Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

This is a post about the French theologian Jean Borella, but I need to set a context for his work. So, please permit me to first tell the story of the wonderful turning in the French Academy that has occured in recent years.

I. The New French Theology

As far as current trends in theology go, perhaps the most interesting work being done is in France. A hope-inspiring current of thought has emerged in the past two decades, existing in the line of the great French theologians like Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou, and Louis Bouyer. I refer to a loosely connected current of thought embodied in such illustrious contemporary figures as Jean Luc Marion, Remi Brague, Yves Lacoste, and Robert Armogathe. These figures are all well-known, even in America, albeit mostly in the area of philosophy. But they have brought French humanism to the doorstep of theology by recovering the Catholic theological dimension of modern French philosophy in its Cartesian and Pascalian directions. That is no mean achievement, given the rabid secularism of the French Academy, with its propensity to repudiate, in Manichean fashion, the very Church that gave birth to the European universities. Interestingly, most of these new French Catholic thinkers emerged as Christian humanists in response to the cultural revolution in western universities in the late 1960s.

Indeed, in response to the Communist-led student revolutions of those years, one of the great ecclesiastical figures of the French Church in the twentieth century, Msgr. Maxime Charles, formed a non-credit school of theology for the most promising young French Catholic students of the day – at the Shrine for the Sacred Heart at Montmarte overlooking Paris.  These included Marion, Brague, and Armogathe, as well as the now-prominent professor of literature in France, Jean Duchesne.

Msgr. Charles brought together an eminently distinguished group of theologians to teach these young students, including de Lubac, Danielou, and Bouyer, all of whom deeply inspired the theology of Vatican II. Interestingly, all of these theologians had in common with Charles a sense of isolation from the mainstream Church in France in the post-conciliar age. They had wanted to engage the culture of the day from the heart of the Church’s doctrinal, scriptural, liturgical, and spiritual tradition. The mainstream French Church, on the other hand, had capitulated to a large extent to the ideology of the student revolutionaries.

In spite of all that, and with the grace of God, Msgr. Charles’s non-credit academy of Christian theology would form this young group of French scholars to go out into the universities and to bring  the message and person of Christ there: albeit through the subtle workings of philosophy, philology, and genealogy. They would not be able to enter directly into theology at all times, but they would be able to encounter the radicals and ex-radicals of the Academy with the subtle voice of the Logos who speaks to the depths of all human hearts.

Though Msgr. Maxime Charles, de Lubac, and these other great theologians whom Charles had recruited, were radically isolated from the French Church-at-large, this was only a temporary condition. For the ideology of the Communist revolutionaries faded, and Charles’s informal academy of Christian education had done its job so well that French Catholic thought was taken back into the heart of the Church by these now-eminent scholars. Cardinal Lustiger, later appointed by John Paul II as the Archbishop of Paris, would encourage the direction in Catholic education that Msgr. Charles had begun with this aspiring group of intellectuals. Indeed, in the equally troubling days of WW II, Lustiger, then a young student, had himself been converted to the Church through the instrumentality of Msgr. Charles’s influence! Lustiger would even reopen the cathedral school in Paris, where nowadays Parisian seminarians receive at least some of their theological formation. This is a remarkable turn of events, a concrete example of Europe perhaps coming back to its Christian roots.

All of this is providential, following the pattern of wisdom that is imprinted in the created order and brought to radical newness in Christ. The Church of Christ is the means for the salvation for humanity; it is only natural that it should prove to be, in unenlightened, dark ages such as our own, the great means of salvation for the humanities as well.

II. The Example of Jean Borella 

I wanted to do this post strictly on Borella, but I think that he is representative of this greater direction in French thought. So, it seemed appropriate to detail the encouraging signs of development in post-conciliar French theology as a whole.

