Rich and Poor

Last updated on: September 3, 2018 at 6:06 pm By Peter Leithart

Proverbs 22:2 says: “The rich and poor have a common bond, Yahweh is the maker of them all.”

The text has an immediate contemporary application. Rich and poor aren’t different species, and they shouldn’t occupy different spaces. But, in the U.S. at least, we’re “coming apart,” as Charles Murray has written, with the wealthy segregating themselves physically, socially, educationally. Solomon would be appalled at the neglect of our derelict inner cities; he would be equally appalled at the isolation of our gated communities. We have organized our social space in a way that denies the “common bond” that we have as creatures of Yahweh. We recoil at our own flesh (cf. Isaiah 58:7).

Several of the surrounding Proverbsfill out details of Solomon’s vision of a society that embodies the common bond of rich and poor. Proverbs 22:9 says, literally, that “The good (of) eye shall be blessed, for he gives from his bread to the poor.” Jesus also uses the image of the “eye” when talking about wealth: “If you eye is clear, then is your body full of light” (Matthew 6). The eye is an organ of judgment, associated with valuations, including valuations of wealth. The “dark eye” cannot evaluate the true worth of heavenly or earthly treasure, and so hoards treasure. Those with good eyes know the true value of earthly treasure, and also see the greater value the poor.

There is a connection with Genesis 3. The eyes of Adam and Eve were opened when they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, a tree that signified kingly status and the authority to judge. By eating from the tree, they were elevated to a royal status for which they were unprepared. Proverbs 22:9 indicates kings with “open eyes” are generous. A good king is one with a good eye and a body of light. A good king discerns between good and evil, and provides for those who are in need. As always in the Bible, care of the poor is the criterion of a just society.

The Proverb says that the man with a good eye gives “from” his bread, or, as the NASB says, “some of his bread.” That might sound less than fully generous: Why doesn’t he give it all away? Is Solomon endorsing a residual selfishness? No. We should view this as a description of hospitality. The man with a good eye consumes his bread, but consumes it along with the poor. Hospitality, not unilateral dispossession, is the biblical ideal. Those who have should give to those who don’t have, but they should give in such a way that haves and have-nots share goods together. Economics is part of the larger “social” reality of fellowship. The common bond of rich and poor is expressed by common share in a loaf of bread.

From 22:22 through 24:23, Proverbs diverges from the typical two-line pattern. With a few exceptions, these proverbs run to at least two, sometimes several verses. Thus verses 22-23 form a single proverb, as do verses 24-25 and verses 26-27. Verses 28-29 go back to the normal pattern, but then the long-form proverbs resume in 23:1.

In 22:22-23 Solomon instructs his son in just treatment of the poor and afflicted. Proverbs is an instruction manual for princes. Solomon wants his son to rule justly. The “gate” is the place of trials and judgments, the place of entry and exclusion, and Solomon wants his son to establish justice among the elders of the gates. Rulers of the gates shouldn’t ignore the pleas of the poor nor favor the rich.

Verse 23 gives the rationale, echoing the warnings of the Torah (e.g., Exodus 23:6). Yahweh takes up the cause of the afflicted, and those who have no protector. He is Father of the fatherless, Husband of widows, Kinsman Redeemer of the oppressed. There is a lex-talionic justice at work: Yahweh threatens to “rob the soul” of those who rob the poor.

Of all nations, Israel should understand this. Israel was formed as a people when Yahweh delivered them from the oppressor – the Exodus. As Yahweh took up the cause of Israel in Egypt, He will take up the cause of the oppressed if Israel becomes an Egypt (as, ironically enough, it does under Solomon himself, and under Solomon’s son Rehoboam, perhaps the first recipient of these proverbs!). In Egypt, the Lord did “rob the soul” of those who “rob the poor,” taking the firstborn of Egypt in exchange for all the sons of Israel that were thrown into the Nile.

This is a portion of a post for Politics of Scripture. Continue reading here.

In the Beginning Were Diptychs

Last updated on: August 31, 2018 at 12:57 am By Peter Leithart

Thomas Brodie (Genesis As Dialogue) argues that “Genesis consists of twenty-six diptychs. Building on older insights that several Genesis texts occur in pairs and that Genesis is somehow binary or dialogical, this study makes a basic observation: The entire book is composed of diptychs—accounts which, like some paintings, consist of two parts or panels.”

