down, we have the polarisation of ‘Grossraums’ and the casualties of diminutive nation states. So ‘nomos’ means the real original title to land and when conflicts arise, it is usually a consequence of this disputed title, as in the Ukraine or Israel, or in Taiwan.

From the Middle Ages there developed a code of civil and ecclesiastical law to regulate conflicts of Church, Republic and Prince. The Holy Roman Empire acted as a type of ‘Katechon’ or protector against the antichrist. It was therefore more of a guiding ethos, or telos regarding Empire, an ideology even. The ascendancy of nation states in the nineteenth century sees the demise of the ‘Katechon’ or ethos. As in Washington’s final address the emblem of the modern era becomes ‘As little politics as possible, as much trade as possible’. So, nation states become largely conduits for trade, for globalised trade. Such a myriad of conflicting interests, mostly economic, has resulted in a ‘forgetting’ or rational/technical society without an underlying ethos. Now civilisational states, such as Russia’s ‘Holy Rus’, Chinese ‘Tianxia’, or Islamic states see themselves as unified (however corrupt). The American ‘Grossraum’ on the other hand, consists of liberal contradictions, the weakness of representative government, a confusion of foreign policy and an anarchic domestic world of anomie. Yet the liberal elites act as though they hold some higher moral ‘progressive’ framework. Hegel had said that there was no real American ‘state’, that it lacks a commonality of culture. 

It is not in effect a process of deglobalisation which is occurring, but the fundamental dissolution of the de facto independence of nation states and its replacement with regional Grossraums, akin to Empire. The current dying pains of economic globalism are ringing around the world.  Notions of International Law break down when its implementation is unequal and sporadic or when the civilisational states and empires resent encroachment. Schmitt envisaged, presciently, a world, not of globalisation, but one of differentiated ‘Grossraums’. He contrasted fixed ‘culture’ states such as Germany with flighty mercantile sea empires such as Great Britain. Land based realms, close to the soil, to nature are more stable. Again, there is a contrast between Kantian notions of universal international states based on a system of International Law and its opposite in civilisational Eurasian states who emphasise local and particular cultures. The Westphalian   world, which ushered in the modern notion of nation states is under threat.  The problem for modern nation states is that the sovereign no longer is able to wield the ‘exception’, to secure the safety of the state. This is due to the decadent form of liberalism which runs amok inside nation states. The absolutely sovereign Hobbesian state is in abeyance. The liberal state, based on economy, rationalism and progressive universality is unable to defend itself. The Katechon is under threat, not ostensibly from warring civilisational states, but from inside. 

The liberal and Marxist world envisaged an unfolding progress to a Utopian end of history schema and its naivete is now visible. It is more akin to Hegel’s development of spirit but one rooted in nature and culture. The liberal world must accept the particularity of cultures and their equal jurisdiction; there is no universal human rights, no good and evil. Man has moved from land to sea to air, to space. Yet we need to return to the land and a ‘jus gentium’ (law of nations) based on natural law rather than positive law which protects peoples rather than land borders. This, in itself, involves a sea change to real democratic participation in the polis and a move away from nationalism to community. In the middle ages there was a recognition of an authority that existed, be it the Emperor or the Pope,  and an informal common law. There were no wars between states, only competition between nobles. They largely concerned the pushing out of terrain rather than defending ‘borders’. We are now encompassed by borderlands and all its ensuing strife and war. Modern globalisation only concerns matter rather than spirit. Competition between modern states is delineated by a type of economic piracy. We have a version of maritime colonialism dressed up as globalisation. It is merely the naming which has changed. 

This international sea like empire is rootless. It imagines ownership of titles rather than ownership of culture. It is extractive rather than productive or creative. It provokes ‘ressentiment’ from the poor and disenfranchised. It creates borders and division because it has no underlying theology. The theoretical underpinning of the Chinese’Tianxia’ (all under heaven) of a cultural Chinese empire is its, according to the Chinese, opposite. In this argument the empire must understand the relevant cultures it ascribes to. It is not one off dominion but understanding, however far-fetched that might seem with the present Chinese incumbents. 

War has an economy of its own. When the underlying ‘telos’ to nation states is economic only, then this permeates all aspects of life. It is like a plague of sorts jumping from one realm to another: it invades healthcare, education, and war.  So, war has become Keynesian in an era of diminishing capital rate of returns ( r>g).  Capital follows a pattern of osmosis- seeking any host. Stocks in defence industries are booming. There seems to be no limits on technology and capital. War is not incidental to the modern era – it is a fundamental part of the ‘wealth of nations’. An International Court of Justice should be based on fundamental natural law, not allied to political institutions and particular states. Multicultural states are unrooted and their capital elites unmoored. There is in essence a dysfunctional quality to modern occidental states. Economy must be subservient to theology and telos.

Much of modern and late modern conceptions of Democracy and Identity are general, universal assumptions about how scientific research is done. Scientists and liberal philosophers start from the premise of how things ‘should’ be, not about what they, in fact, are. Our quest, then, is to find this dominion and how ‘Being,’ as an ontological concept, is not objective or fixed, but phenomenological, that is it is local and particular, in flux all the time. This conception nullifies any universalist attempts to ‘categorise’ or objectify other cultures. It therefore renders invalid much of the liberal assumptions on universal law, democracy, human rights and identity.

The map of the dominion, I believe, can be travelled in four domains, that of Political Economy, the ‘Polis’ (Democracy), Elites and Identity, although they all share common terrain. We follow Clifford Geertz in ‘believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’ Therefore, I approach these subjects from the position of phenomenological description and hermeneutics to give access to meaning. Since Plato, philosophers have established forms, or categories, noumena or Gods, as a framework of usurping nature. These ‘systems’ have imprisoned culture in artificial reason or metaphysics, divorced from nature, from the reality of good and evil. By analysing a ‘forgetting’ of the underlying assumptions of morality (and how they have been overtaken by reason), democracy and identity can be removed from obscurity, from a hermeneutical hiding since the Enlightenment.

A Disastrous Decision that will Ruin this Pontificate

The Vatican has just allowed the blessing of irregular couples, homosexuals in particular. A crisis has ensued; and it is only just the beginning. In this short article, I would like to offer a few thoughts on this crisis, as a way of orienting oneself and considering possible options.

I think I am what is known as a staunch Catholic. I do not believe a pope is infallible all the time—but I do believe him (Vatican I) to be infallible when he teaches ex cathedra. I tend to respect his ordinary teaching. With that in mind, the pope’s absolute power is only just, like all absolute power, if it is strictly limited and framed, with absolute respect for the Deposit of Faith and the institutions willed by the Church’s Founder, Holy Scripture and Church tradition as its counterpart. I also understand that we may not always have at the head of the Church a saint who doubles as a genius and triples as a hero. More generally, my piety is not papocentric. And like John-Henry Newman, I like to drink to the Pope, but first to my conscience.

In previous years, I have always had mixed feelings towards Francis, but overall I have tended to defend his positions, attracting the hostility of high-flying Bergogliophobes.

I took the time to read the text carefully, to reflect and to pray. And now, I have to admit, I have lost it. It’s as if I have come to the end of my tether.

Perhaps we are living in one of those exceptional moments in the history of the Church, and its future now depends on the outcome of the discussion, or struggle, that is taking place.

The essential tradition of the Church is concentrated in Scripture, the Word of God. The Bible includes Paul’s epistles. Saint Paul is the major source of all Catholic theology. The most important of these is his letter to the Romans. The first chapter is absolutely fundamental. So, here is how Paul wrote to the Romans to characterize sin in its essence and root:

And they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error (Romans 1:23-27).

These are not very mysterious texts. Even without being a great theologian, or a qualified exegete, one can understand. It is very clear that homosexuality has a particularly close relationship with idolatry and the overthrow of the Glory of God.

With that said, we are all poor sinners whom Christ wants to save. We are all capable of anything. Jesus prefers the lost sheep. He prevents the stoning of an adulteress, but says to her, “Go and sin no more.”

There is nothing of the sort in Cardinal Fernandez’s text.

We understand that there are an infinite number of lost sheep, and it is not a bad idea to try to bring them into the fold with a kind offer, rather than crushing condemnation.

But Saint Paul knew the love of Christ, which surpasses all knowledge, at least as well as we do. And yet, after dwelling on the atrocious mass of sin, he concludes this first chapter with these words:

They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them (Romans 1:32).

Is it contrary to mercy to speak this way? Who are we to judge the Word of God?

Mercy means calling the sinner not to die in sin, not to lose his soul, not to tarnish the glory of God. Is this what Cardinal Fernandez’s text does?

His text is subtle, I agree. But how can we ignore what the simplifying media will say and do with it? Trouble for believers? The scandal for the weakest? How can we ignore the monstrous global LGBT propaganda? That Rome seems to be going along with these perverse, totalitarian monstrosities? What an immense scandal! What an obstacle to the evangelization of the South and East, which can no longer bear the tyranny of a degenerate West!

So, I cannot help but wonder:

Would the author of the 1st chapter of the epistle to the Romans have signed Cardinal Fernandez’s text? Who is Cardinal Fernandez, to tear up the text of Holy Scripture? Does he not understand that the whole world looks on in amazement and wonders: Has Rome lost its faith? Is the Catholic Church still worthy of faith? Is the Pope here to weaken the faith of his brothers? Has Cardinal Fernandez lost all fear of God? Does he have no fear of hell?

A friend told me: “In my doubts, I used to turn to Rome. In my doubts about Rome, where do I turn?”

And he added: “Why stop there? Every criminal association has its values. Mafiosi have a sense of family, loyalty, sacrifice and friendship. They also want, in their own time, to get back on the straight and narrow, and to gently remind themselves that God remains their Father. Eminence, why do you not bless the mafias?”

And he added: “Of course, we do not change the doctrine, but in practice we do the opposite. I cannot express the disgust I feel at this hypocrisy. How can anyone say that this won’t upset anyone? If an educated person like me is troubled, what about the weak-minded person informed by TV?”

