Psalm 42:5: Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance. Psalm 42 is a lament. The Psalmist is a deer in the wilderness panting for God. He is separated from God and wonders if he will ever be in God’s presence again. His soul is thirsty and he longs for the God who alone can refresh him. He... Read more
Today’s sermon is about hope. Hope is not certainty. Hope doesn’t guarantee complete control. A hopeful person is not someone who has anticipated and managed all the contingencies before he begins. Hope doesn’t avoid all mistakes and miscues. Hope is a virtue of adventurers: From hope, and through hope, and to hope are all adventures. Adventurers don’t know where their quests will take them. For adventurers, mistakes are part of the job description. Columbus never discovered what he set out... Read more
Marx looked forward to the withering of the state. He was centuries late. Figgis says it already happened in the middle ages: “As Professor Maitland pointed out, under feudalism there is no public law; all rights are private, including those of the king. It is this absence of a theory of the State as such which characterises especially medieval history, except for the great Church as a whole. In the strict sense of the term, there is no sovereign in... Read more
JN Figgis ( Political Thought From Gerson to Grotius ) writes, “The normal value . . . of political theories is a ‘long period value.’ The immediate significance of an Algernon Sidney or an Althusius is small and less than nothing as compared with a practical politician, like Maurice or Jeffreys. But his enduring power is vast. Hildebrand, Calvin, Rousseau, were doctrinaires, if ever there were such. Yet neither Bismarck, nor even Napoleon, has had a more terrific strength to... Read more
Tracing the separation of “economics” from the rest of life, Dumont notes that one key moment was the blurring of traditional distinctions between fixed property in land and movables. This was based on the priority of the I-Thou over the I-It relation (not his terminology): in “traditional societies,” “relations between men are more important, more highly valued, than the relations between men and things.” Given this view, for traditional societies, “immovable wealth remained, as associated with power over men, the... Read more
Louis Dumont ( Essays on Individualism ) notes that “the word by which the old scholastics designated society, or corporations in general, [was] universitas , ‘whole.’” By this they referred to the institutions, values, concepts, language that was “sociologically prior to its particular members, the latter becoming human beings only through education into and modelling by a given society.” Within the universitas was a variety of complexly connected societies, so that Althusius could speak of a ” consociatio complex et... Read more
Trent states: “Whosoever affirms that new-born infants are not to be baptized, even though they are the children of baptized parents, or says that they are indeed baptized for the remission of sins, but derive no original sin from Adam, which requires to be expiated by the laver of regeneration in order to obtain eternal life — whence it follows, that in them the form of baptism for the remission of sins is not true but false, let him be... Read more
I have an Advent meditation at http://www.firstthings.com/ this morning. Read more
JN Figgis ( Studies of Political Thought From Gerson to Grotius ) writes, “In the Middle Ages the Church was not a State, but the State; the State or rather the civil authority (for a separate society was not recognized) was merely the police department of the Church. The latter took over from the Roman Empire its theory of the absolute and universal jurisdiction of the supreme authority, and developed it into the doctrine of the plenitudo potestatis of the... Read more
Dumont argues that the Gelasian “two powers” theory is often misread. The theory is not a simple hierarchy, the state subordinated to the church, but a ” hierarchical complementarity .” Priests are indeed superior to kings, but they are “subordinate to the king in mundane matters that regard the public order” and thus are “inferior only on an inferior level.” By the Gelasian theory, “if the Church is in the Empire with respect to worldly matters, the Empire is in... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In