He gives several examples: “There are . . . two panels of creation (1:1–2:24), two of primordial sin (2:25–4:16), two genealogies (4:17–chap. 5), two parts to the flood story (6:1–9:1:17), two complementary histories about Noah’s sons (9: 18–chap. 10), and so on—to a total of twenty-six diptychs (six in chaps. 1–11, seven in the Abraham story, six in the initial Jacob story, and seven in the Joseph story). Genesis then falls into fifty-two panels—a refinement of the medieval division into fifty chapters” (xi-xii).

Twenty-six, you say? As in the gematria of YHWH?

After the double creation account, Brodie finds a double account of the fall – the forbidden fruit in the garden (2:25-3) and Cain’s murder of Abel (4:1-16). The two accounts are linked in multiple ways. They tell similar stories, but along a different axis:

“Rather as the creation diptych (Gen. 1: 1–2:24) was representative of the two basic types of creation narratives, so the crime-and-punishment diptych also is broadly representative. The first crime is primarily vertical, against God; the second is more horizontal, against another human being. Furthermore, these two crimes involve two of the most basic pairings in life: man-woman; and brother-brother. By portraying two basic couples and two basic kinds of crime or sin, the diptych as a whole is typical or representative” (143).

Here is a modified version of Brodie’s chart of the parallels between the episodes (144):

The setting
They. . .the man and his wife. . .	The man knew. . .his wife
The serpent. . .of the field. . .	Sin crouching. . . into the field.
Fruit forbidden by God.	Fruit not regarded by God.
Problem: relation to God.	Problem: relation, through God, to Abel.
The drama on the face: the eyes’ delight, desire.	The drama on the face: distress, face fallen.
Crime and punishment
After eating: they knew. . .	After killing: Where is Abel. . . ?
They heard the voice. . .	The voice. . .is crying to me
I hid.	I must hide/be concealed.
Avoiding responsibility: : It was the woman. . .the serpent.	Avoiding responsibility Am I my brother’s keeper?
Because you have done this, cursed are you. . . cursed is the ground because of you.	What have you done? Now you are cursed from the ground.
The aftermath
God’s protective action: Clothes them.	God’s protective action: Puts a sign on Cain.
God cast them out of Eden.	Cain went out from God.
Cherubim placed east of. . . Eden.	Cain dwelt east of Eden.

Beyond this, the double fall is echoed again later on in the post-diluvian account of Noah’s sons: “The two sin accounts (2:25–4:16, including Cain) are mirrored obscurely in the stories of Noah’s sons (including Canaan, 9:18–chap. 10). In particular, the drama of the tree, nakedness, and the eyes (2:24–chap. 3), is partly reversed in the drama involving another strange tree (the vine) and the turning away of the eyes from nakedness (9:18–29)” (17).

Shakespeare’s Fallen World

Last updated on: August 30, 2018 at 2:45 am By Peter Leithart

John Wilders’s The Lost Garden attempts to discern the unified concept of the human condition that lies behind Shakespeare’s English and Roman history plays. He finds the key in the Christian doctrine of sin:

The “discrepancy between an ideal past and a painful present, between the hopeful intentions of Shakespeare’s heroes and their temporary, fragile achievements, is, I believe, a way of portraying in social and political terms the theological idea of a ‘fallen’ humanity. The myth of the Fall and the doctrines derived from it are an attempt to account for the imperfections of the secular world, for the way in which actual experience falls short of experience as we imagine, ideally, it could be” (10).

Though Shakespeare’s characters rarely openly discuss theology (playwrights were prohibited from doing so), he was aware of the doctrine, and it accounts for central themes of his histories: “the temporal, shifting nature of man and his achievements, his subjection to the arbitrary whims of fortune, the separation between man and God and the hidden nature of God’s purposes, man’s ignorance of himself and of a world which had formerly been plain and clear to him, the impossibility of wholly right action in a creation which has become corrupt” (10).

In short, “As an Elizabethan Englishman, however, he could not have failed to be acquainted with the idea that man had once enjoyed a happy state in which his life was consistent with his hopes and he was free from the effects of time. Although Shakespeare’s historical characters seldom talk theology, nevertheless the frustrations they experience and the defeats they suffer may be attributed to the constrictions imposed by God on mankind for Adam’s disobedience. Conscious of the unsatisfactory nature of their times, they occasionally look back – or forward -to a golden age when things were better” (10).