And he said in conclusion: “Facts are facts. Either God abandons His Church, or Rome is no longer in Rome.”

What could I say?

And what will I think?

I am told I have a phlegmatic temperament. I tend to consider all hypotheses coldly.

Here are the main hypotheses:

  1. The Pope is super-Christian (A) and his critics are sinister Pharisees (B).
  2. The Pope is ill, slightly senile, not very intelligent, too much of a camarilla, and Fernández has abused his weakness.
  3. The pope is a real pope in full vigor and is joyfully heretical in good faith and freely, although hypocritically.
  4. Bergoglio is not the pope and never has been. He is an antipope, put in place by the powers of this world, who have cunningly organized an orange revolution in the Church. A legitimate pope must therefore be elected without delay.
  5. Bergoglio is a political pope, like Urban II or Julius II, a Machiavellian defender of Church freedom.

That this discussion could even take place at all might seem overwhelming.

If option 3 were true, the question would arise whether to remain Catholic. It is not the most likely.

Option 4 is the most romantic. But conspiracies are not always wrong. However, there are some facts that do not fit the hypothesis.

Option 5 seems the truest, probably, given our current state of knowledge. To be combined with 2 and 1—especially 1 B, because 1 A is not the case. And if Bergoglio is a saint, I have my chances of being canonized, too.

I will now reconstruct the (hypothetical) political reasoning:

The pressure is too great. If we say no to the gays, we will be in trouble, and the clever anti-German maneuvering (we can talk about that later) requires some veering to the left if it is to succeed.

But, of course, we cannot say, yes.

So, Fernandez is asked to give the homos the kiss that kills. He invents an ingenious, theologically-incongruous distinction between first-rate benediction and junk benediction.

And we give homos the junk benediction.

Having thrown them a bone to gnaw on, which the media will turn into a royal feast, they will leave us in peace.

This concoction will go down well, served in a sauce of merciful sentimentality. We cannot rule out the possibility that its aroma will genuinely make the Pope weep with tenderness.

Let us be politicanti. All these LGBT aberrations will soon end along with the power of the West. It is just a matter of time. In the meantime, the power of militant homos to cause trouble must be taken into account. (God knows how much blackmail power they can wield in practice.) The powerful of the world are horribly instrumentalizing poor, grassroots homosexuals. And when the tide of history turns, these unfortunates will be the ideal scapegoats for reaction. So, it is only right to love them, since they will be so much to be pitied tomorrow.

In short, it is worth it to keep our backs to the wall until all these nice people have lost their power. Good Catholics will grumble, but they will stay. There is no explaining it. Intelligent believers must understand that Francis’ word is like Pius XII’s silence.

This kind of analysis may not do Bergoglio any favors, but at least it leaves Peter essentially untouched.

Unless, that is, it is a huge error of governance. This, seen from my window of competence, is indubitable. It ruins the relationship with Islam, bears the seeds of the loss of Africa and the disinterest of Asia, and the bridges will be burned with the Orthodox, while the Evangelicals will have the argument they needed to gain the upper hand in South America. Does Francis want to sink Rome with Washington?

Catholicism needs a pope. Loss of trust now goes hand-in-hand with loss of respect. Tomorrow, the loss of authority will lead to schism, as with the Anglicans.

The Church and the world are decidedly large objects. They do not fit into a too-narrow brain, and global responsibility does not sit well with coffee-shop talk and sub-prefecture Machiavellianism.

We will have to think about that at the next conclave.

In the meantime, it seems clear to me that dismissing Fernandez would be the only way to save this pontificate, which otherwise risks ending in disaster.

Featured: The Vision of Pope Innocent III, by Giotto; painted ca., 1295-1300.

The Synod as Seen by an Ordinary Paris Priest

We don’t know much about the Synod, because we’re not directly involved. We’re out in the field, patiently ploughing through parish life and “smelling the sheep.” We pick up a few scattered rumblings, which are generally met with indifference; but for some they fuel a vague concern, for others the hope of reforms concerning the place of women or the end of a supposedly “rigid” morality. The advent of a “synodal” Church is also presented, at least implicitly, as a response to the crisis of sexual abuse committed by certain clerics. One of the unstated aims of the “synod fathers and mothers” seems to be to deconstruct the authority of the pastor in favor of collective “decision-making processes,” which would destroy the seeds of clericalism, seen as the root of all evil.

To constantly evoke the dangers of clericalism in an almost totally de-Christianized world and a Church bereft of priestly vocations, which has seen a spectacular drop in the last decade (for Paris, the number of seminarians has fallen by over 50%)—isn’t this just shooting point-blank into what’s left of our feet to walk on? We’d like to hear words about the beauty of the priesthood, implore the Lord to send laborers into His harvest, and pray that priests will be good servants of God’s people, rooted in the interior life. ” Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear,” says the Apostle (Eph 4:29). Priests, especially the younger ones, need so much encouragement and consolation in the trials of ministry.

The least we can say is that this synod is not arousing the enthusiasm of fervent young Catholics, who attended very little of the preparatory phase. In Paris, only 14% of participants were between the ages of 20 and 35. The figure speaks for itself. Young people have a thirst for identity and clarity, a desire for formation and a certain flexibility in expressing their sensibilities. They go from the Christian pilgrimage to the Mission Congress, from the Gloria of the Angels to an evening of praise and healing.

In his homily at the opening Mass of the Synod on October 4, which was overshadowed by his responses to the dubia and its many possible interpretations, Pope Francis tried to strike a balance. He wants to avoid making debates over controversial issues too tense, and dismisses both the temptation of “rigidity” and submission to an “agenda dictated by the world.” The Synod is called upon, says the Holy Father, to build “a Church that has God at its center and that, consequently, is not divided internally and is never harsh externally.” He warns against “an immanent gaze, made up of human strategies, political calculations or ideological battles.”

The Church is Not Her own Creator

It’s obvious that behind the scenes at synods and conclaves, worldly strategies, intimidations and seductions are all around us. This is the way of man, and even more so of the ecclesiastical world, which is easily covered by a veneer of Roman charity and unctuousness. We can only agree with the Holy Father’s desire for unity. This does not prevent us from reflecting and offering constructive criticism. “You can take off your hat in church, but not your head,” said Chesterton. Cardinal Fernandez accuses those who criticize the “doctrine of the Holy Father” of heresy and schism (National Catholic Register, Sept. 8, 2023). Strictly speaking, there is no “doctrine of the Holy Father,” but the Catholic faith revealed in Jesus Christ, of which we are the servants and not the masters, whatever the orientations of a pontificate.

Basically, things are simple. Does the truth about faith and morals, the fundamental structure of the Church, the sacramental life, the final ends, emanate from “below,” through a democratic dialogue supposedly “in the Holy Spirit” that finally reaches a consensus? Or is it to be accepted “on our knees” by the Revelation of a demanding love that surpasses us, transmitted in fullness by Christ and borne by the living tradition of the Church, by those who have borne witness to the faith at the price of their blood? The Church is not the creator of herself, and we don’t have to define our own moral criteria, but listen to the Lord’s Law. “Be holy, for I am holy”, says the Lord (1 Pet 1:16).

Nonetheless, it’s true that new issues are constantly arising in the parish, and that they are growing in scope, and that the Church can’t ignore them. For example, the number of “remarried” divorcees, some of whom claim the right to receive Holy Communion, invoking “the spirit of Pope Francis;” homosexual “couples” who ask baptism for an adopted child or a child born through MAR; engaged couples, almost all of whom live in a form of cohabitation; the ignorance, for many who knock on the Church’s door, of the most elementary foundations of catechesis. Priests ordained for a traditionalist community generally have the grace of being surrounded by trained, culturally homogeneous faithful who take care of them and don’t question the Church’s constant teaching. A priest in a de-Christianized parish, following decades of “inclusive” pastoral care based on an unconditional welcome that strives to avoid any “cleavage,” and focused more on the charitable pole than on catechetical formation, doesn’t have the same support. The Church needs all kinds of people. Pastors who take care of families anchored in the faith, and others who are more on the front line in the shifting sands of a “liquid” society where the Church is trying to make its way along a difficult path that rarely avoids trial and error, pitfalls or lapses in judgment.

What Catholic, what bishop, would not be preoccupied by concern for all souls? How much hidden sufferings, buried guilt and wounds we must encounter by listening to and soothing, just as the Good Samaritan poured oil and wine on the man’s wounds and led him to the inn: the image of the Church? But to love all men is also to show them, as they grow, the way to a demanding and holy life in line with the objectivity of goodness.

Don’t Try to Legislate Everything

Rome must leave it up to the pastors in the field to discern the best path to take in the face of the particular cases that arise, and avoid at all costs trying to legislate everything, at the risk of falling into unbearable casuistry and aggravating divisions. The pastoral charity of a parish priest strives to reach out to people in complex or objectively sinful situations, but “love and truth meet” (Ps 84). Giving milk does not mean renouncing solid food, still less maintaining the vagueness of revealed truths, at the risk of creating extreme confusion. Loving all people means recalling their vocation to holiness.

The wisest thing to do is to do good where we are, to keep our spleens in check, and to continue teaching the faith of the Church, taking care of the sheep where they are, with as much pastoral delicacy as possible, but never giving up on leading them to the holy mountain which, as priests, we must climb first in a tireless conversion. Not primarily that of reforming structures by initiating ecclesial “processes,” but that of a heart resolutely turned towards the Lord. Conversion is personal, or it is not. The rest will pass like snow in the sun, and the mountain may simply give birth to a mouse. Let’s hope it doesn’t nibble away at the threads that bind us to the long tradition that comes down to us from the Apostles, and that it leads us to take one more small step towards the Lord of life, who remains eternally, beyond the contradictions of mankind, Master of time and history.

Father Luc de Bellescize is the Curate of Saint Vincent-de-Paul in Paris. This article comes through the kind courtesy of La Nef.