Borella was not himself, so far as I know, formed in the school of theology at Montmarte that Msgr. Charles had started. He is, in fact, of a different generation. But he might be the most interesting thinker among all the names that I have mentioned in this post. He is a French Traditionalist Catholic: a faithful Catholic theologian in the schools of both Henri de Lubac and Rene Guenon, the latter of whom he greatly criticized for his syncretism and for his denial that Catholic theology has a truly mystical dimension. Borella has written several books detailing the spiritual depths of the Catholic faith, defending the tradition of Christian gnosis, seeking to provide a greater understanding of Henri de Lubac’s seminal theology, defending the papacy of John Paul II, detailing the root cause of the Church’s post-conciliar liturgical desacralization, and showing the roots of modernity in Christian heresy.

Perhaps his most interesting book is The Sense of the Supernatural, which was written over ten years ago now, but is still of great importance. Arthur Versluis summarizes the book in this way:

Like The Secret [an earlier book of Borella's], The Sense of the Supernatural is a devotional work on the orthodoxy of gnosis, but it includes a different aspect — historical analysis — and in this it is a groundbreaking and extremely important book. If in The Secret, Borella is concerned with establishing the necessity for an authentic Christian gnosis comparable to but distinct from what one finds in Taoism, Sufism, or other world religious traditions, in The Sense of the Supernatural, Borella’s focus is much more analysis of what he sees as the various modernist heresies that have emerged in the past several centuries. Chief among these is the refusal not only of those in secular society, but what is worse in his eyes, of those who represent Roman Catholicism itself, the refusal to recognize the primacy of faith and of what he calls the “sense of the supernatural.” Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular have become almost totally secularized, and Borella analyzes this secularization in some detail from the perspective of a traditional Roman Catholic clearly scandalized by it and by some of the rather astonishing pronouncements by contemporary or recent Roman Catholic clergy, theologians, and even bishops.

But what makes The Sense of the Supernatural so valuable is the perspective it offers on what I would call the paradox of modernity. The paradox of modernity is this: how is it on the one hand that modernity is indissolubly based in the notion of “progress,” and that indeed there are numerous advancements, technological, medical, and otherwise that may be adduced to support the notion of progress, and yet it is self-evident that this “progress” is destructive not only of humanity and culture, not only of nature, but also of religious tradition? If from a purely materialistic perspective, we may be said to live in an era of unparalleled “progress,” the same cannot be said of our eroding and disappearing religious traditions and traditional cultures. The paradox of modernity, simply put, is that all our “progress” appears to have as corollary effects cultural and religious regress or decadence, and the destruction of the natural world. The Sense of the Supernatural offers an analysis of modernity from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective informed by a vast erudition, secular and theological. This vantage point is in fact to a considerable extent outside modernity itself, and thus offers insights that one will not find elsewhere.

Of course, Borella’s Guénonian logic, combined with his total devotion to Roman Catholicism, leads him to condemn not only modernist secularism, but also the Protestantism that inevitably led to modernism. According to Guénonian logic, Protestantism was nothing more than a manifestation of the downward movement toward the complete loss of the sense of the supernatural, toward the individualism, secularism, and decadence of modernity, caught as it is in unredeemed historicism and materialism. Of course, this rather condemnatory view of Protestantism does totally ignore the entire Christian theosophic tradition that began with Jacob Böhme in the early seventeenth century, and that continued throughout the subsequent history of modernity in such stellar figures as Franz von Baader in the nineteenth century, and Leopold Ziegler and Nicholas Berdyaev in the twentieth centuries. And indeed, the truth is that Baader (himself a Catholic and also a theosopher in the line of Böhme) has much in common with Borella’s own insights. In overlooking the theosophic tradition in its entirety, and in its total condemnation of Protestantism as a whole, Borella’s work loses some of its luster. It would be richer were it to include the Böhmean current of theosophy and its insights. This said, Borella is faithful to his Guénonian premises here; for Guénon too, coming from a Catholic perspective, totally ignored the theosophic tradition.