For Elizabethans, one effect of the fall was the disjointing of time. Fallen humans were subject to unexpected shifts and changes. Shakespeare often depicts this phenomenon in his histories through the use of messengers, who bring news that disrupts plans and changes the mood. At the beginning of the second part of Henry IV, three messengers arrive, the last two contradicting the first. The effect is to depict the confusion of battle and of Northumberland, who is the central figure in the scene.

Richard III uses the same device to good effect. For most of the play, Richard is “largely untroubled by change” because “he is responsible for the deaths which constitute the shifts in power and has little need of messengers to tell him what he already knows.” Toward the end of Act IV, things change, as Richard begins receiving “reports of events outside his control – the landing of Richmond, the gathering of enemy forces in the west and north. . . . the appearance of these messengers is one of the signs we are given that Richard is losing his grip” (14).

Loyalism v. Integrity

Last updated on: August 30, 2018 at 3:17 pm By Peter Leithart

President Trump started calling his Attorney General Jeff Sessions “beleaguered” months ago. Now it’s actually true. Trump made it true.

Republican leaders are plotting with Trump to replace Sessions after the mid-term elections.

Jerry Falwell, Jr., has raised questions about the sincerity of Sessions’s commitment to Trump’s agenda. “He’s not on the President’s team,” Falwell says.

Sessions, a long-time Alabama Senator, can’t depend on support back home any more. The Alabama Congressional delegation has stopped defending him.

Trump and everyone connected with him wants the Russia investigation to go away. Getting rid of Sessions is the cleanest way to get that done.

Trump does a lot of outrageous things. But when he humiliates Sessions, it makes my Alabama blood boil. And I’m a transplant to Alabama.

Sessions left a secure Senate seat to throw his weight behind a long-shot candidate. Was this opportunism?

As Fred Barnes has pointed out, no one in Trump’s administration has advanced Trump’s agenda more effectively than Sessions. Is this disloyalty?

Of course Sessions recused himself from the Russian investigation. He had been implicated as a possible target of investigation. Was this cowardice?

Sessions insists that the Department of Justice will enforce the law without bowing to political pressure. How did this become controversial?

I don’t defend Sessions because I share all his priorities or views. I’m skeptical that his law-and-order agenda will be an effective response to crime. Immigration law is a mess, but I don’t believe that immigration poses a mortal threat to the Republic.

And I don’t defend Sessions merely because he’s from my home state.

Sessions should be defended because he’s a man of integrity. He takes the law as given and seeks to enforce it, thoroughly, toughly, impartially. He does his job, without fanfare, leaks, Tweets.

He lives by the old American axiom that we are a nation of laws not men.

One would have thought this is what Republicans would want from the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Do GOP leaders want an AG who functions as the President’s personal attorney?

Does Falwell want to turn the federal government into an arm of the Trump Organization?

It’s no surprise that Trump doesn’t quite know what to do with a man who won’t bend to his whims or buckle under his insults. Loyalty to Trump is Trump’s own criterion for judging his Cabinet and staff. We’ve come to expect that.

But it’s alarming when loyalty to Trump becomes a guiding principle for the Republican Party and leaders on the Religious Right.

The internal battle at the DOJ, and in the Trump administration more generally, is loyalism v. integrity. If Trump wants to make America great, and not merely advance his personal cult, he should look for more people like Jeff Sessions to add to his team.

Not Pedophilia

Last updated on: August 25, 2018 at 10:52 pm By Peter Leithart

News reports of the recent revelations about the sex scandals in the Catholic church still claim that the crisis is about “pedophilia.” It’s not, as Philip Jenkins pointed out more than twenty years ago (Pedophiles and Priests).

The alliterative “pedophile priests” is rhetorically punchy but, Jenkins argued, misleading: “Both the words in question are open to controversy because they place a special construction upon the behavior: taken as a whole, the term makes the problem more serious, more dangerous, and more Catholic than it would otherwise appear. To speak of ‘priests’ severely limits the phenomenon of abuse by clergy because the word is commonly understood to refer to Catholic priests, as opposed to the pastors or preachers of other denominations (though priests conceivably also implies Episcopal or Orthodox ministers)” (7).