Featured: Fridolin Assists with the Holy Mass, by Peter Fendi; painted in 1833.

The Malthusians

Dr. Malthus, an economist, an Englishman, once wrote the following words:

“A man who is born into a world already occupied, his family unable to support him, and society not requiring his labor, such a man, I say, has not the least right to claim any nourishment whatever; he is really one too many on the earth. At the great banquet of Nature there is no plate laid for him. Nature commands him to take himself away, and she will not be slow to put her order into execution.”

As a consequence of this great principle, Malthus recommends with the most terrible threats, every man who has neither labor nor income upon which to live to take himself away, or at any rate to have no more children. A family, that is, love—like bread, is forbidden such a man by Malthus.

Dr. Malthus was, while living, a minister of the Holy Gospel, a mild-mannered philanthropist, a good husband, a good father, a good citizen, believing in God as firmly as any man in France. He died (heaven grant him peace) in 1831. It may be said that he was the first, without doubt, to reduce to absurdity all political economy, and state the great revolutionary question, the question between labor and capital. With us, whose faith in Providence still lives, in spite of the century’s indifference, it is proverbial—and herein consists the difference between the English and ourselves—that “everybody must live.” And our people, in saying this, think themselves as truly Christian, as conservative of good morals and the family, as the late Malthus.

Now, what the people say in France, the economists deny; the lawyers and the littérateurs deny; the Church, which pretends to be Christian, and also Gallican, denies; the Press denies; the large proprietors deny; the government, which endeavours to represent them, denies. The Press, the government, the Church, literature, economy, wealth—everything in France has become English; everything is Malthusian. It is in the name of God and his holy providence, in the name of morality, in the name of the sacred interests of the family, that they maintain that there is not room in the country for all the children of the country, and that they warn our women to be less prolific. In France, in spite of the desire of the people, in spite of the national belief, eating and drinking are regarded as privileges, labor a privilege, family a privilege, country a privilege.

M. Antony Thouret said recently that property, without which there is neither country, nor family, nor labor, nor morality, would be irreproachable as soon as it should cease to be a privilege; a clear statement of the fact that, to abolish all the privileges which, so to speak, exclude a portion of the people from the law, from humanity, we must abolish, first of all, the fundamental privilege, and change the constitution of property. M. A. Thouret, in saying that, agreed with us and with the people. The State, the Press, political economy, do not view the matter in that light; they agree in the hope that property, without which, as M. Thouret says, there is no labor, no family, no Republic, may remain what it always has been, a privilege.

All that has been done, said, and printed to-day and for the last twenty years, has been done, said, and printed in consequence of the theory of Malthus.

The theory of Malthus is the theory of political murder; of murder from motives of philanthropy and for love of God. There are too many people in the world; that is the first article of faith of all those who, at present, in the name of the people, reign and govern. It is for this reason that they use their best efforts to diminish the population. Those who best acquit themselves of this duty, who practice with piety, courage, and fraternity the maxims of Malthus, are good citizens, religious men, those who protest against such conduct are anarchists, socialists, atheists.

That the Revolution of February was the result of this protest constitutes its inexpiable crime. Consequently, it shall be taught its business, this Revolution which promised that all should live. The original, indelible stain on the Republic is that the people have pronounced it anti-Malthusian. That is why the Republic is so especially obnoxious to those who were and would become again, the toadies and accomplices of kings—grand eaters of men, as Cato called them. They would make a monarchy of your Republic; they would devour its children.

There lies the whole secret of the sufferings, the agitations, and the contradictions of our country. The economists are the first among us, by an inconceivable blasphemy, to establish as a providential dogma the theory of Malthus. I do not reproach them; neither do I abuse them. On this point the economists act in good faith and from the best intentions in the world. They would ask nothing better than to make the human race happy; but they cannot conceive how, without some sort of an organization of homicide, a balance between population and production can exist.

Ask the Academy of Moral Sciences. One of its most honorable members, whose name I will not call, though he is proud of his opinions, as every honest man should be—being the prefect of I know not which department, saw fit one day, in a proclamation, to advise those within his province to have thenceforth fewer children by their wives. Great was the scandal among the priests and gossips, who looked upon this academic morality as the morality of swine! The savant of whom I speak was none the less, like all his fellows, a zealous defender of the family and of morality; but, he observed with Malthus, at the banquet of Nature there is not room for all.

M. Thiers, also a member of the Academy of Moral Sciences, lately told the committee on finance that, if he were minister, he would confine himself to courageously and stoically passing through the crisis, devoting himself to the expenses of his budget, enforcing a respect for order, and carefully guarding against every financial innovation, every socialistic idea—especially such as the right to labor, as well as every revolutionary expedient. And the whole committee applauded him. In giving this declaration of the celebrated historian and statesman, I have no desire to accuse his intentions. In the present state of the public mind, I should succeed only in serving the ambition of M. Thiers, if he has any left. What I wish to call attention to is that M. Thiers, in expressing himself in this wise, testified, perhaps unconsciously, to his faith in Malthus.

Mark this well, I pray you. There are two millions, four millions of men who will die of misery and hunger, if some means be not found of giving them work. This is a great misfortune, surely, and we are the first to lament it, the Malthusians tell you; but what is to be done? It is better that four millions of men should die than that privilege should be compromised; it is not the fault of capital, if labor is idle; at the banquet of credit there is not room for all.

They are courageous, they are stoical, these statesmen of the school of Malthus, when it is a matter of sacrificing laborers by millions. Thou hast killed the poor man, said the prophet Elias to the king of Israel, and then thou hast taken away his inheritance. Occidisti et possedisti. Today we must reverse the phrase, and say to those who possess and govern: You have the privilege of labor, the privilege of credit, the privilege of property, as M. Thouret says; and it is because you do not wish to be deprived of these privileges, that you shed the blood of the poor like wate: Possedisti et occidisti!

And the people, under the pressure of bayonets, are being eaten slowly; they die without a sigh or a murmur; the sacrifice is effected in silence. Courage, laborers! sustain each other: Providence will finally conquer fate. Courage! the condition of your fathers, the soldiers of the republic, at the sieges of Gênes and Mayence, was even worse than yours.

M. Léon Faucher, in contending that journals should be forced to furnish securities and in favoring the maintenance of taxes on the press, reasoned also after the manner of Malthus. The serious journal, said he, the journal that deserves consideration and esteem, is that which is established on a capital of from four to five hundred thousand francs. The journalist who has only his pen is like the workman who has only his arms. If he can find no market for his services or get no credit with which to carry on his enterprize, it is a sign that public opinion is against him; he has not the least right to address the country: at the banquet of public life there is not room for all.

Listen to Lacordaire, that light of the Church, that chosen vessel of Catholicism. He will tell you that socialism is antichrist. And why is socialism antichrist? Because socialism is the enemy of Malthus, whereas Catholicism, by a final transformation, has become Malthusian.

The gospel tells us, cries the priest, that there will always be poor people, Pauperes semper habebitis vobiscum; and that property, consequently, in so far as it is a privilege and makes poor people, is sacred. Poverty is necessary to the exercise of evangelical piety; at the banquet of this world here below there cannot be room for all.

He feigns ignorance, the infidel, of the fact that poverty in Biblical language, signified every sort of affliction and pain, not hard times and the condition of the proletaire. And how could he who went up and down Judæa crying, Woe to the rich! be understood differently? In the thought of Jesus Christ, woe to the rich meant woe to the Malthusians. If Christ were living today, he would say to Lacordaire and his companions: ” You are of the race of those who, in all ages, have shed the blood of the just, from Abel unto Zacharias. Your law is not my law; your God is not my God!

And the Lacordaires would crucify Christ as a seditious person and an atheist.

Almost the whole of journalism is infected with the same ideas. Let Le National, for example, tell us whether it has not always believed, whether it does not still believe, that pauperism is a permanent element of civilization; that the enslavement of one portion of humanity is necessary to the glory of another; that those who maintain the contrary are dangerous dreamers who deserve to be shot; that such is the basis of the State. For, if this is not the secret thought of Le National, if Le National sincerely and resolutely desires the emancipation of laborers, why these anathemas against, why this anger with, the genuine socialists—those who, for ten and twenty years, have demanded this emancipation?

Further, let the Bohemians of literature, today the myrmidons of journalism, paid slanderers, courtiers of the privileged classes, eulogists of all the vices, parasites living upon other parasites, who prate so much of God only to dissemble their materialism, of the family only to conceal their adulteries, and whom we shall see, out of disgust for marriage, caressing monkeys when Malthusian women fail—let these, I say, publish their economic creed, in order that the people may know them.

Faites des filles, nous les aimons—beget girls, we love them, sing these wretches, parodying the poet. But abstain from begetting boys; at the banquet of sensualism there is not room for all. The government was inspired by Malthus when, having a hundred thousand laborers at its disposal, to whom it gave gratuitous support, it refused to employ them at useful labor, and when, after the civil war, it asked that a law be passed for their transportation. With the expenses of the pretended national workshops, with the costs of war, lawsuits, imprisonment, and transportation, it might have given the insurgents six months’ labor, and thus changed our whole economic system. But labor is a monopoly; the government does not wish revolutionary industry to compete with privileged industry; at the work-bench of the nation there is not room for all.

Large industrial establishments ruin small ones; that is the law of capital, that is Malthus.

Wholesale trade gradually swallows the retail; again Malthus.

Large estates encroach upon and consolidate the smallest possessions; still Malthus.

Soon one half of the people will say to the other:

The earth and its products are my property.

Industry and its products are my property.

Commerce and transportation are my property.

The State is my property.

You who possess neither reserve nor property, who hold no public offices and whose labor is useless to us, TAKE YOURSELVES AWAY! You have really no business on the earth; beneath the sunshine of the Republic there is not room for all.

Who will tell me that the right to labor and to live is not the whole of the Revolution?

Who will tell me that the principle of Malthus is not the whole of the counter-Revolution?