One other major contribution of Borella’s The Sense of the Supernatural, beyond its analysis of modernity, is to introduce us to the work of Louis Lanneau, an eighteenth-century French missionary to South Asia who encountered Buddhism and who wrote a long manuscript on the Christian process of “deification” that was only relatively recently republished in French in full. One can see why for Borella the work of Lanneau would be immediately recognizable as important as a predecessor: it emphasizes the centrality in Christianity of a process of spiritual awakening through which one must go, as opposed to a merely historical understanding of Christianity according to which, since Christ died at a certain point in history, one need to nothing more than give lip service to one’s belief in that death and its significance. For Lanneau, as for Borella, Christianity is nothing if not a process of spiritual awakening that leads to gnosis, or direct spiritual knowledge of the divine and individual deification.

Borella is indeed representative of a fully Christianized, one should say more specifically, “Catholicized,” Guenonianism. This is a very important achievement. He has brought the great Henri de Lubac into confrontation with Guenon in a decisive manner and has turned the latter, through the instrumentality of de Lubac, in the direction of Christ. This is an important achievement because Guenon may be as influential a figure in the history of twentieth century thought as even the most prominent and famous philosophers that everyone studies in grad school.

For those who do not know, Guenon was the progenitor of the Traditionalist school of religious philosophy. This was a syncretizing movement of metaphysical theology that favored Islamic mystical monotheism over traditional Christian Trinitarian thought. People who are known to have been influenced greatly by Guenon are Mircea Eliade, Thomas Merton, Fritjof Schuon, Aldous Huxley, Philip Sherrard, Titus Burkhardt, E.F. Schumacher, Wolfgang Smith, Seyyed Hosein Nasr, Huston Smith, and Ananda Coomaraswamy (whose son, Rama, became a traditionalist Catholic priest).

This loosely connected school of thought is of world historical importance perhaps rivalling that of even the great and famous postmodern philosophers. Though its thinkers tended to exist on the margins of the universities (generally speaking, the WASPy Ivy Leagues were not a fitting match for these people) and largely go unstudied in official channels, they have greatly influenced attitudes in the West to world religion and have even played a role in the resurgence of Islam and radical Hinduism. As the religious essence of human existence becomes more and more a prominent, undeniable fact of culture, and as secularism fades gradually into insignificance, it might become evident that Guenon exceeds in importance even Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucalt.

But, like Derrida and Foucalt, Guenon’s thinking is marked by a darkness, nay, even a nihilism: for he rejects the triune God in favor of an Absolute in whom no alterity, no true deification of man, is allowable. He sees a perennial tradition of religious mysticism at the core of all religions, and this core is very much for him that of the Neo-platonic One- beyond-being, existence outside of which can be no more than an inexplicable egress.

Borella’s work is so important because, taking full cognizance of the mystical dimension that truly must nurture all religions, he brings the Guenonian tradition into a fully Trinitarian and Christological fulfillment. He helps to show that in Christ and in his Church alone can there be found a deification that truly answers to the yearning of human eros, the condition of unrequited longing that is at the root of all religion. Christian mysticism, in the orthodox form that Borella extols, follows the pattern of Chalcedonian Christology, in which it is understood that God’s perfect union with man in Christ and the eschatological Church is “without confusion or change.” Christian deification, unlike that of merely monotheistic mysticisms, is in fact a transfiguring recreation and not a decreation.

The other French thinkers whom I have mentioned, Marion, and so on, tend to take their starting point for dialogue and confrontation in the postmodern critique that enlivens the universities. But Borella’s thought, following the Guenonians, is rooted from the start in the religous center of human existence and in man’s quest for divinization. As a purely ideological humanism slowly disappears from the face of the earth with the disappearance of socialism, the religious dimension of man’s being will perhaps, as I’ve said, become an obvious cultural fact. The importance of Borella’s work will perhaps then also come to the fore, as he shows that the only truly efficacious religion is founded on the Mystical Body of the Eucharist of Christ.

Everyone who is concerned with fighting the culture of death should be a regular reader of Wesley J. Smith’s blog at First Things: Secondhand Smoke. No one in the realm of public punditry understands better than he the ethos and tactics of the eugenicists in our midst. And, unlike prevaricators of Rod Dreher’s ilk, who think that it is more appropriate to target Glenn Beck for public recrimination than, say, John Holdren, he does not sugarcoat the perfidious direction in which the Barack Obama administration is taking our nation.