Pedophile is also misleading: “A pedophile is a man sexually attracted to children below the age of puberty, but the vast majority of recorded instances of clergy ‘abuse’ or misconduct involve an interest in teenagers of either gender, often boys of fifteen or sixteen. The difference may seem trivial, but most psychological opinion holds that pedophiles are far more difficult to treat or control than offenders who direct their attention to older targets. Nor is it possible to speak of a younger child’s giving genuine consent to a sexual act, so that the conduct necessarily implies the use of force or grave deception. To speak of a ‘pedophile priest’ implies that the victims are younger and more defenseless than they commonly are and that the offenders are severely compulsive and virtually incurable. The very term most commonly used to describe this problem has powerful rhetorical connotations in its own right, even before a given writer or journalist has begun to select and describe cases to illustrate the phenomenon” (7).

Rather than pedophilia, most cases exhibit “pederasty” or “ephebophilia,” “the consensual preference for boys . . . upon puberty” (79). The “cases often suggest sexual liaisons between priests and boys or young men in their late teens or early twenties” (78). Jenkins adds, “The case that ruined Bruce Ritter involved a man of twenty-five who generally passed for nineteen. Other incidents were said to affect somewhat younger boys, but even if all the allegations against him were true, he would not count as a pedophile” (79).

The distinction isn’t meant to excuse. But getting the details straight does clarify what the moral issue actually is: “Suggesting that the church concealed or tolerated pedophiles is much more destructive than the charge that it granted a certain degree of tolerance to priests involved in consensual relationships with older boys or young men. In Catholic church law, the age of heterosexual consent is sixteen rather than the eighteen common to most American jurisdictions” (79).

Surprisingly, Jenkins argues that “the hostile imagery in the mainstream media from the mid-1980s onward resulted from the precedents set by Catholic newspapers and Catholic commentators, who excoriated the policies of the church hierarchy. It was the Catholic press, above all the liberal National Catholic Reporter (NCR), that broke ground for other media outlets in drawing attention to clergy sex scandals, in presenting the cases as part of a systemic problem, and by stressing the institutional context of the offenses. As early as 1985, it was NCR that pioneered the term ‘pedophile priests'” (15).

All this justifies Bishop Robert Morlino’s forceful recent statement about the crisis: “until recently the problems of the Church have been painted purely as problems of pedophilia — this despite clear evidence to the contrary. It is time to be honest that the problems are both and they are more. To fall into the trap of parsing problems according to what society might find acceptable or unacceptable is ignoring the fact that the Church has never held ANY of it to be acceptable — neither the abuse of children, nor any use of one’s sexuality outside of the marital relationship, nor the sin of sodomy, nor the entering of clerics into intimate sexual relationships at all, nor the abuse and coercion by those with authority. . . It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord. The Church’s teaching is clear that the homosexual inclination is not in itself sinful, but it is intrinsically disordered in a way that renders any man stably afflicted by it unfit to be a priest. And the decision to act upon this disordered inclination is a sin so grave that it cries out to heaven for vengeance, especially when it involves preying upon the young or the vulnerable. Such wickedness should be hated with a perfect hatred. Christian charity itself demands that we should hate wickedness just as we love goodness.”

God and the First Amendment

Last updated on: August 25, 2018 at 9:42 pm By Peter Leithart

“The First Amendment’s religious liberty provisions make no sense except on the supposition that God exists – that such a thing as religious truth exists and that the commands of true religious faith are real and superior to the commands of civil society.”

This is the thesis of a 2013 article in the Pepperdine Law Review article by University of St. Thomas law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen.

The existence of God is the only plausible foundation for a doctrine of religious freedom, Paulsen argues: “Religious freedom only makes entire sense as a social and constitutional arrangement on the supposition that God exists (or very likely exists); that God makes claims on the loyalty and conduct of human beings; and that such claims, rightly perceived and understood, are prior to, and superior to, the claims of any human authority. Simply put: God’s commands—God’s will, God’s purposes—rightfully trump man’s. Freedom of religion, understood as a human legal right, is government’s recognition of the priority and superiority of God’s true commands over anything the state or anyone else requires or forbids” (1160).

It’s incoherent to say that governments confer the right to religious liberty: “That would be, subtly and ironically, inconsistent with the very liberty the state purports to confer. It would be an assertion, at some level, of the priority and supremacy of the state and not God: the state, in its beneficence, grants the exercise of religion—the strivings of individuals and groups to discern and fulfill their duties to God, in good faith, as they understand them—a certain amount of leeway. But the nature and extent of such freedom is, on such a view, ultimately for the state to judge” (1160).