And it is for having published such things as these, for having exposed the evil boldly and sought the remedy in good faith, that speech has been forbidden me by the government, the government that represents the Revolution!

That is why I have been deluged with the slanders, treacheries, cowardice, hypocrisy, outrages, desertions, and failings of all those who hate or love the people! That is why I have been given over, for a whole month, to the mercy of the jackals of the press and the screech-owls of the platform! Never was a man, either in the past or in the present, the object of so much execration as I have become, for the simple reason that I wage war upon cannibals.

To slander one who could not reply was to shoot a prisoner. Malthusian carnivora, I discover you there! Go on, then; we have more than one account to settle yet. And, if calumny is not sufficient for you, use iron and lead. You may kill me; no one can avoid his fate, and I am at your discretion. But you shall not conquer me; you shall never persuade the people, while I live and hold a pen, that, with the exception of yourselves, there is one too many on the earth. I swear it before the people and in the name of the Republic!

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865).

This essay was published in 1848. It was translated into English by Benjamin R. Tucker and published in 1885.

Featured: Illustration from the American School Board Journal, 1922.

Scita Et Scienda: The Dwarfing of Modern Man

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909 – 1999) gave this lecture at Hillsdale College in 1974. He was true Renaissance Man, with expertise in linguistics, theology, history, economics, philosophy, political science and art.

A few years ago a friend of mine, a professor of zoology at an American university, invited several of his colleagues for a little party in my honor. I was curious to know their attitude towards Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but when I raised that question I received only blank looks. I spelled the name—still no reaction. “Well,” I finally said, “Teilhard was, after all, mainly a paleontologist and his works might not be of direct interest to you, but surely you know those of Pierre Lecomte du Nouy, a biologist. Like Teilhard he also died in this country and his books have been translated into English.” And again the learned assembly shook their heads. I gave up. Now, I do not want to be misunderstood. There was nothing specifically American about this conversation; exactly the same might have happened almost anywhere in the world—nowadays.

When all the guests had left my friend explained. “You must know,” he said, “that these professors are not only unable to coordinate zoology with the neighboring disciplines—paleontology or biology for instance, not to mention philosophy—but neither have they ever acquired a truly comprehensive knowledge of zoology as a whole. Like surgeons at an operation, denuding only a minute part of the patient’s body, they work in their own small, special compartment of science and except for their admittedly very thorough specialized research, nothing really interests them. They watch ball games and TV, read detective stories, play golf and canasta, but that’s about all. Erudition requires an enormous effort, and although it would be of an intellectual interest, it no longer has a practical, least of all a cash value.”

This kind of specialization is found all over the modern world and one of its immediate results is the Hillsdale College Hillsdale, Michigan 49242 Vol. 3 No. 10 October 1974 extinction of the polyhistor, the all-round scholar. Men like William Graham Sumner, or more recently like Roepke and Ruestow, two economists who also were at home in history, sociology, philosophy, theology, geography, politics and the fine arts, are becoming rarer and rarer. As a matter of fact, in many fields of scholarship and research—especially so in the natural sciences—great names appear hardly anymore, since larger tasks can only be accomplished by groups and teams. Prizes and honors are then accredited to an individual merely as a sort of primus inter pares. There still are discoverers, but exceedingly few inventors. The computer gradually takes over large sectors of learning, though not of the humanities, because it is unable to create a new philosophy with a new vocabulary, and so forth. It might be able to replace engineers and chemists, but not Kierkegaard, St. John of the Cross or Rouault. Thus technology, strangely enough, restored a certain hierarchy of knowledge, thought and creative work.

Specialization, however, has other effects as well. While it concentrates a man’s knowledge within restricted areas, it produces in others an increasing ignorance. And this ignorance is growing in an absolute as well as in a relative sense. A theologian-philosopher-scientist on the scale of St. Albert Magnus is quite inconceivable today. Shrinking in width, though gaining in depth, the areas of specialized knowledge are surrounded by fallow wastelands of neglected and abandoned fields of research. This relative ignorance increases inevitably and quite independently of the curse of specialization simply due to the accumulation of “registered” knowledge which the individual mind no longer can cope with.

This applies by no means only to the natural sciences; it occurs in the humanities as well. In theory somebody could develop a new, original philosophy without having gone through either extensive or intensive philosophical studies. The historian, on the other hand, has to deal with the steadily growing volume of stocked knowledge (“on file”). The subject matter grows and grows. Are men like A.J.P. Taylor to be called “historians,” an honorary term formerly bestowed on scholars of the caliber of Macaulay or Trevelyan? However, this decline is not only, nor even mainly due to narrowness, laziness, parochialism, superficiality or to the lack of a universal point of view, but is simply the result of the “practical” and excusable inability to master the Gaurisankar of classified and codified knowledge. Thus today specialization seems—justifiably? unjustifiably?—”realistic” (the great art of limitation!), whereas a universalist outlook unfortunately appears to be amateurish. The alternative seems to lie between “serious limitation” and “irresponsibly unfettered dilettantism.” “Research” today has come to imply narrow specialization.

In order to grasp the fatal proportions of our relative ignorance we have to take another aspect into consideration: the steady “shrinkage” of our globe in regard to subjective distances. In the old days it more or less sufficed to know what went on in one’s own and a few adjoining countries. Before World War I many French professors flatly refused to accept references from foreign sources in the doctorial dissertations of their students. Quotations from “barbarians” were not admitted. An “educated person” (as against a scholar) was judged and evaluated from this rather provincial point of view. But in an age when a jet takes one around the world in less than 24 hours and the daily news contains at least as many items from overseas as from the “home front,” the scholar’s outlook is necessarily directed towards other continents. The American library, the Canadian laboratory, the Australian research center, the badly (or not at all) translated Japanese or Russian periodical—he cannot disregard either of them. In fields of politics and economics, to quote some especially glaring examples, this geographical shrinking process makes even greater, more time-consuming and more expensive efforts necessary. Often we can merely cast a glance at a subject which needs to be studied thoroughly. The abundance of material within the various domains of learning leads or, rather, misleads modern man into a helpless eleaticism, and this in the very age when specialization and “complete” knowledge are trumps.

Thus we are faced with an insoluble dilemma. The desperate attempts on the part of modern medicine not to lose itself in details but to see the patient as an entity to heal, to cure man as a whole, encounters serious difficulties due to the lack of a truly comprehensive knowledge. Here especially the abyss between the scita and the scienda, between what is (generally) known and what should be known, widens from year to year. The result? On the one hand, because it has become indigestible, recorded knowledge is unavoidably more and more neglected and replaced by sheer intuition. One has to guess whenever it has become impossible to know and, therefore, to think rationally. (In medicine the diagnostician often does just that.) On the other hand, authoritarianism grows beyond measure. A layman, even a thoroughly educated one, can only listen in awe to the specialist’s elaborations, just as we listen respectfully to the watchmaker’s verdict about our ailing timepiece and pay grumbling and reluctantly whatever he charges. Gone are the times when an educated person was able to form an opinion on all the subjects that interested him or were necessary for his work. Specialized knowledge can still give strength and freedom in certain instances; thus an otolaryngologist suffering from ulcers still can judge the therapy proposed by a surgeon because, after all, he too has studied medicine. But from a general point of view the increase of accumulated and recorded knowledge also has increased our dependency in so many domains. Our self-confidence is being constantly weakened. Again and again we find ourselves facing a specialist who points out the sanction we incur if we do not follow his—to us, most incomprehensible—orders. Thus a new and outright humiliating fideism is being bred in the very shadow of rationality and scientism.

The result is man’s reduction to a dwarfish slave. The watchmaker who just pronounced a verdict beyond appeal on a customer’s alarm clock trembles before the diagnosis of his ophthalmologist or urologist who again prescribes in “good faith” medications concocted by a team of biochemists. There exist entire chains of “authorities” which, thanks to their individual monopoly of certain fragments within the gigantic complex of accumulated knowledge, exert very definite power in certain areas. This knowledge has become esoteric not only due to an artificial screening, but also due to its colossal volume. For the individual it is available only in part and with great effort. (The time required for a university degree is becoming longer and longer: the average mechanical engineer in Europe is today at least twenty-six, the practicing physician in the United States twenty-eight years old.) School knowledge too is affected by this development. A hundred or a hundred-fifty years ago a boy left school (lycee, Gymnasium) with an adequate fund of “general knowledge.” Today he has managed to grasp only a measly fragment of the scienda, the things he really needs to know in order to rate as an “educated man.” Whoever in the old days understood the working principle of the steam engine or the electromotor today ought to grasp the principles of the atomic reactor or the computer. But does he? Mathematics, philosophy, history and literature also constantly enlarge the body of accumulated knowledge. Homo discens, learning man, is being dwarfed by an immense, if not to say monstrous material.

Only the artist, the man who gives form to ideas and feelings, escapes this process. One can give piano concerts at the age of twelve, write poetry when eighteen and paint pictures not much later. This is possible. But it is interesting to see that today even art has become highly esoteric and subject to Horace’s Odi profanum vulgus. The art of the Middle Ages, of the baroque period, even of the Renaissance was somehow accessible to the average man. But how do most of the contemporary Germans react to the paintings of Marc, Klee, Kandinsky or Feininger? And the average American just managing to comprehend Melville, has he any relations to Robert Lowell or Karl Shapiro? National socialism which must be regarded as a “left” rebellion of the masses, the “regular guys” against all sorts of elites, revolted also against the esoteric character of the so-called “degenerate art” which gave little minds an inferiority complex or filled them with gnawing envy for the “easily earned money” of “infantile paint brush clowns.”