His most recent posts, this one on the New Republic’s Greg Easterbrook, in particular, are bringing to light the truly despicable anti-humanism that is now, with the advent of leftist supremacy in the White House and in congress, coming out into full display. And where are the David Frums, Rod Drehers, and paleo-conservative pundits in general in taking note of this flourishing anti-humanism of the left? They are nowhere to be found. Here’s a tidbit from Wesley Smith’s most recent post, where he makes a connection between the biotech revolution and scientific anti-humanism (part of the ethos that supports eugenics):

The biotech agenda has never been about stem cell research. That is only a stage. The ultimate agenda is Brave New World, e.g. genetic engineering, reproductive cloning, post humanism, and anything goes.  This has been hidden for political reasons, but with the hated Bush’s stem cell funding restrictions now defunct, we are beginning to see some truth in advertising.Greg Easterbrook of the New Republic fame spills some beans over at Wired.  From his column “Embrace Human Cloning:”

Others argue that cloning is “unnatural.” But nature wants us to pass on our genes; if cloning assists in that effort, nature would not be offended. Moreover, cloning itself isn’t new; there have been many species that reproduced clonally and a few that still do. And there’s nothing intrinsically unnatural about human inventions that improve reproductive odds—does anyone think nature is offended by hospital delivery made safe by banks of machines?

This does not necessarily make human cloning desirable; there are complicated issues to consider. Initial mammalian cloning experiments, with sheep and other species, have produced many sickly offspring that die quickly. Could it ever be ethical to conduct research that produces sick babies in the hope of figuring out how to make healthy clones? And clones might be treated as inferiors, rendering them unhappy.

Still, human cloning should not be out of the question. In vitro fertilization was once seen as depraved God-playing and is now embraced, even by many of the devoutly religious. Cloning could be a blessing for the infertile, who otherwise could not experience biological parenthood. And, of course, it would be a blessing for the clone itself. Suppose a clone is later asked, “Are you glad you exist even though you are physically quite similar to someone else, or do you wish you had never existed?” We all know what the answer would be.

The column is mainly a bunch of assertions without real moral engagement.  Note, for example, that Easterbrook is unable or unwilling to say categorically that it would wrong to experiment on sick babies to perfect human cloning.  And that isn’t all it would take to make human reproductive cloning “safe.”  There would have to be many thousands of cloned embryos manufactured (raising the egg biological colonialism issue), eventually gestated into fetuses, and terminated to see how the genes are expressing and as part of the attempt to discover reliable quality control techniques.  Even successful reproductive cloning would also be  human experimentation of the rankest kind since any cloned child successfully brought to birth would be subjected to continued scientific prodding and poking to see how his/her biological systems functioned.

The ethos on display in this ”Wired” article that Smith dissects — that is, turning human persons into subjects fit only for scientific experimentation – was precisely that of the Nazi regime in Germany, in its first stages, and this is why so many on the American right are now prone to level charges of Nazism at the democrats: who uniformly support the biotech revolution. This is a legitimate connection, one that Edwin Black made quite convincingly in linking early twentieth century American eugenics and scientific experimentation to the ethos of Hitler, in his important book The War Against the Weak. Indeed, it was early twentieth century American progressivism that normalized eugenics and the reduction of the person to an experimental subject for scientific prodding. One hundred years later, little has changed.

Lest it be concluded that I am absolutely oblivious to the nihilism that is present on the contemporary American right, I thought that I should add a new post. There is a clear moral separation between the contemporary American left and the contemporary American right. For the former, it is a settled issue that eugenics, abortion, euthanasia,  the deconstruction of the natural family, and the eradication of religious freedom are indisputable goods to be pursued. The right is generally opposed to all of these, on the level of public policy at any rate, if only for the purely utilitarian reasons of electoral politics.