The view that the state confers religious liberty isn’t “really religious liberty, in the sense of freedom of religious exercise from ultimate state control. It is a cipher, shadow, or parody of religious liberty. At bottom, what justifies religious liberty—the only thing that makes it at all sensible as a liberty distinct from other liberties—is some shared sense that true religious obligation is more important than civil obligation and that, consequently, civil society must recognize this truth. Religious liberty is the legal duty of civil society to defer to the plausibly true free exercise of genuine religious faith” (1160).

Religious liberty is a recognition that the state doesn’t have the competence to judge God: “Because God’s commands, rightly perceived, trump the state’s commands, it makes no sense to say that the state can determine what God’s commands are and whether an individual or group has rightly perceived them. The state may not in this respect, or any other, set itself up as the arbiter of religious truth and enforce its determinations as law. The state is incompetent to determine authoritatively what God does or does not command” (1160).

Paulsen’s argument is that the Founders believed in religious truth, and for that reason formulated the First Amendment’s free exercise and nonestablishment clauses. Without this premise, on the premise that religious liberty is conferred by the state, religious liberty is a “chimera.”

On this basis, the “Free Exercise Clause is . . . best understood as a sweeping protection of freedom to engage in religious conduct, even when at odds with the usual commands of civil government. Understood as protecting the priority of God’s commands over man’s, the Free Exercise Clause means that religious conduct is presumptively immune from the usual authority of the state. It means that religious conduct and only religious conduct— conduct rooted in the believer’s understanding of the commands or expectations of God, and not a mere personal moral or ethical philosophy or analogous secular belief system—is, to the extent of the Free Exercise Clause’s constitutional immunity from government’s power, affirmatively preferred to non-religious conduct. And it means that the limitations on religious freedom are, likewise, better understood as flowing from essentially religious limits on what plausibly can be credited as a true command or requirement of God, not merely from ad hoc evaluation of the importance of asserted secular interests of civil government” (1260).

This requires courts to make judgments about what might and might not be considered a legitimate expression of God’s will. But First Amendment jurisprudence has to sift claims about religious freedom anyway. Paulsen’s proposal would change the kind of arguments, and the criteria for sifting claims.

The outcomes would be different, but not completely so: “the type of conduct that will fail of constitutional protection is of the type specifically and consistently prohibited by the moral codes of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in things like the Ten Commandments and comparable New Testament moral codes, and their counterparts in Islam and most other theistic and even polytheistic religions. To a surprising degree, these common moral prohibitions track the ‘compelling interest’ libertarian exclusions noted above (although with certain differences with respect to prohibitions on sexual conduct, which depart from at least modern-day libertarian sensibilities). Thus, the debates over what conduct cannot plausibly be attributed to God’s commands might end up looking considerably like debates over what conduct falls outside the bounds of libertarian toleration: conduct inflicting serious injury upon non-consenting third-parties (murder, rape, robbery, fraud, slavery, abortion, aggressive war, genocide, or other grave harm to others who are not part of the religious community)” (1259).

The advantage is that acknowledging the “priority of God” would put these decisions on a more coherent basis: “the state’s interests prevail over the religious claimant’s not because the state says so, and not because John Stuart Mill might have thought so, but because God thinks so” (1259).

Literal, Figurative, Fundamentalism

Last updated on: August 23, 2018 at 2:43 am By Peter Leithart

Adam S. Miller begins his editorial introduction to Fleeing the Garden (vii-ix) by observing the confusions that surround the terms “literal” and “figurative” in biblical interpretation:

“the word literal often just functions as shorthand for the claim that the text refers to something real. In such cases, the word is used without regard to how something is referenced—the designation of how a text refers being the kind of work the word literal is meant to do—and instead is used to stake a position on the success of a referential connection. In these debates, literally just means ‘really.’ Or, even more crudely, the word literal becomes shorthand for ‘true’ and, conversely, the word figurative becomes shorthand for ‘false.’ To be literally true is to be really true. Then, saying that something is ‘only’ figurative sounds like an attempt to dodge the question of reference or to soften or sugarcoat the verdict that what’s being talked about is make-believe.”

This usage confuses two things – the success of a referential act and the manner that this act carries out its reference. When literal = true, we’re saying that a text is understood literally if it successfully refers to its referent. But a language act can be successful even if it’s not literal in the normal sense. “He’s a dirty rat,” Cagney says, successfully naming his enemy’s rodent-like, oily qualities; but the enemy isn’t actually a rodent.