Now, there are two domains which, in theory, should be esoteric due to their great complexity, whereas in practice they are still the layman’s happiest hunting grounds: religion and politics. However, the situation is different in each case because religion has not only intellectual, but also spiritual and psychological aspects. The purely personal element which dominates in religion (as in love, whether we mean Eros or friendship) cannot be rationalized or reduced to mathematical formulas. We all are called to religious life, but not to shoemaking, cooking, race-driving or journalism. Without particular learning we can legitimately hold certain opinions in regard to religion in general, but not on a systematized level, not to theology. We can complain about the pains brought upon us by a serious illness, we can voice our despair or our impatience with the results of the treatment, but this does not give us the right to produce a scientific analysis of our ailment. Most cancer specialists have never suffered from cancer, few ear specialists from deafness. And daily communion does not put one in a position to pontificate about the Eucharistic mystery. In practice, however, the situation is quite different and, curiously enough, theology has. become an intellectual free-for-all. The tendency has always existed, but now the enterprising religious amateur has intrepidly rushed into theology. Atomic scientists will nowadays be pleased to give interviews on theological problems, zoologists lecture about the divinity of Christ and in television we find physicians and biologists dogmatizing about the Immaculate Conception (which they most invariably mix up with Christ’s birth from a virgin). Ignorance does not hamper anybody. On the other hand, a theologian would hardly ever attempt to lecture on nuclear fission, inheritance factors or the origin of thyroid diseases. He knows—or, at least, until recently knew—only too well that in this case scita and scienda are too far apart. (The intrusion of theologians into the fields of sociology, politics and economics, with very little preparation, is a very modern phenomenon.)

Theology, indeed, is a “last frontier,” as D. Riesman conceives this term, but so is politics. Man is doubtless an animal religiosum, but whether he is also a zoon politikon (and not only an animal sociale) is debatable—in spite of Aristotle. He naturally reacts towards political events and decisions and is not indifferent about administrative measures. But whether he has a natural bent to be politically active on the national level is not unequivocally established. On the other hand it is evident that the political systems of our time, either honestly motivated by ideological convictions, or hypocritically and for the sake of propagandistic “managing,” invite or force all adult citizens to go to the polls. Thus one cannot avoid the polls even in a totalitarian dictatorship. In that case, of course, only the most naive voter can harbor the illusion that he has been seriously asked for his opinion.

Things are different in the still free world because there a certain accumulation of votes has usually a decisive impact on the political process. The voter is called upon to consider and judge important questions and to form an opinion about subtle points by voting for or against the advocates of specific viewpoints. He is forced to take sides, to join this or that party, to express preference for one man or the other. This is easily said and often also too easily done.

This procedure was meaningful in the past and still is in narrowly circumscribed areas. The history of democracy in Athens has shown that there the general level of education was perhaps, in a way, sufficient for self-government, but that the passions whipped up by the demagogi (most of all envy!) had disastrous effects. Socrates was condemned to death by the democrats because he ridiculed their system of government and held monarchical views (as we know from contemporary sources). Plato, his disciple, despised democracy, and Aristotle fled from Athens in order to avoid the hemlock cup. On the other hand, direct democracy is successful and impressive even today in certain Swiss Cantons. Thus the citizens gather on the market place of Glarus in order to vote for the various propositions. In this limited framework scita and scienda are still very close. The problems concerning the Canton can be grasped by almost everybody. But this is an exceptional case in the present age.

We have the data of numerous polls in a great variety of countries which prove that the vast majority of the population is utterly baffled by the great problems facing their countries in our day. Their replies to the questionnaires testing their knowledge of current affairs would often be hilariously funny if the implications were not so tragic. However, it must be born in mind that the politics of a larger country (as against a village or small province), not to mention the global ones which directly concern the citizens of large nations, cannot be grasped without thorough preparation. This, in turn, presupposes years of time and money consuming studies far beyond the means of the average voter. True, subconsciously many people begin to suspect that they know less than they should and, in addition, they sometimes have the sinking feeling that their vote is a drop in an ocean. Their votes, as Aristotle a long time ago has stated, are counted and not weighed. The young playboy’s or prostitute’s vote has the same effect as that of a scholar or of an elder statesman. This realization still rarely affects the people in the newer democracies, but does it all the more so in the countries where the voting has been customary for centuries—in the United States and in Switzerland, for example, where now only 68 to 75 percent of the qualified voters go to the polls. In Austria and in Germany participation is way above 90 percent and in the totalitarian tyrannies it is almost one hundred.

The situation is not so very different wherever persons rather than parties are voted for. If the voter’s task facing parties is overtaxing his intellectual equipment, he is humanly helpless when he has to make choices between individual candidates. The demand on his psychological (if not psychiatric) experience is even bigger. In an age of TV and broadcasting a photogenic candidate has a huge advantage over a rather unattractive candidate, the brilliant speaker over a reticent though highly educated and experienced thinker. Undoubtedly a Hitler-type excites the masses far more than a personality like Heinrich Bruning. Here we see the fatal effects of what Ernst Junger once called “the fleeting Eros.” And since the candidates’ wives also appear in television, the male voters too can be emotionally attracted. Here, too, scita and scienda diverge sharply because the intrinsic superficiality of the mass media avoids all depths. “To dislike him properly you have to know him really well,” a disillusioned Republican once said about a Presidential candidate whose main handicap was his shortness.

The discrepancy between scita and scienda appears not only among the voters but also among those who govern. In former times rulers and administrators used to come from those layers who had the tendency to train their male progeny from childhood on for the higher forms of civil service. Promoters of the monarchist system could point out that future monarchs were given a very special education beginning in their infancy and this, together with the initial guidance of their predecessors (often the father or a near relative) enabled them to assume their duties fairly well prepared. In addition, a monarch could learn from experience in the course of many years, whereas in the modern republics a head of government is always suspected of wanting to monoplize all power and when, at long last, he finds his balance and acquires the necessary experience, he is dismissed like an insolent servant and replaced by another amateur who has to start from scratch. Of course, the monarchic system gave no special regard to talent, but is not the ungifted expert preferable to the green amateur? Who will make you a better coat: a bad tailor or a bright endocrinologist? The history of Europe with its steady ascent from 800 to 1918 and its cataclysmic descent from then on gives us without pity the right answer.

Similarly the statesman is more and more frequently replaced by the politician. The Congress of Vienna created a system for Europe which, in spite of certain deficiencies and misconstructions (like the continued partition of Poland), staved off another great war for 99 years. In this connection one also should remember the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919-1920 where rancor, meanness and sheer ignorance celebrated true orgies. At the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand, the representative of a defeated nation, was allowed to play an important and highly constructive part, whereas in 1919 the German representatives were humiliated and the Austrian ones handled like obnoxious criminals. The Hungarian, Turkish and Bulgar delegates were, of course, given a similar treatment.

What interests us here in the first place, however, is not the purely political or moral aspect of these fateful conferences, but the problem of scita and scienda. At the time of the Vienna Congress the economic factor was not yet generally recognized as of great importance; geopolitical considerations were rare; the psychology of nations was not studied since the masses, the plebs only intermittently became politically active. All nations represented at the Congress of Vienna had more or less only one common ideological enemy: la Revolution, The Revolution, that is to say, nationalistic democracy. This alone united them all in one camp as far as Weltanschauung was concerned. For the statesmen at the Vienna Congress it sufficed to know history, geography, the genealogy of royal families, international law and a few items taken from military science. In addition, one had to be able to move deftly on the slippery parquet of the great salons and to speak French well (the language of the “enemy”), for the mere thought of conducting important and confidential discussions with the help of interpreters would have seemed preposterous (and dangerously inadequate) to everybody.

For a politician of international status today the knowledge held by a Metternich, a Talleyrand, a Castlereah or a Hardenberg would be utterly insufficient. In addition to the informed expertise of the statesmen 150 years ago he ought to be versed in economics, finance, agriculture, mining, religious affairs, nuclear fission, electoral laws, the psychology of nations, party politics and the personal background of his foreign colleagues—a truly encyclopedic volume of information. To all this comes an endless variety of problems due to a shrinking globe! A newly accredited ambassador in Washington now has to call on over 120 heads of foreign missions. And not only the number of politically active countries has increased, international organizations, too, have mushroomed. There is the Red Cross, the UNO, UNICEF, UNESCO, UNIDO, the World Bank, ILO, FAO, NATO, GATT, the European Common Market, Euratom, Comecom, the Warsaw Pact, the OAS, the World Council of Churches, the Council of Europe, the CENTO and SEATO pacts. The world has become immensely complicated and, politically speaking, all information and knowledge pertaining to government must, one way or the other, be integrated. The minister of defense has to know about nuclear fission, the foreign minister about fishing rights, the minister of commerce about gold mining in distant continents, and so forth.

Still, the specific learning of our present-day cabinet ministers and presidents is not greater—although it desperately needs to be so—than that of the statesmen at the end of the Napoleonic Wars: it is, in fact, often vastly inferior. And do not suggest that modern politicians, having been raised to the highest offices through elections or parliamentary procedure, can simply rely on the advice of experts. The effects of such advice on the mood of the electorate has seriously had to be considered, as well as the effects on the coalition partners, if any. But let us, for argument’s sake, assume that a given politician, filled with a sense of genuine moral responsibility, is prepared to proceed according to his best knowledge and without regard to public opinion, perhaps even ready to accept unpopularity and to withdraw into private life after the next elections. If he really wants to listen to the experts, what does he do if the experts disagree? This is frequently the case. How does he get the insight to coordinate the contradicting specialists, to separate the wheat from the chaff? Even the experts are sometimes overwhelmed by the immense material confronting them. How is the politician to cope with the conflicting data offered him by the various experts?

In the case of the peace conferences and treaties one has to add the passions aroused by war (and war propaganda) which render balanced decisions almost impossible. Remember the “Hang the Kaiser!” slogan of a demagogue like Lloyd George who later became a boundless admirer of Hitler. With his catchword he won the Kaaki-Elections of 1918. His ignorance of historic and geographic facts equalled that of Clemenceau and was surpassed by Wilson, a former professor of government at Princeton. Here specialization made itself felt with a vengeance. To this helpless “scholar” with a Messiah-complex, who was thoroughly duped by Italian informants with forged maps, we owe the fact that the South Tyrol is still a political cauldron. (There are some worse contemporary problems too.) After World War II only few formal treaties were signed, but the decisions of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam are ample proof for the continued decline since 1919-1920. Compared to Roosevelt, Wilson was a sage and a saint, just as the German chancellors in World War I were geniuses when compared to Hitler.