With that said, the contemporary American right is obviously full of its own, well, nihilists. Take this example. Recently, a 22 year old struggling artist in Ohio died of the H1 N1 virus. As she was striving to be an artist, and possibly just because of the bad economy, her two jobs were not lucrative enough to be able to afford health insurance. Without health insurance, and fearful of the cost of prospective medical treatment, she was reluctant to go to the hospital when her symptoms hit. She eventually went, but by that time it was too late, and she died. It is a tragic story.

Of course, her death has been immediately politicized by the left in the push for health-care reform. But check out this response by Steve Spruiell, representative of the neo-conservative counteresponse, on National Review’s “The Corner”:

When Artists Starve  

A few points regarding this story [the story of the girl's tragic death]:

• The median starting salary for Miami University (Ohio) graduates is $47,100.

• A healthy 22-year-old female in Oxford, Ohio can purchase serviceable health insurance ($30 co-pay for office visits) for $55 a month, according to ehealthinsurance.com.

This young woman’s death is indeed tragic, but it is not an indictment of the U.S. health-care system, cheap left-wing moralizing to the contrary notwithstanding. Many capable young people forgo stable careers in order to try their hands at starving-artistry. The rest of us are under no obligation to subsidize that choice.

This response seems utterly soulless, in the manner of the master Ayn Rand herself. Did Mr. Spruiell take account of our economy? Does he realize how difficult it is for newcomers in the job market right now to find jobs that he would approve of? And what of the pursuit of art as a career? So many pundits on the “neo-conservative” right have no concern whatsoever for any pursuit in life that does not involve wealth creation or being established in a sinecure as a policy-wonk-masquerading-as-a-philosopher. If they had their way, there would be nothing beautiful in the realm of human culture. We would all be buried in a dystopia of brick and steel with no art or religion to lift our spirits, spending our whole lives toiling in meaningless work.

The left is no better, what with their transvaluation of the transcendentals of being, giving us such marvelous testimonies to human artistic creativity as the “Piss Christ,” and whatnot. Nevertheless, to see the picture of this beautiful young woman, taken out of life tragically, and to respond the way Mr. Spruiell has done, is indicative of a nihilism on the right that is simply a mirror image of that of their political counterparts.

We pray for the repose of the soul of Kimberly Young.

Perhaps the most obvious example of moral distance between the contemporary American left and the contemporary American right is the Singerian, Malthusian, anti-humanism granted ideological prestige by the left. Such anti-humanism certainly has a prominent place in the Barack Obama administration: in the persons of John Holdren and Cass Sunstein and the myriad radical abortionists appointed by him.

The most recent example of this is Cass Sunstein. At What’s Wrong With the World, they have engaged in a nice conversation on this man’s radical equivocations on the dignity of human personhood. A very sharp contributor by the name of Lydia McGrew has shown what’s wrong with Cass Sunstein’s idea to grant the legal right to sue, and thus to give the status of personhood under the law, to animals.

A “paleo-conservative” by the name of Maximos has tried to refute Lydia’s concerns on the same blog. If you read the combox of Maximos’s post, you’ll see that Lydia very summarily handles his “defense,” if we can call it that, of Sunstein.

The whole debate between these two contributors on that blog points to the problematic political stance that has been taken by “paleo-conservatives” since the Bush years. In their desire to oppose the Iraq war, and so forth, they have become more sympathetic to the contemporary left than to the “neo-conservative” right.

Now, granted all the problems with the “neo-conservative” right, it is exceedingly problematic to see a moral equivalence between the neoconservatives (who have given us decent supreme court appointments in the past 8 years, and who make the likes of Leon Kass — rather than Peter Singer — public voices of moral authority) and the new left.

It all hinges on the nature of the person, as David has been right to show. What is often unnoticed with the contemporary left is their uniform tendency to diminish the onotological status of the human person. Indeed, the reductionist programs of research into the brain in the contemporary academy are fed by and feed the political programs of contemporary leftism. Peter Singer is no anomaly in the contemporary academy. And his view of the person is at home on the left much more so than on the right — David Frum, or Rod Dreher, or David Brooks notwithstanding.