Miller neatly points out that “all referential connections work by way of detour. Rather than connecting directly with a referent (with the object or idea in question), we connect with it indirectly by way of a web of words. We detour through language. Reference always involves this layer of indirection and third-party mediation.”

Once we recognize that, “literal” and “figurative” are seen to be points on a spectrum, naming the “size” or the complexity of the linguistic detour: “The more common and familiar a referential detour is, the more literal we say the language is. The more circuitous and unconventional a referential detour is, the more figurative the language becomes. The difference between literal language and figurative language is one of degree, not_. kind.” Literal reference use familiar, comparatively simple detours; figurative reference “work by way of more complex detours [that] may loop through several semantic layers and then require a recursive interpretive gesture.” the issue isn’t the truth or reality of reference: “whether the interpretive gesture is relatively simple or recursively complex, the capacity for real referential connection is the same.

Literal language in this sense has its advantages. It “can often hit its referential target with a minimal amount of fuss.” But literal language also has its weaknesses. In fact, figurative language can be more powerfully referential “because its route is unfamiliar and because the wider arc of its complex detour loops more things into the referential grid from which it draws power. Because its detour is bigger, figurative language involves more elements. And because it involves more elements, it can gather a bigger crowd of witnesses. When successful, figurative language can often draw more power and precipitate a more substantial semantic cloud. Literal references, while simpler, tend to be thinner and less substantial.”

Miller notes that these issues become more complex when we’re dealing with a text or speech that assumes a “referential terrain” that is no longer familiar. This happens when we read ancient texts like the Bible: “A literal mode of reference gets both complicated and attenuated when what was ordinary and familiar to its original audience is no longer ordinary and familiar to us.”

At this point, Miller introduces a distinction between “literalism” and “literality.” The first is “shorthand for the claim that there are no worlds but the ordinary one present and familiar to us and all serious modes of reference refer only and directly to our familiar world.” By contrast, “literality” is “a name for just one among many modes of real reference that all operate by way of detour, a mode whose relative simplicity depends on its successfully connecting with one specific member of the set of possible worlds.”

By clinging to literalism, fundamentalism in effect denies “the possibility of multiple worlds, of historical heterogeneity, and, in the end, of history itself. Fundamentalism ignores the letter of the text by ignoring the divergence of worlds. It treats past worlds as if they had not passed. It treats everything in the present tense: the only world in which real reference takes place is our present world.”

Thus, “fundamentalism is ahistorical. It tries to cheat the demands of time—and the delays and detours required for real referential connection—by imposing an illusion of temporal homogeneity. Fundamentalism denies that texts themselves have a history, and so, ironically, it ends up denying, in practice, the real historicity of the past worlds referred to in those texts.” For all its insistence on the historical factuality of the Bible, fundamentalism’s literalism undermines a genuine grasp of historicity.

Culture of Death

Last updated on: August 22, 2018 at 9:37 pm By Peter Leithart

In her introduction to Ratzinger’s Faith, Tracey Rowland contrasts the emphases of John Paul II and those of Benedict XVI with regard to what each called the “culture of death.” Though neither is a dualist, John Paul focused more on the destruction of bodies while Benedict called attention to the destruction of souls:

“John Paul II was focused on practices which completely destroy the human body or at least undermine its dignity through a severance of the good from the true, while Ratzinger has focused on practices which diminish the possibilities of the soul or the self, for its own transcendence. The marketing of vulgar art, music, and literature and the generation of a very low, even barbaric, mass culture is seen by Ratzinger to be one of the serious pathologies of contemporary western culture” (9).

To put it otherwise, John Paul was concerned with the crisis of the true and the good. Ratzinger, more Balthasarian, worried over the crisis of the beautiful.

For Ratzinger, this crisis had penetrated into the liturgy itself, in what he saw as the decay of church music: “The movement of spiritualization in creation is understood properly as bringing creation into the mode of being of the Holy Spirit and its consequent transformation, exemplified in the crucified and resurrected Christ. In this sense, the taking up of music into the liturgy must be its taking up into the Spirit, a transformation which implies both death and resurrection” (quoted 132).