Thus we observe in the present political development twin tendencies which, at first glance, seem paradoxical. On the one hand there is the growing number of experts who, however, are not rarely chosen for all too personal reasons; on the other hand, in democracies as well as in dictatorships, we encounter the rule of the absolute amateur who is at the mercy of experts, provided he does not arrogantly disregard all advice. Thus reason, knowledge and experience are all too frequently neglected. In the desperate dilemma caused by the contradictory suggestions of experts, clear thinking and serious study are rejected in favor of intuition and “prophetic visions.” This leads only very occasionally to the desired goal but in many more cases to disaster. Wilson, Roosevelt and Benes also boasted of their “inspirations,” and we still remember Hitler’s claim to his “inner security of a sleepwalker,” his traumwandlerische Sicherheit. They all had fatally transferred artistic principles to the art of governing. Art, religion and love are generally human, generally accessible, and universal. But, as Goethe already had pointed out, a work of art is complete, perfect in itself, whereas knowledge knows no bounds. Through art (as through religion, through love) man grows, but the realization that knowledge and science are bottomless makes him feel dwarfed. The wise will thus say with Socrates, resigned but calmly: “I know that I know nothing.” Knowledge and science are acquired with enormous efforts, yet they always remain fractionary. One also has to ask oneself whether the dictum that “knowledge renders free” is true to fact or whether it does not rather weigh man down with added responsibilities, make him his brother’s keeper, create a kind of thirst which in this life cannot be quenched. The fulfillment which art, religion or love can give is unknown to mere knowledge.

But—and this is a great “but”—knowledge brings power, or is at least a means to power. And precisely for this reason we have to ask what lies `historically’ beyond the amateurism of the popular intuition-motivated visionaries. Is the rule of experts, who still lack in scienda but represent the scita to a remarkable degree, somewhere in sight? Such a development began in Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries when the monarchs, realizing their limitations (and the increasing importance of the bureaucracies), ruled with the help of specialists. (These, in turn, had to correct subtly the blatant mistakes of diets and parliaments.) Even if today we speak of `statesmen’ we rarely think of truly popular presidents or prime ministers but rather of men who had the confidence of their monarchs and sometimes, to a certain degree, of the elected parliaments, men like Bismarck, Cavour, Witte, Disraeli, Guizot, Metternich, Richeliem, Oxenstjerna, Kaunitz, Pasic, Bratianu, Stolypin, Schwarzenberg.

This phenomenon has largely disappeared in the age of dictatorships because although the dictators need not respect the “will of majorities” they were or are almost all ideologically bound amateurs, which makes them disregard facts) The only exception is the non-ideologic military dictatorship (as in Spain, for instance) which, due to its already basically bureaucratic nature, can enter into a symbiosis with the civil service. What threatens us now in the free world is the premature fading out of our parliaments which frequently resemble low-level debating clubs, the discrepancy between microscopic scita and unassimilated scienda. Power as well as authority is shifted more and more to the ministries—and, of course, also to the trade unions. For the latter the disharmonies between the scita and scienda are not of vital importance. They make things easy for themselves: they are not genuine stewards, they merely claim to represent certain interests; they do not administrate (except if they themselves conduct enterprises); and if they feel no responsibilities toward the common good (which happens), they merely postulate and engage in blackmail.

l When once a student remarked to Hegel, the father of modern ideologies: “But Herr Professor, the facts contradict your theories,” the old gentleman looked down on him through his spectacles. “All the worse for the facts!” was his severe reply.

This growing discrepancy can become—directly or dialectically—a true threat to freedom. The masses might one day lose their self-confidence and their enthusiasm for their amateurish leaders. And the outlook is not much rosier in the case of experts who begin to feel the dormant possibilities for their power and wrangle for positions. Behind the political stages and the still party-oriented cabinets the various braintrusts make themselves more and more felt.

Governments consisting purely of experts would be exceedingly brittle, narrow and merciless. They could rule with ice-cold objectiveness in the name of reason and knowledge. We would thus be ruled “from above” without the patriarchal element and the father-image which characterized the monarchies of old. Against this concept liberal democracy promotes a fatherless “fraternity” and consequently, we only too often get the tyranny of Big Brother. The oligarchy of experts without controls might assume the character of a dictatorship of professors or, at least, of a government of governesses. But eventually it would go to the way of all flesh because of its inability to cope with the abyss between scita and scienda among its own members. Without an effective coordinating center which, I am sure, only a dynasty can provide, it would fall apart into nagging, fighting factions. Only an optimist can manage to regard our political and cultural future with equanimity.

The way to avoid a development which spells catastrophe for our freedom lies in the creation of sacrosanct domains beyond the grasp of power-hungry centralist forces, areas where the individual or limited groups can act freely, because there scita and scienda are still correlated—in the family, the small enterprise, the village, the borough, the county. Yet as far as the big central governments are concerned, we have coldly to face the realities of our technological society, which means an unavoidable increase of the technocratic element and of expertise. Nobody doubts that technocrats must have a high degree of knowledge, experience and even wisdom (which is more than cleverness). It is less realized that they also must have a high degree of character, that they must have virtue, that they have to be good men, which means men capable of love, magnanimity, tolerance, filled with humility in spite of their importance and responsibility. If this is not the case everything will be lost and the most ingenious political design come to naught.

Our freedom, after all, is menaced far more by the totalitarian than by the authoritarian principles. The latter came into being with our first parents, the former was born by the French Revolution. What we must avoid is turning humanity into an ant-heap; instead we ought to create small, individual “kingdoms” which can be governed with reason, understanding and, at least, a modicum of affection. “Where there is no love there is no law.” The tiniest of these kingdoms lies within the four walls of each home. And the thickness of these walls, as Ortega y Gasset has already pointed out, is the measure of our freedom.

This article appears through the kind courtesy of Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

Featured: Atelierwand (Studio Wall), by Adolph von Menzel; painted in 1852.

Order, Disorder, and the Wisdom of God

Ordo ab chao—“order out of chaos”—is a motto used in various permutations of Freemasonry. It refers to the “new world order” that the revolutionary Masons will bring out of the chaos they create in their revolutions bent on first separating and then destroying “throne and altar.” At its heart, Freemasonry is diabolical, even if many of its adherents call themselves Christians. The devil being the simia Dei — “the ape of God” — many of the trappings of Freemasonry have been pilfered from that Christendom the Masons so hate: their degrees, their symbols, and even their name, that of the Catholic guild of the stone masons — all are stolen Catholic goods.

The concept of ordo ab chao, while it is a revolutionary motto put at the service of evil, is actually quite Catholic if we understand it correctly. How might we do that? When we Christians look at the world and see so much disorder, we can assure ourselves, by our divine and Catholic faith, that the Providence of the all-wise God is serenely seated above this madness and will bring an order out of it that will astonish us all — His friends and foes alike. We have good reason to believe this. “And we know,” Saint Paul tells us, “that to them that love God, all things work together unto good, to such as, according to his purpose, are called to be saints” (Rom. 8:28). There is nothing omitted from those “all things”; Saint Augustine assures us that even our past sins are included.

Biblical Examples

Consider the revolutionary rejection of Jesus Christ by the official representatives of the true religion of the Old Testament. As wicked revolutionaries, they stirred up a mob and accomplished the mad crime of deicide. Yet, in God’s providence, that horrible crime was the very occasion of our salvation. (See this idea developed further in What Nobody Can Take from You, where I consider the patristic figure of Our Lord’s sacred humanity being a sort of “bait” or “trap” set by God for the devil.) Moreover, many members of that mob “had compunction in their heart” when they heard the preaching of Saint Peter (Acts 2:37); they did penance and were baptized. Later, as the nascent Church expanded, even “a great multitude also of the priests obeyed the faith” (Acts 6:7).

The revolutionaries became loyalists.

We can see a Christianized ordo ab chao even in the Old Testament. Consider the much beloved story of Joseph of the Old Testament, the son of Jacob who prefigured both his namesake, Saint Joseph, and Our Lord Himself. As literature, the true history of this amazing figure is a “comedy” in the sense that Dante and Shakespeare used the word, because, after all sorts of horrible things take place, it ends happily. These words of Joseph to his brothers are the revelation of just how happy an ending it is: “You thought evil against me: but God turned it into good, that he might exalt me, as at present you see, and might save many people” (Gen. 50:20).

God transformed the evil of Joseph’s treacherous brothers into good. Not only that, but the evil occasioned Joseph being exalted and turned into a savior of “many people”—clearly prefigurative of Jesus, the Savior.

Harmony out of Dissonance

Dom Augustin Guillerand, the Carthusian spiritual writer, wrote thus in his wonderful volume, The Prayer of the Presence of God:

My God, You are infinite order. Now, such vestiges of Your order that we can find and perceive here below are marvelous and dazzle us — and we see so little!

You are so essentially “order” that even what we call disorder is made to serve Your designs. You possess the amazing power of making harmony out of dissonance. It is true: to recognize that supreme order, we must pass beyond the duration of time and present circumstances — in short, of what is not — and wait until the passing and superficial moment has produced what Your eternal gaze sees and Your immense love wills.

Your wisdom is this gaze, seeing far beyond time and distance. It emerges from a mind that creates order and a love that gives itself. The order is the outcome of the mind that loves, the proper name for which is Wisdom.

“You are so essentially ‘order’ that even what we call disorder is made to serve Your designs,” wrote the Carthusian. That sentence is worth savoring, reflecting upon, turning over in our minds and hearts, and discussing with Our Lord.