The Barack Obama administration has, in fact, given us an instructive example on this point. Cass Sunstein’s legal theory in defense of animal rights shows that the person does not have for him  a unique, unrepeatable, ontological dignity by virtue of his embodiment of a rational and free nature.

Two things have happened in the realm of education recently that bring out the point that I have made incessantly on this blog: there is not the remotest moral equivalence between the contemporary American left and the contemporary American right.

One of the things to which I refer made the news today — the scary video of children singing paeans to the American Messiah-in-Chief. It has been much discussed. You can see it here. Basically, we see in this video an example of demagoguery and secular messianism of the most frightening variety.

The second, less reported thing to which I refer involves a recent court decision in New Hampshire forcing a young girl out of homeschooling because it was deemed by the court that her Christian education was making her too religiously rigid:

In New Hampshire, a 12 year old home schooled girl was ordered into public school because her religious beliefs were too ’sincere’ and ‘rigid’. 

The girl was home schooled by her mother, and her parents were divorced.  Her father was against homeschooling because he thought it would interfere with her social development.

When a court renegotiated the terms of parenting for the young girl, the judge ordered her to attend public schools for the 2009-2010 school year.  The court’s Guardian ad Litem said that the girl lacked some ” youthful characteristics,” partly because “she appeared to reflect her mother’s rigidity on questions of faith.”

The court stated that the girl ”would be best served by exposure  to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior and cooperation in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs.”

We have in these two juxtaposed cases examples of what I have been writing about for months. The contemporary American left, in good Stalinist fashion, wishes to obliterate all pre-political communities that stand in the way of the State’s complete control over the individual’s life. This means especially for them that all parental and religious authority over children has to be abolished for the sake of assimilating them to the technocracy of the mechanized State. Obama, as the figurehead of the State, becomes the personified force of technocratic providence, rightly to be liturgized by little children as the One who will bring fairness and justice to the land.

Ooops: I had to remove most of this post due to incoherence. It was written too late at night.

This is perhaps the third or fourth post that I have started in the last month, never having had time to finish any of them.  But here goes again…

Our late Holy Father, John Paul II, began his encyclical, Fides et ratio with a quote from a carving in the entryway of the temple Delphi admonishing those entering to “Know Thyself.”   This was perhaps the greatest theme of John Paul II’s magisterial papacy.  He spent much of his teaching trying to help Christians and all men of good will to better understand the truth of who and what they are.  Ultimately, he warned, that without God, man becomes an enigma to himself and in the end, he will turn against himself.

This is what John Paul saw in two evil political instantiations  during his early years in his beloved Poland which caused him to refer to the 20th century as the century of tears.  Indeed, both of these were socialist movements, Nazism and Marxist Communism, which explicitly removed God from the equation.  While both ostensibly were aimed at improving the lot of man, they grossly missed his meaning.  The failure to understand man as made in the image of God means that man becomes at best, an animal.  However, he is still not like the other animals.  He possesses something that makes him much more dangerous than the most ferocious carnivore.  He possesses free will (even if the more intellectually consistent atheists will try to explain this away, they still have to presuppose it).

This leads me to the motivation for this particular attempt at a post.  Reading Hierothee’s latest post got me ta think’un again.  The current administration has provided much fodder for posting (if one just had the time).  The big uproar over health care is part and parcel of the problem that comes from trying to address real social problems based upon a flawed, and therefore dangerous, anthropology.  So many of those in this administration exhibit this confused thinking about the human person.  They see him as special and in need of help and protection in some ways (programs for the poor, universal access to health care) but they likewise disregard his intrinsic value and see him as dispensable in so many other ways (abortion, embryo destructive research, euthanasia).

The tendency toward government control over all decision making further reflects this schizophrenic ideology.  This plutocratic tendency is one which reflects a distrust of man’s freewill in this fallen dispensation.  It demands, in gnostic fashion, that the few Enlightened do all of the important decision making for the “instinct” driven masses–though at some level they recognize that the danger is that the masses do not reliably follow their “instincts.”