He rejected the notion that church music was to be judged by purely pragmatic standards – i.e., does it affect worshipers in a healthy way. Part of his critique, though, was that “utilitarian” standards of church music ultimately make music useless:

“A Church which only makes use of ‘utility’ music has fallen for what is, in fact, useless. She too becomes ineffectual. For her mission is a far higher one . . . The Church must not settle down with what is merely comfortable and serviceable at the parish level; she must arouse the voice of the cosmos and, by glorifying the Creator, elicit the glory of the cosmos itself, making it also glorious, beautiful, habitable and beloved. Next to the saints, the art which the Church has produced is the only real ‘apologia’ for her history” (133).

For Benedict, this concern is not tangential to the central mission of the church. On the contrary, “The Church is to transform, improve, ‘humanize’ the world—but how can she do that if at the same time she turns her back on beauty, which is so closely allied to love? For together, beauty and love form the true consolation in this world, bringing it as near as possible to the world of the resurrection. The Church must maintain high standards; she must be a place where beauty can be at home; she must lead the struggle for that ‘spiritualisation’ without which the world becomes the ‘first circle of hell’” (quoted 133).

Neglect of beauty is, for Benedict, as much a reflection of the modern culture of death as abortion.

Bankruptocracy

Last updated on: August 12, 2018 at 12:42 am By Peter Leithart

Adults in the Room, Yanis Varoufakis’s account of his brief time as the finance minister of Greece, has all qualities of a tragedy. It is, Varoufakis writes,

“the story of what happens when human beings find themselves at the mercy of cruel circumstances that have been generated by an inhuman, mostly unseen network of power relations. This is why there are no ‘goodies’ or ‘baddies’ in this book. Instead, it is populated by people doing their best, as they understand it, under conditions not of their choosing. Each of the persons I encountered and write about in these pages believed they were acting appropriately, but, taken together, their acts produced misfortune on a continental scale. Is this not the stuff of authentic tragedy? Is this not what makes the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare resonate with us today, hundreds of years after the events they relate became old news?”

But it’s hard to sustain the no-baddie claim as the book progresses. He describes the 2010 Greek bailout in stark terms: It was about “forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income.”

Why force new loans on a bankrupt country? Because Greece’s creditors were the banks of France and Germany. If Greece went belly-up, so did the giant banks, and so did the EU. France and Germany convinced other European countries to contribute to the “bailout,” and then the French and German banks immediately started siphoning off money from Greece to repay their loans.

To cover their tracks, French and German banks brought in money from other European countries and from the International Monetary Fund: “of every €1000 handed over to Athens to be passed on to the French and German banks, Germany would guarantee €270, France €200, with the remaining €530 guaranteed by the smaller and poorer countries. This was the beauty of the Greek bailout, at least for France and Germany: it dumped most of the burden of bailing out the French and German banks onto taxpayers from nations even poorer than Greece, such as Portugal and Slovakia. They, together with unsuspecting taxpayers from the IMF’s cofunders such as Brazil and Indonesia, would be forced to wire money to the Paris and Frankfurt banks. Unaware of the fact that they were actually paying for the mistakes of French and German bankers, the Slovaks and the Finns, like the Germans and the French, believed they were having to shoulder another country’s debts.:

At least, some argue, Europe’s banks didn’t behave as badly as America’s. Varoufakis disagrees: “Europe’s banks were managed so atrociously in the years preceding 2008 that the inane bankers of Wall Street almost look good by comparison. When the crisis hit, the banks of France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK had exposure in excess of $30 trillion, more than twice the United States national income, eight times the national income of Germany, and almost three times the national incomes of Britain, Germany, France and Holland put together. A Greek bankruptcy in 2010 would have immediately necessitated a bank bailout by the German, French, Dutch and British governments amounting to approximately $10,000 per child, woman and man living in those four countries. By comparison, a similar market turn against Wall Street would have required a relatively tiny bailout of no more than $258 per US citizen. If Wall Street deserved the wrath of the American public, Europe’s banks deserved 38.8 times that wrath.”

The European banking system was also designed to prevent the European Central Bank (ECB) from absorbing bad debt:

“Washington could park Wall Street’s bad assets on the Federal Reserve’s books and leave them there until either they started performing again or were eventually forgotten, to be discovered by the archaeologists of the future. Put simply, Americans did not need to pay even that relatively measly $258 per head out of their taxes. But in Europe, where countries like France and Greece had given up their central banks in 2000 and the ECB was banned from absorbing bad debts, the cash needed to bail out the banks had to be taken from the citizenry.”