The sentence that follows gives us a glimpse the monk’s sensitivity to music. It is worth pondering: “You [God] possess the amazing power of making harmony out of dissonance.” Those who have elementary knowledge of music theory will know that it is the dissonances which provide much of the harmonic “motion” in music. For a trite example of this, the dissonant tritone at the word “two” in “shave and a haircut, two bits” resolves into the consonant major sixth at the word “bits.” While contemporary serious music often revels in the dissonant with no resolution to consonance — making most of it cacophonous claptrap — serious music of a bygone era, like Bach, used dissonances resolving to consonances all over the place to move the harmonic structure while supporting a beautiful melody. In the context of Dom Guillerand’s book, we can imagine that, if our life has occasional dissonances in it (troubles, crosses, contradictions), Our Lord can and will resolve them into harmonious sounding consonances. If we cooperate with His grace, we are making beautiful music with God.

Perhaps it is the idea of “life as music” that led Pére Jacques Marquette to beg of his Immaculate Mother that she, “make clean my heart and my song.”

Picturing Divine Order

Another artistic allegory that we might consider in connection with this theme of order and disorder, though not employed by our Carthusian writer, is life as a painting. Imagine, if you will, an enormous canvas upon which an exquisite work of art is painted by the skilled hand of a master. If we look through a magnifying glass at a tiny segment of the work, but are, at the same time, prevented from seeing the whole, we might only see what is dark or even ugly. Extrapolating from the tiny part we are allowed at that moment to set our gaze upon, we might reason that we are beholding something hideous, only to discover that we have been pondering a small section of the eyeball of the serpent in Peter Paul Rubens’ exquisite masterpiece, The Immaculate Conception.

We even have an expression for this in our common parlance; we call it, “seeing the big picture.” But here and now, as Dom Augustin says, “we see so little!”

God is an artist; and, more than any other artist, He loves the work of His craft. We are that craft, not only as individuals, but as a Mystical Body. If at times there are dark spots in our lives, let us strive to practice the Christian virtues, prayerfully calling upon the Divine Artist with confidence that when His full canvas is revealed — when we “pass beyond the duration of time and present circumstances,” in Dom Augustin’s words — what we thought were hopeless blots and spills were but the dark contrasts of His masterful chiaroscuro.

It behooves us to consecrate ourselves totally to Jesus through Mary, generously and penitentially accepting all the chaos that circumstances impose upon us, asking God only that this disorder be made to serve His loving designs. Then we can work with God, in our own small way, to bring order out of chaos.

As a “coda,” I present Brother Francis’ meditations on order from his wonderful book of meditations, The Challenge of Faith:

  1. The heart of wisdom is the appreciation of order: putting first things first.
  2. The mission of religious life is the restoration of order.
  3. God created the world for man, and man for salvation: all order serves this one end, the salvation of man.
  4. St. Teresa of Avila commenting on the text, “Thou hast set him over the works of thy hands: Thou has subjected all things under his feet” (Ps. 8: 7-9), says that this is true principally of the saints, because most men subject themselves to the things of this world. Only the saints are truly the lords of creation.
  5. Peace is the tranquility of order; beauty is its splendor.
  6. Order is the perfect disposition of means to the end. Only those who know the true end can work for order. He who knows not the true doctrines of salvation is like a captain of a ship who does not know the destination of his journey.
  7. The only first principle of order is the Apostles’ Creed; the best prayer for order is the “Our Father”; the best grasp of the means for order is the “Hail Mary”; the triumphant shout of order is the “Hail Holy Queen”.

Brother André Marie is Prior of St. Benedict Center, an apostolate of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Richmond New Hampshire. He does a weekly Internet Radio show, Reconquest, which airs on the Veritas Radio Network’s Crusade Channel. This article appears courtesy of Catholicism.org.

Featured: Fiant luminaria in firmamento cæli (Let there be light), mosaic, Monreale Cathedral, created ca. 12th and 13th centuries.

Note of Bishop Marc Aillet Concerning the Declaration Fiducia supplicans

“The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) has just published (December 18, 2023), with the approval of Pope Francis, the Declaration Fiducia Supplicans, On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings.

Hailed as a victory by the secular world, and in particular by LGBT lobbies who see in it at last a recognition by the Church of homosexual relationships, despite the many restrictions recalled by this Roman document, it is the subject of unprecedented public disapproval from entire bishops’ conferences, particularly from Africa and Eastern Europe, as well as bishops from every continent. In addition, many of the faithful, including those renewing their faith, and many priests, who face complex pastoral situations in a society losing its bearings, demonstrating as much fidelity to the teaching of the Magisterium as pastoral charity, are all expressing their confusion and incomprehension.

In response to these reactions, and having taken the time to reflect, I would like to address a note to the priests and faithful of my diocese, as a bishop, to help them welcome this declaration in a spirit of communion with the Holy Apostolic See, by providing some keys to understanding, while respectfully questioning certain points of the declaration that may need clarification. Finally, I would like to invite the priests of my diocese to exercise prudence, the virtue par excellence of discernment. I am aware that this note is dense, but it seems important to me to treat the question with sufficient theological and pastoral depth.

Unchanged Doctrine on Marriage

Fiducia supplicans begins by recalling that the Church’s teaching on marriage as a stable, exclusive and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of new life, remains firm and unchanged (no. 4). This is why, the text insists, it is impossible to give a liturgical or ritual blessing to couples in an irregular situation or of the same sex, which would risk leading to serious confusion between marriage and de facto unions (no. 5). This is the reason why the former Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in an ad dubium response on February 22, 2021, concluded that it was impossible to give a blessing to same-sex “couples.”

Distinction Between Liturgical and Pastoral Blessings

A whole biblical journey is then proposed as a basis for the distinction between liturgical blessings (no. 10) and what we might call pastoral blessings, with a view to clarifying the possibility of a blessing being granted to a person who, whatever his or her sinful condition, may ask a priest, outside the liturgical or ritual context, to express his or her trust in God and request for help to “live better” and better adjust his or her life to God’s will (no. 20). This is, moreover, part of the Church’s elementary and two-thousand-year-old pastoral practice, particularly in the context of popular devotion (no. 23-24), where it is never a question of exercising control over God’s unconditional love for all, nor of demanding a certificate of morality, it being understood that we are dealing here with a sacramental, which does not act as a sacrament ex opere operato, but whose efficacy of grace depends on the good dispositions of the one who asks for and receives it. Thus far, the text adds nothing new to the Church’s ordinary teaching on these matters.

A Pastoral Blessing Extended to Same-Sex Couples

From the centuries-old practice of spontaneous, informal blessings, which have never been ritualized by ecclesial authority, we move on to what was presented in the document’s introduction as its proper object: “It is precisely in this context [ that of Pope Francis’s “pastoral vision ] it is precisely in this context that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage” (Presentation). It is even specified that “a pastor’s simple blessing, which does not claim to sanction or legitimize anything” (no. 34).

Thus, in the third part of the declaration, there is a surreptitious shift from the possibility of blessing a person, whatever their situation, to a blessing granted to an irregular or same-sex “couple.”

Despite all the clarification of the non-liturgical nature of these blessings and the laudable intention “to entrust themselves to the Lord and his mercy, to invoke his help, and to be guided to a greater understanding of his plan of love and of truth” (no. 30), we are obliged to note that this has been received, almost unanimously by pro and contra alike, as a “recognition by the Church of homosexual relationships” themselves. Unfortunately, this is often how the practice—already in use in some local churches—of blessing same-sex “couples” is understood, particularly in Germany and Belgium, and in a very public way. It is to be feared that they will feel encouraged to do so, as a number of them have already testified.

Questions Requiring Clarification

We understand the Holy Father’s legitimate desire to demonstrate the Church’s closeness and compassion towards all situations, even the most marginal—is this not the attitude of Christ in the Gospel, “who welcomed publicans and sinners” (cf. Mt 9:11), and which constitutes a large part of our ordinary ministry? There are, however, a number of unanswered questions that need to be clarified, both doctrinally and pastorally.

Would not these blessings be in contradiction with the notion of “sacramental” that all blessings assume?

It is worth pointing out that the reason put forward by the Responsum ad dubium of 2021 placed less emphasis on the liturgical context of the blessing than on its nature as a “sacramental” which remains, no matter the context: “Consequently, in order to conform with the nature of sacramentals, when a blessing is invoked on particular human relationships, in addition to the right intention of those who participate, it is necessary that what is blessed be objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace, according to the designs of God inscribed in creation, and fully revealed by Christ the Lord. Therefore, only those realities which are in themselves ordered to serve those ends are congruent with the essence of the blessing imparted by the Church” (Responsum Explanatory Note). This is why the former Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared illicit “every form of blessing” with regard to relationships that involve sexual practice outside marriage, as is the case with same-sex unions. While we must recognize and value the positive elements of these types of relationships, they are put at the service of a union that is not ordered to the Creator’s Purpose.

Is There Not a Distinction to be Made between Blessing a Person and Blessing a “Couple?”

The Church has always held that “such blessings are meant for everyone; no one is to be excluded from them” (no. 28). However, if we refer to the Book of Blessings and the Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy, we see that they are essentially, if not exclusively, for individuals, even when gathered in groups, such as the elderly or catechists. But in these cases, the object of the blessing is not the relationship that unites them, which is merely extrinsic, but the person.

Here we come to the novelty of the Fiducia supplicans declaration, which lies not in the possibility of blessing one person in an irregular or homosexual situation, but of blessing two who present themselves as a “couple.” It is therefore the “couple” entity that invokes the blessing upon itself. However, while the text is careful not to use the terms “union,” “partnership,” or “relationship”—used by the former Congregation for its prohibition—it does not provide a definition of the notion of “couple,” which has here become a new object of blessing.

This raises a semantic question that remains unresolved: can the term “couple” reasonably be applied to the relationship between two people of the same sex? Have we not hastily integrated the semantics that the world imposes on us, but which confuse the reality of the couple? In his apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Europa (2003), John Paul II wrote: “attempts are made to accept a definition of the couple in which difference of sex is not considered essential” (no. 90). In other words: is not sexual difference essential to the very constitution of a couple? This is an anthropological question that needs to be clarified to avoid confusion and ambiguity, for if the world has extended this notion to realities that do not enter into the Creator’s Design, should not the magisterial word assume a certain rigor in its terminology to correspond as closely as possible to revealed truth, anthropological and theological?