This ideological crowd is at once philanthropic and misanthropic because they do not know man or why he is special.  They replace truth with ideology.  Without God they cannot know man’s dignity.  So they develop confused criteria for when a man must be treated with concern and when he can be thrown out as so much medical waste.

Without Trinitarian anthropology they cannot know man’s real needs.  That is, he is an individual made for communion with God and other human beings.  In his fallen state, this means he has a task.  So they deprive him of his authentic rights to help perfect himself and society and treat him as a quasi-special animal who must be pacified through “bread and circuses” and so whose free will can be controlled.

However, that is not man’s authentic nature.  Man must be provided the room to master himself, while respecting this opportunity for all men, in such a way that he can enter into authentic relationships, that is relationships of communion with God and with others.  These relationships of communion arise from the divine archetype, which is a Trinity of total self-giving.  Thus, man must master himself so that he fully possess himself and therefore has all of himself to give to God and to others.  That is, one gives oneself to others for their own sake and not for what they can do for me.

What this means is that man necessarily possesses free will because this is a prerequisite for authentic self-giving, which the Christian tradition calls agape.  Thus we see the human being as an individual who is made for relationships with others.  He is at once a member of the human family according to nature but alone as a person until he authentically enters into a relationship and thereby fulfills his potential as a person.

This is the anthropology behind the co-principles of human social relationships called solidarity (a mutual responsibility for all) and subsidiarity (responsibilities must be exercised at the lowest social structure possible).  Those representing the current administration seem to recognize (at some level) that we share a human nature and so have a mutual responsibility for one another–solidarity.  However, they do not recognize that man has a task to exercise his free will in such a way as to master himself in order to perfect himself as a person and contribute thereby, to the perfection of society–subsidiarity.  But as JPII intimated and B16 made explicit (though not using my terminology) in his latest encyclical, these two principles are co-principles.  That is, one cannot have one without the other.

Solidarity without subsidiarity denies the truth of the human being and so degrades into collectivism where the species is important but not the individual.  This is what we generally see with socialism.  It is what is behind, to some degree, the outrage of those who see the current administration as wanting to interpose the State into personal health care decisions.  The so called “public option” that is so important to those with a socialist ideology is seen as dehumanizing, which it certainly can quickly become,  for those who currently have health care.

However, it must be said that the response of this latter group does not always indicate that they appreciate the principle of solidarity.  That is, they express their wish to maintain their freedom of decision making but they do not show that they recognize that part of the reason for the health care reform movement is an inefficient and inequitable access to it for all persons.

The fact that we are in a fallen world, means that solidarity is not lived out with sufficient consistency.  There is a need for some coercive controls on society that ensures those with the smallest voices are also integrated into and have reasonable access to the benefits of society; i.e. there is some legitimate role for governmental involvement, as long as the principle of subsidiarity is honored.  Thus, when this group does not possess a zeal for solidarity, their subsidiarity devolves into individualism.

Which of these is more dangerous?  I would argue that the historical evidence is that the socialist denial of the importance of the individual leads to a totalitarian, coercive collectivism.  Thus, socialism has the most dangerous tendency, at least in terms of recovering from it without bloodshed.  However, tt seems to me that the failure of giving due concern to  solidarity is what opens the door to this socialist tendency.

On the other hand, left to its own, the trajectory of the latter group seems to be individualist anarchy.  That is, in fact, a good part of what we are seeing happening in our society. The difference being that in political structures tending toward the individualist ideology there is still the room for freedom of action that allows at least the possibility for authentic reform (though of course, the individualism must reformed).

Currently, both of these ideologies are now forming much of the rancorous debate and are at loggerheads with one another.  They reflect a crisis of the understanding of the meaning of the human person, his dignity and what he needs in terms of social structures for his authentic flourishing.  It is tragic that most Catholics in political positions to influence this problem have traded the truth for one or the other of these faulty political ideologies.  This even more, makes this situation a real crisis of anthropology.