This, he explains is “Europe’s establishment is so much keener on austerity than America’s or Japan’s. . . . It is because the ECB is not allowed to bury the banks’ sins in its own books, meaning European governments have no choice but to fund bank bailouts through benefits cuts and tax hikes.”

Thus Europe became a “bankruptocracy,” a regime in which “the more insolvent a banker was, especially in Europe, the greater his chances of appropriating large chunks of income from everyone else: from the hard-working, the innovative, the poor and of course the politically powerless.”

In the aftermath, the radicalization of European politics seems almost inevitable.

De-Fragmenting Modernity

Last updated on: August 9, 2018 at 6:50 pm By Peter Leithart

A couple of excellent passages from Paul Tyson’s De-Fragmenting Modernity.

First, this on how modernity’s “immanent frame” (Charles Taylor) not only prevents governments from addressing social problems, but actually creates conditions that cultivate the problem in the first place (2-3):

“At a policy level, we are more or less locked into seeing ‘mental health’ answers to the youth suicide problem, so we put psychologists at the front line of strategic planning to reverse the problem. But to do so is to define the limits of what ‘the problem’ can and cannot be, regardless of whether those limits actually define our real problem. . . . if youth suicide is at least in part symptomatic of a cultural and community malaise . . . treating self-harming individuals is not going to address the real problem. . . . If we define psychological ‘health’ as simply what is functionally normative to any given shared way of life . . . there is something inherently misguided about pathologizing a ‘natural’ feature of that life-form without asking if the life-form itself is pathological.”

He brings in Durkheim’s early study of suicide for support: “Since Durkheim, sociologists have known that one of the characteristic features of structuring society around high levels of negative freedom is a certain background level of despair and anomia. That is, when modern liberal societies are set up so that individuals can please themselves and choose their own values and beliefs as much as possible . . . collective customs of appropriate behavior and common religious and ethical belief structures are seriously diluted. At a certain level of dilution, this dynamic dissolves the shared customary framework of a common way of living governed by shared beliefs about cosmic order. This renders power structures bleakly functional and impersonal, meaning subjective and insubstantial, and behavior norms . . . highly plastic and uncertain. This produces anomia and despair: confusion about cosmic order expressed as a debilitating existential anxiety about one’s own and other people’s intentions, identity, and significant.”

In short, “our policy makers may well be trying to solve the problem of youth suicide without seeing the problem as it really is.” They help youth adjust to the social norms of liberal society, which may have contributed to their suicidal tendencies in the first place.

In a later chapter, he examines the public character of belief. Early Christian belief was “highly political,” since it challenged the Lordship of Caesar that was “vital to the public cultus of the Roman Empire” (50). In liberal society, belief is privatized; only factual knowledge counts in public.

But secular liberalism doesn’t us free, as it claims, to believe as we like (51-2):

“Liberal secularism is itself a violent regulator of ‘private’ belief. You can believe whatever you like, provided you do not believe that your personal beliefs are actually objectively true, or matter in any public way. You can have whatever personal loyalties you like, provided you give uncompromising public loyalty to the state in which you are born, to the liberal and secular laws it mandates, and . . . accept its total power over coercive violence. . . . in reality, we have a single public cultus, and private cultus pluralism. . . . Because the realm of objectivity is tightly conceptually tied to mere facticity and mere instrumental efficacy, technology has increasingly displaced humanity in the arena of public power. The technologies of public-opinion manipulation that the mass media uses, and that politicians seek to harness, and that large corporations use with their staggeringly large lobbying, advertising, legal and accounting budgets, makes the public square anything but a realm that reflects the religious or moral values, or even the actual workplace and economic interests of the people that democratic government is meant to represent. So in reality, the cross-over from non-coerced personal beliefs into the public realm of civic debate and legal construction is powerfully shaped by the supposedly merely efficient and merely factual forces of what in fact highly interested and personally invasive political technologies. Our supposedly personal beliefs and values are relentlessly disciplined by advertising so as to promote an atomic self with our desires always directed toward personal satisfaction via must-have goods and services, and the financial means of attaining them. In fact, there are no hard boundaries between the personal and the public, but we are fed relentless solipsistic diet of myths and illusions such that our self is radically de-politicized and beliefs concerning all matters of final significance are radically interiorized and made passive in relation to the world we inhabit.”

An interior conception of belief, in short, aids and abets secular liberal order, an order interferes with those interior beliefs, even while claiming to protect our right to make up our own conception of reality.