What about Homosexual Relationships?

Granting a blessing to a homosexual “couple,” rather than just to two individuals, seems to endorse the homosexual activity that links them, even if, once again, it is made clear that this union cannot be equated with marriage. This raises the question of the moral status of homosexual relationships, which is not addressed in this declaration. The Church’s teaching, in line with Sacred Scripture and the constant teaching of the Magisterium, holds such relationships to be “intrinsically disordered” (Catechism of the Catholic Church no. 2357): if God is not averse to blessing the sinner, can He speak well of that which is not concretely in conformity with His Purpose? Would this not contradict God’s original blessing when He created man in His own image: “Male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply'” (Gn 1:28)?

Are There Not Acts which are Intrinsically Evil?

To put an end to the controversies that had agitated Catholic moralists since the 1970s, on the fundamental option and morality of human acts, Pope John Paul II published a magisterial encyclical, Veritatis splendor (1993), on some fundamental questions of the Church’s moral teaching, whose 30th anniversary we celebrated in 2023. This encyclical, which confirms the Moral Part of the CCC and develops certain aspects of it, recalled in particular the Magisterium’s constant teaching on the existence of intrinsically evil acts (no. 79-83) which remain forbidden semper et pro semper, i.e., in all circumstances. This teaching is far from optional, and provides a key to discerning the situations we face in pastoral ministry. No doubt behavior that is objectively at odds with God’s plan is not necessarily subjectively imputable—indeed, “who am I to judge?” to use Pope Francis’s famous expression—but this does not make it morally good. The declaration Fiducia supplicans often refers to the sinner who asks for a blessing—”who acknowledge themselves humbly as sinners, like everyone else” (no. 32)—but is silent on the particular sin that characterizes these situations. Moreover, experience shows that the possibility of an “unconditional” blessing is not necessarily an aid to conversion.

Can the Exercise of Pastoral Charity be Disconnected from the Prophetic Mission of Reaching?

It is fortunate that this statement refers to the ministry of the priest, and we must give thanks to the Holy Father for creating all kinds of opportunities to enable people, far removed from the Church and its discipline, to meet a priest, as he expresses the wish in his apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia (2016), to experience the closeness of a “tender and merciful God, slow to anger and full of love” (Ps 144:8). But then, there can be no question of two people of the same sex engaged in homosexual activity and presenting themselves as such, or of couples in an irregular situation, resorting to a blessing granted, even informally, without a pastoral dialogue to which Pope Francis precisely often encourages pastors.

In this sense, the exercise of pastoral charity cannot be separated from the priest’s prophetic mission of teaching. And the heart of Jesus’ preaching remains the call to conversion, which we regret is not mentioned in this statement. When Jesus shows compassion for the sinner, He always exhorts him to change his life, as we see, among other examples, in the story of the adulteress: “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more” (Jn 8:11). What would pastoral care be if it did not invite the faithful, without judging or condemning anyone, to evaluate their life and behavior in relation to the words of the Covenant and the Gospel? These words speak of God’s benevolent plan for mankind, with a view to conforming their lives to it, with God’s grace, and according to a path of growth, called by John Paul II: “’the law of gradualness’ or step-by-step advance” (cf. Familiaris Consortio n. 34). Would not blessing two people in a homosexual relationship, or a couple in an irregular situation, lead them to believe that their union is a legitimate step in their journey? However, John Paul II was careful to point out: “And so what is known as ‘the law of gradualness’ or step-by-step advance cannot be identified with ‘gradualness of the law,’ as if there were different degrees or forms of precept in God’s law for different individuals and situations. In God’s plan, all husbands and wives are called in marriage to holiness, and this lofty vocation is fulfilled to the extent that the human person is able to respond to God’s command with serene confidence in God’s grace and in his or her own will” (Ibid.).

Can We Set Pastoral Care Against Doctrine?

Furthermore, can we oppose pastoral care against doctrinal teaching, as if intransigence were on the side of doctrine and principles, to the detriment of the compassion and tenderness we owe pastorally to sinners? Faced with the Pharisees who put Him to the test on the subject of divorce and the act of repudiation consented to by Moses, Jesus refers uncompromisingly to the “Truth of the beginning” (cf. Gen 1 and 2), asserting that if Moses consented to their weakness, it was because of “the hardness of their hearts” (cf. Mt 19:3-9). Jesus is even the most intransigent. It has to be said that the old law did not make us righteous: but with Jesus, we are now under the regime of the New Law, which St Thomas Aquinas defined, drawing inspiration from St Paul, as “the grace of the Holy Spirit given to those who believe in Christ” (Summa Theologica I-II 106, 1). Every act of ministry, including blessings, should therefore be placed under the regime of the new law, in which we are all called to holiness, whatever our sinful condition.

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, stated in a letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on pastoral care for homosexuals (1986): “But we wish to make it clear that departure from the Church’s teaching, or silence about it, in an effort to provide pastoral care is neither caring nor pastoral. Only what is true can ultimately be pastoral. The neglect of the Church’s position prevents homosexual men and women from receiving the care they need and deserve” (no. 15).

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, stated in a letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on pastoral care for homosexuals (1986): “But we wish to make it clear that departure from the Church’s teaching, or silence about it, in an effort to provide pastoral care is neither caring nor pastoral. Only what is true can ultimately be pastoral. The neglect of the Church’s position prevents homosexual men and women from receiving the care they need and deserve” (no. 15).

And St. John Paul II warns: “The Church’s teaching, and in particular her firmness in defending the universal and permanent validity of the precepts prohibiting intrinsically evil acts, is not infrequently seen as the sign of an intolerable intransigence, particularly with regard to the enormously complex and conflict-filled situations present in the moral life of individuals and of society today; this intransigence is said to be in contrast with the Church’s motherhood. The Church, one hears, is lacking in understanding and compassion. But the Church’s motherhood can never in fact be separated from her teaching mission, which she must always carry out as the faithful Bride of Christ, who is the Truth in person… In fact, genuine understanding and compassion must mean love for the person, for his true good, for his authentic freedom. And this does not result, certainly, from concealing or weakening moral truth, but rather from proposing it in its most profound meaning as an outpouring of God’s eternal Wisdom, which we have received in Christ, and as a service to man, to the growth of his freedom and to the attainment of his happiness” (Veritatis splendor, no. 95). At the same time, the clear and vigorous presentation of moral truth can never disregard the deep and sincere respect, inspired by patient and trusting love, that man always needs on his moral journey, often made painful by difficulties, weaknesses and painful situations. The Church, which can never renounce the principle of “truth and consistency, whereby the church does not agree to call good evil and evil good” (Reconciliatio et paenitentia, no. 34), must always be careful not to break the bruised reed or quench the dimly burning wick (cf. Is 42:3). Paul VI wrote: ” Now it is an outstanding manifestation of charity toward souls to omit nothing from the saving doctrine of Christ; but this must always be joined with tolerance and charity, as Christ Himself showed in His conversations and dealings with men. For when He came, not to judge, but to save the world, (cf. Jn 3:17) was He not bitterly severe toward sin, but patient and abounding in mercy toward sinners?” (Humanae vitae, no. 29),” (Veritatis splendor, no. 95).

“Do Not Be Conformed to this World”

I am well aware that this is a delicate issue, and I fully endorse the Holy Father’s insistence on the pastoral charity of the priest, called to bring God’s unconditional love close to every human being, even to the existential peripheries of today’s wounded humanity. But I am thinking of the luminous words of the Apostle Paul to Titus, which we hear proclaimed in the Christmas Eve liturgy, and which sum up the whole Economy of Salvation: ” For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly… He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds” (Titus 2:11-12, 14).

The pastoral charity that urges us—”Caritas Christi urget nos” (2 Cor 5:14)—to reach out to all people to show them how much they are loved by God—the proof of which is that Christ died and rose for all—also urges us, inseparably, to proclaim to them the Truth of the Gospel of Salvation. And the Truth is stated by Jesus to all those who wish to become his disciples: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16:24-25). Saint Luke makes it clear that he was saying this “to all” (Lk 9:23), and not just to an elite.

The words of St. Paul still resonate within me to illuminate our pastoral attitude: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2). All people, including irregular or same-sex couples, aspire to the best, because the inclination to the good, the true and the beautiful is inscribed by God in the heart of every human being—to recognize this is to respect their dignity and fundamental freedom. And it is worth “sticking your neck out” to help everyone, whatever their situation of sin or contradiction with God’s plan, as revealed in the Decalogue and the Gospel, to discover it and, through processes of growth and the help of God’s grace, to move towards it. And this cannot be done without the Cross.

Practical Pastoral Approaches

Thus, in conclusion, and given the context of a secularized society in which we are experiencing an unprecedented anthropological crisis, which inevitably leads to stubborn ambiguities:

  • I invite the priests of the diocese, when dealing with couples in an irregular situation or with people involved in a homosexual relationship, to demonstrate a welcome full of benevolence: people must not feel judged, but welcomed by a look and a listening ear that speak of God’s love for them.
  • I then invite them to establish a pastoral dialogue and to have the courage, for the good of the people and with the appropriate delicacy, without judging them and involving themselves personally in the pastoral relationship, to tell them clearly the Truth that the Church teaches about their situation.
  • Finally, I invite them, if the people ask for it, to give them a blessing, provided it is to each person individually, calling them to conversion and inviting them to ask for the help of the grace that the Lord grants to all those who ask Him to conform their lives to God’s Will.

Msgr. Marc Aillet, Bishop of Bayonne, Lescar and Oloron

Bayonne, December 27, 2023
Feast of Saint John the Apostle

The original version may be read here.