Thank God for Glenn Beck. Really. If it were not for his television show, Barack Obama’s radicalism would still largely go without comment. No other reputable journalist has brought the true nature of Obama’s ideology to the light of day. Thanks largely to Glenn Beck (he’s the first to have put the incriminating video on television and to have devoted whole shows to it), ACORN is on the verge of extinction. Thanks largely to Glenn Beck, the National Endowment of the Arts is not going to become an out-and-out propaganda arm for the Obama administration in the near future. Thanks largely to Glenn Beck, we know of the true nature of the radicals whom Obama has placed into positions of inluence in his administration — including the self-avowed communist, Van Jones. Where is the rest of the journalistic community to be found on these vital issues? They are in absentia.

Yet, the pious Christians at Beliefnet — namely, Mark Shea and Rod Dreher — have decided in their own journalistic wisdom that Beck is bad for the republic. They are, of course, repeating a meme that is being endlessly repeated by the journalistic community at large. They have even gone so far as to try to repudiate Beck by pointing out his reliance upon one of the books by Mormon anti-communist Cleon Skousen. It should be needless to say, however, that Skousen’s views are far less whacky than, for instance, the Malthusian anti-humanism of Obama’s science czar, John Holdren, who has in the past advocated compulsory mass abortion and sterilization. It always amazes me that presumably Christian pundits fail to acknowledge how thoroughly absurd philosophical materialism is, and all political philosophies built upon it. And, by the way, neither Skousen (who is dead), nor Beck (who is but a television and radio mouthpiece), have the power to inluence public policy, as Holdren does.

The criticisms by Shea and Dreher are, in fact, largely irrelevant. Each has failed to acknowledge the importance of Beck’s demonstrations of the insidious nature of Obama’s commitments. Neither of them — and Dreher far less so than Shea — has taken the full measure of Obama’s radicalism.

I went through all of this prior to the election, but now might be an opportune time to repeat it. Barack Obama and his minions are committed to transgressing natural, pre-political societies that impede the direct authority of the State over the individual. And, by the way, they can see the human person, the individual, as nothing more than the sum of his bodily, economic relations. This is standard policy and anthropology for the left, and if it were not for Beck’s loud mouth (and I say that in a complimentary way), Obama might have proceeded much farther along his transgressive path than he has been able to do so far. And who knows how far the left might be able to take their anti-humanist fantasies if they usurp control of the nation’s health-care system?

Obama’s left is firmly, joyously committed to the extension of abortion rights, euthanasia, contraception (read: eugenics), and the deconstruction of the natural family. It is committed to the repudiation by the force of law of any and all religious authority that contradicts its moral ideology (see my next post, regarding homeschooling). The anthropology of the left is firmly rooted in a de-humanizing materialism that reduces the human person to just another natural object in the world — like a rock, or a tree, or a body of water. This is why politicians on the left have no trouble — as Barack Obama’s latest appointment, Cass Sunstein, has shown — with any of the grave insults to human integrity that I have already mentioned, as well as with human cloning, or embryonic stem cell research, or scientific experimentations of any kind, or enforced, coercive water and food rationing for the sake of environmental concerns, etc.

And why does Rod Dreher in particular seem to be oblivious to the impending danger of giving our healthcare system over to people with these radically reductionistic views? And how can Mark Shea draw a moral equivalence between the water-boarding of enemy combattants and a political ideology firmly committed to the destruction of human lives that pose no bodily threat to the population at large? (In a future post on Reinhold Schneider, a hero of Hans Urs von Balthasar, I hope to show the millenarian, essentially Protestant ideology, that supports equivocations of these sorts).

No, Glenn Beck is not the problem in our republic. He is no intellectual, and he is no confessional Christian. And he might very well have a mental breakdown in the very near future. But he poses far less of a threat to the republic than those who deny the spiritual dignity of the human person, and who have the unimpeded force of law to enforce coercively their anti-humanism. The problem in our republic is much more that the journalists or journalistically-minded pundits, deadened in their moral sensibilities, are oblivious to the true nature of the of the contemporary left.